Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon

Hot on the heels of the most monumentally disgraceful misuse of a popular game franchise in the history of videogames, Philips quickly churned out a sequel to Link: The Faces of Evil, in the same damn year! This only serves to solidify the notion that Philips spent no time polishing, play-testing, writing, animating, or producing this ill-conceived spin-off franchise. The Wand of Gamelon employs everything you hated about the first game in exactly the same manner, with a slightly different character model.

The opening animation is identical in terms of style to Faces of Evil. This time, however, both the King and Link venture off to uncharted territory, only to be lost and taken captive, leaving Zelda in charge of rescuing them from further loss of dignity. Unfortunately, Zelda fails miserably in her task.

There isn't much to say about this game that I hadn't already expressed via sobbing uncontrollably on the keyboard and miraculously typing in my review for Faces of Evil. The controls are still terrible at best. The same "who the hell came up with this?" style is employed - button One slashing, button Two simultaneously opening doors and opening the inventory menu, button Three using a special item, and directional button Up used for jumping.

Zelda, just as Link before her, cannot slash up towards enemies, and there is no button used for activating the shield. You must, instead, stop moving for about one second, and the shield suddenly comes into play. This means you have to advance at enemies very slowly, stop, wait for the shield to cover Zelda, block the incoming projectile, and repeat. The enemies are also exactly the same as they were before, which, for some unexplained reason, are all dinosaurs. Pterodactyl enemies fly down at your character, and you will suffer unnecessary cheap hits trying to vanquish them. And I swear the shopkeeper refers to the currency as "rubies" instead of "rupees".

The music has that same "never going to be considered catchy by anyone other than the jackass that composed it" flair, and the sound effects are minimal and uninspired. In short, Wand of Gamelon keeps the 0 and 1 record going steady for Philips, and since they learned nothing, nor let a sufficient amount of time pass TO learn anything from the abysmal first entry in this series, I have to give this game an even lower score. Of course, just as the last game, knock my score down another 10 points if you cherish the legitimate Zelda series.