Foolishly Perfect

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

It's been almost four hours since I began playing the infernal video game. I can't stop, and I'm starting to babble. That happens whenever I encounter something that smashes my notion of what's possible in the digital realm--when I first saw the Web, for instance, or entered an online MOO or got a glimpse of streaming video. "This is going to change the world," I babble now, fluttering my hands at the TV screen. "Utterly amazing. My head hurts. Look at that fish! Mommy..."

The object of my bebabblement is the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a new game due in stores next week exclusively for the Nintendo 64. To those of you who have never played a video game, or even seen one, my rapture will sound goofy. But trust me. In some ways Zelda is every bit as compelling as the best painting I've ever seen, or even the best movie. The experience of a good video game is transcendent; Zelda is a great video game. At this moment, for instance, I'm at Lake Hylia in the mythical land of Hyrule. Imagine being inside an animated Japanese wood-block print. The sun is going down (it really is--you can track it across the sky), causing colors to punch out and deepen. I'm fly-fishing in peerless blue water--yellow sunlight bounces off the surface--and fat lunkers lurk below. When one at last strikes at the red-feathered lure, lake-floor sediment swirls like a dust cloud.

"It is a foolishly perfect world," says master game designer Shigeru Miyamoto almost sheepishly. His team of 140 people labored for three years to create the game, the fifth in the popular Zelda series. The outcome of the video-game wars may well rest on its success. Nintendo hopes Zelda will drive people to buy its console, the N64, closing the gap with Sony's PlayStation. (In the same way, an earlier Miyamoto blockbuster, Donkey Kong, provided the beachhead for the old Super Nintendo Entertainment System.) Some 250,000 customers have already reserved copies of Zelda; demand was so great that Nintendo discontinued its "presell" program. The company expects to sell 2.5 million copies, at $69 a pop, by Christmas.

Nintendo's strategy might work. Last year, when I was trying to decide whether to buy the PlayStation or the N64, I went with the Sony. With 10 times as many games to choose from, there didn't seem to be a contest. I hadn't seen any evidence that Nintendo's 64-bit processor (twice as fast as the PlayStation's) made a great difference in game play. Besides, Sony-only games like the Crash Bandicoot series--which sold more than 5 million copies--proved to be as good as, if not better than, Nintendo's best. The latest in the series, Crash Bandicoot: Warped ($49) was shipped to stores on Nov. 3, and it's already a big hit in my home. But clever as it is, Crash now feels to me--after playing Zelda and getting lost in what Miyamoto calls the "miniature garden"--flat and outdated. Worse still, it didn't make me babble. Read more about the new video games at timedigital.com Catch Anita on CNNfn's Digital Jam, Wednesdays at 7:30 p.m. E.T.