In 1998, if you wanted to know how everyone else was faring in Ocarina of Time, you'd have to ask your friends in the playground between rumors of a hidden Sky Temple. Or maybe you'd scour some old-school message boards like N64.com and AOL, long before the days of Reddit and centralized social media.
It's a little different for today's kids. Now, there's a dedicated Zelda Notes section on the Nintendo Switch app that keeps track of all the stats, so you only need to swipe on your smartphone to find out who is dying to what. It's got a little less of that tactile hubbub of the playground rumor mill, but there are some interesting details to come out of it.
As reported by GoNintendo, the Zelda Notes not only provide personalized playtime data, but global data. If you die to an enemy, you get lumped into a statistic that everyone can gawk at. Funnily enough, not much has changed since the day of ASCII-art GamesFaq guides, when authors would urge that you "run through the green muck" because it "hurts less than if you go near a ReDead." Even now, in the remake, they're the...
