Hasta La Gadget!

While they’re not the first Legend of Zelda playing cards, these ones are still quite beautiful, and a worth addition to any Zelda collection. They were made to celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the game, and are imported from Japan.

They’re an officially licensed Nintendo product, and feature images from all of the past Zelda games. On the back of every card there are four variations of Link. They look like quality cards and are nicely detailed.

You can buy the set on Amazon for anywhere from about $17 to $30(USD). It’s dangerous (and sometimes boring) to go alone. Take these cards with you and play some poker during your downtime.

[via Geekalerts]

Mike Hoye has recently been playing The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker with his 3-year-old daughter Maya. He read the narration on screen to her, but because he wants Maya to be the hero, he changed all the nouns and pronouns that refer to Link to female ones. One day he got tired of editing on the fly, so he hacked the game’s actual display text instead.

Hoye used a hex editor and manually searched and changed for all of the nouns and pronouns in the game, converting “he” to “she”, replacing “master” and “my lad” with “milady” and more. He talks about the process briefly on his blog. The hack is not for newbies – you’ll need to tinker with binary files in order to apply the patch to a disk image of Wind Waker, which you can then play using the Dolphin emulator.

What Hoye did may sound more tedious than just swapping words on the fly, but this story is not just about the hack. It’s about a parent’s love and a commentary on gender representation in video games. I highly suggest you read Ars Technica’s article on Hoye’s pronoun patch.

[via Polygon]

Fans of the Legend of Zelda series have long wondered about the chronology and connection of the 16 main games. As part of its 25th anniversary celebration this year, its creators finally revealed the canonical answer to these questions and more in the book Legend of Zelda: Hyrule Historia. Originally available only in Japan and only in Japanese, an English translation of the book is now slated for release in North America as well.

Aside from explaining “the full history” of the franchise – including details on the bloodline of the Hylians and their decline – the 274-page Zelda bible also contains lots of never before seen concept art and sketches, as well as a Skyward Sword manga. Here’s a look at the Japanese version of the book, courtesy of YouTuber MyGamingBoulevard:

The Amazon listing for the book claims that co-creator Shigeru Miyamoto co-authored the book, but all I can say for sure is that he penned the book’s introduction. You can pre-order the book from TFAW for $28 (USD) or from Amazon for $21. It will be available on January 29, 2013.

[via Kotaku & Knights of Hyrule]

image via Retroinvaders

If you so happen to have $150,000 in spare cash lying around somewhere, or money that you have access to, and are looking for something to invest all that moolah in, perhaps it is time to look beyond the regular vehicles of investment such as property and financial instruments, or even less traditional modes such as wine, comic books or vintage cars. How about video game memorabilia? Enter the pre-release prototype of Nintendo’s first Legend of Zelda game which hit eBay earlier this morning? Yes sir, a seller going by the name “tjcurtin1″ has put up his copy of a pre-release prototype version of The Legend of Zelda, in addition to a totally new and sealed copy of the game up for auction – with an asking price of $150,000. Here is what tjcurtin1 has to say.

This is a complete version to my knowledge and as far as I know does not differ from the released version. The simple label reads “HP NOA 2-23-87 Legend of Zelda.” The actual release of the game was August 22nd 1987. I can only speculate that the 2-23-87 refers to the date they completed this prototype and being so close to launch is why there are no differences from the released version. Again I’m speculating. If you google NES Zelda Proto you will see the history of this particular cart. I will be happy to add pics, answer questions (to the best of my ability) and field offers for this title. If you look through my 100% positive eBay history you will see I am a regular purchaser and seller of video games. This is without a doubt the pinnacle of my collection and I challenge anyone to come up with anything more important in the video game collecting scene. Stadium Events? How many carts are out there? Hundreds. NWC Gold Cart? Again how many? There is one Prototype in the world for the NES Zelda, one prototype that started the launch of a generation of gamers and you are viewing it.

What do you think of such geekery and the amount of commitment to the cause?

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Zelda NES case mod features a light-up Link [Updated], NES controllers given a new lease on life as wallets,