1998 in video games: Tekken, Zelda, Starcraft, and Pokémon

This year's number-one arcade game is yet another fighter: Tekken 3. I know that I've played a later version of this on Game Pass (5, I think?), but I don't remember anything proprietary about the franchise so I'm going in cold. If anything, it reminded me of the Virtua Fighter game I recently played.

I took Xiaoyu into battle and did fine in the first round, then lost my streak of winning my first three matches. I basically lost to Bruce Lee, though, so I'm okay with that.

    

In the home console market, Nintendo surged back into the picture with its release of the best-selling The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. This game ate up my free time when I got my hands on it in back then, and it's still the one that I revisit more than any other Zelda game. Although it suffers a bit from being the first out the gate for 3D Zelda, so certain things could have used (and will receive) some refinement, the expansive world, the bosses, and the items and weapons are still all so much fun.

I played this before I'd ever played A Link to the Past, so I later learned that many of the features that I thought were brand new for the 64 were actually brought forward from the SNES game. It didn't diminish my love of Ocarina, though; it just confirmed that I really do need to play all of them to get the full picture.

I took the advice from someone's meme and named Link "my dude" so the cutscene interactions would be chill.

I played it via the Switch Online library with the new 64 controller which, mock its weirdness all you want, is the only way I could possibly play this game.

Next up is Starcraft, the number-one game on PC. I've learned that it's a revered game, and I can appreciate how it took what Populous and Age of Empires offered and made it just a little funnier and also easier to pick up and play. Even though I only followed through what was essentially a tutorial, I found it so much more intuitive than those titles. I'd play this one again for sure.

Finally for this week, I re-did everything I'd completed for Pocket Monsters, but this time it's officially Pokémon as it was released in North America - and without the use of Google Translate.

It really is exactly the same, right down to some music that sounds an awful lot like part of Hyrule's music from the first Zelda game, to Oak forgetting his nephew's name until I remind him. I got my Charmander, beat up on a few wild pokémon, and tucked this one away until I find a copy of a Game Boy cartridge in a garage sale somewhere.