The Legend of Zelda

Hyah!

It begins

I have never played The Legend of Zelda. Any of the Zelda titles, in fact. N64, GameCube, old, new, original, remastered. You name the Zelda title and I will show you a game I've never played. But I've watched a great many of them: Let's Plays, speed runs, glitches, histories, documentaries...

Its origins are The Legend of Zelda, launch title for the Famicom Disk System, staple of many NES players' game libraries. It is an absolute must play title whether you're following a list of 1001 games to play or not, so they say, so I really should cut this intro off and fire it up.

Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels

Oh, it's like that is it? Ok, okay...

My cousins didn't have a massive library of SNES games but they did have one title that would definitely provide hours upon hours of replay value: Super Mario All-Stars contained the first three numbered Super Mario Bros. entries, as well as Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels.

I didn't get too far through any of my cousins games as a kid, but I was told to not even bother with The Lost Levels. It was hard, they said, and being a child who listened to his elders I took that on board and never selected it from the menu.

Now, some two decades or so later, I'm in a much better position to see if that advice was accurate.