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So I'm just going to shove this into the face of the Americans here because I'm an *ss. Nah I'm sorry Veknoid, I hope you guys get it too .


Anyway, with this now releasing next year, it really takes me back. Here's a story, I remember it like it was the day before yesterday... Or well, maybe like it was last week or something.

Don't you guys feel old now? I'm talking about those of us that were actually there when the original released.

I mean, we all probably already felt old already when Ocarina 3D released, but Majora's Mask 3D will come even longer after the original than Ocarina 3D did. Next year it will be 15 years. Fifteen years! That's like millenia in gaming terminology. But I got off track again. What I wanted to tell you was this story.

When the original released, my little cousin got it for his birthday. Well, little he was back then, now he's like 20 centimeters taller than me but who keeps score... Anyway, he got it before the actual release date to, because our family had a friend that worked at Nintendo of Benelux, the Dutch/Belgian/Luxembourgian subsidiary of NoE. We always used to get cool things from him, like a Star Fox SNES Demo cart, or even an NES M82 unit, and somehow he managed to get his hands on Majora's Mask a couple days before release and leak it to us. I think him leaking and taking all those things cost him his job some time later, but who were we to complain. We were, naturally, excited like a little pony, and before he could complete the word "Congratulati...", we were upstairs and rammed the cartridge into the Nintendo 64.

With a smile wider than our heads we made our profile and got through the intro of the game. Being amazed along the way, no way could an N64 game look this good. Then, once in Clock Town, we opened up our item subscreen. Strange, we thought, the Ocarina of Time is still there, and usable too, but surely in the cutscene the Skull Kid took it away didn't he? Well, we figured we probably missed something in our excitement. After a short time we found that Link in his new form as a Deku Scrub could do some sort of sliding spin attack. Of course finding this out wasn't exactly hard, just push the A-button, but then it appeared that it would also break some boxes in West Clock Town. "Hey! (no, not 'Listen') A heart came out of that one!" I said. "Let's get it, even though we have a full three hearts already."

... Game Over?

Yes, we died from grapping a recovery heart. Then it dawned on us, pun intended, that there's something wrong with this new cartridge. Especially when we opened up our Masks subscreen and found it completely filled with usable Ocarina's! Twenty-four of them, even in the spots for the Transformation Masks! Our cartridge was glitched somehow. And no matter how many times we reset, it wouldn't matter. Hearts killed you and all you had was a bunch of Ocarina's.

We told the family-friend downstairs, and he took the game back with him to trade it in at Nintendo while feeling a bit disappointed. In hindsight I wish we had kept that cartridge. It was something special for sure, and maybe today, it would have been quite the ultimate challenge to try to beat the game without the ability to recover your life through hearts. If it would have been possible at all. Of course, we'll never know what would happen if we'd grab an new item or a Mask. What would happen to that Ocarina it would replace. A week or so later, when the game actually released, we both got the game. And those cartridges worked like a charm (and still do).