¡¤ The Legend of Zelda ¡¤ Zelda II: The Adventure of Link ¡¤ The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time ¡¤ The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask ¡¤ The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker Demo ¡¤ Special The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker: The Movie Experience Exclusive ¡¤ The Legend of Zelda: Retrospective Movie Experience

While the New Zealand market has long been left to find out for itself the pleasures of GameCube ownership, other Western markets are fortunate to have not only a local office of the world's most lucrative video game operation but a marketing budget to boot.

The spin-off of all this is that here we still get some of the best console deals ever, even if they aren't advertised. Monaco Corporation led the world in GameCube pricing until late last year, and was even giving away Wavebirds while making a loss on the machine. Nintendo itself certainly wasn't.

There's a classic cunning in the latest deal, from the company that 'challenged' kids to collect Pokemon and different coloured Game Boys through some serious doubling up in terms of the offerings of each purchase. Here again we see a similar mantra: the Legend of Zelda disc that comes free with each GameCube is labelled a collector's edition, yet the GameCube it comes free with has had moments leading all consoles in unit sales over the past few months. Moreover, what seemed like a wonderful opportunity to introduce first-time consumers to the peerless legacy of the Zelda series and Nintendo's software library has even confused Nintendo's traditionally fiercely loyal fan base into thinking it's something they should have.

Let's just say that if ownership of this disc were any sign of loyalty, it would have been released in an entirely different form. In fact, for existing owners it offers little more than the convenience of playing yesteryear's releases without switching over their receivers or TV input channels.

However, the series itself has remained rather disjointed and players will find the main character, Link, is not necessarily the same character at all in different games in the series; and even the land of Hyrule takes on some serious changes in those games based around it.

For those that haven't played them, recommending which Zelda game to start with is difficult. While often pushing the technology envelope, the Zelda series has almost defiantly re-used outdated components into the 3D age that effectively require past experience to appreciate to any great degree. To that end, the most reward would be had in starting at the very first Legend of Zelda game, after which players are likely to find themselves sufficiently inspired to fill in the rest of the collection. There's one hicucp along the way in the form of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, but if you can get past this mainly side-scrolling wrong turn before the Zelda series gets back on track, your only next dilema is whether to invest in a few of Game Boy cartridges to complete your collection.

Link's Awakening (whose DX version is available on Game Boy Color along with two Capcom/Nintendo works in Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages) and A Link to the Past (the sublime SNES adventure now available on GBA) can be played on the Game Boy Advance and/or GameCube and Four Swords provides GBA/GC link gaming for up to four players.

Besides the four full games on offer, the collector's edition contains a brief montage of all the games in the series, another short video of the Wind Waker, and a 20 minute playable demo of your choice of three sections of the Wind Waker itself, which naturally allows up to an hour of gameplay between them. These cover the first dungeon, island and stealth levels in the game proper, providing spectacular gameplay at entry-level difficulty.

The real prize in the collector's edition is undoubtedly the two N64 titles: Ocarina of Time and its brilliant sequel, Majora's Mask. While not including the Master Quest as released last year with limited edition copies of Wind Waker on GameCube, these to bring the game into high resolution mode which Nintendo shunned at the time of its release despite releasing the N64's RAM Expansion Pak to allow Acclaim's Turok 2, released at the same time, to run in this mode.