Here we are a few days before a new Zelda is released and outside a few of us diehards it seems like excitement is at an all time low for this series. This thread only exploded for the negative review and that more cause people wanted to see meltdowns rather than talk about the actual game. I look back at 2004 when Twilight Princess was first shown at E3, grown men weeping at the sight of adult Link, it was a major event in gaming. TP in general was massive, very few games felt as big as an event as that one did, and when a game gets that big the backlash is sure to come.

Since then it seems like the Zelda name has taken a huge hit in popularity and attention. Though it maybe a by product of this gen being so strange with Nintendo basically excluding themselves from HD gaming, or modern gaming. The wii feels ancient, cause it is, that paired with motion controls that some don't like and a company that focuses only on family games and you have yourself that kiddie image all over again now taken to the extreme.

It seems to me that as the gen has gone on Nintendo has been drifting more and more out of the hardcore gamer spotlight almost to the point where its some seperate entity in the gaming world. Of course Nintendos big games still generated excitement, still won awards but I see more and more people simply moving away from them. The gaming media is bigger than ever, forums are larger than they have ever been and in them I see Nintendo get treated kind of differently. It seems to me like people that enjoy Nintendo games get labeled as fanboys and Nintendo games themselves get labeled as if they are their own genre. I can't tell you how many people simply don't play Nintendo games, or don't like Nintendo games. They are not a genre, they cover all sorts of genres.This sentiment has been growing and growing to the point where it feels like Nintendo and their games gets excluded from normal gaming talk.

I was in line for Batman at midnight and I was around the "core gamers". I dislike the labels we have but they are there and many do fit into these categories. I talked to some and they all couldn't wait for Call of Duty. A bunch wanted Assassin's Creed. PS3 owners wanted Uncharted 3. There was Battlefield talk. I talked to one guy about Dark Souls, guy never even heard of it, made me so sad. And no mention of Zelda at all, its as if it was not even on the core gamers radar. Best Buy had a midnight opening for EVERY single major release this month, but no such opening for Zelda.

So is it the tech, is it simple that wii doesn't have amazing graphics and or tacked on multiplayer that every game seems to have now. If the next Zelda game was a graphical marvel, would it get major hype again? Or does it go deeper, are do players just not like this kind of game anymore. It's kind of a recurring theme with the reviews, "same old Zelda" they want something else. Did we get so used to big budget cinematic linear "epic" games that when one comes out that still retains some old school gaming elements they just don't like it anymore. I see some of these gamers and their attention span seems very short, I can't imagine them sitting through a boring tutorial at the start of Zelda, or try to solve a bunch of the puzzles, they would just turn off the game cause they were not doing something epic every second.

This is all my views, my observations. It is all limited to what I have seen. Clearly there are plenty of us that still love these games, plenty of us that play all kinds of games regardless of who makes them. We all have our own tastes and as long as we stay true to that we should be alright. I just find it sad that the franchise I enjoy more than any other, that used to be this major event, seems to be getting ignored more and more as time goes on.