The Legend of Zelda

My favorite is Link's Awakening for Gameboy. Best game to play on the go, controls were super tight and art was nice and stylized despite the limited hardware.

I'd have to agree there, shoehorned stories in modern Nintendo titles basically never add anything of value to the game. Seems like they started that crap in the gamecube era and haven't stopped since. Story should only be present if it actually conveys necessary info, or is at least entertaining in some way. Modern first-party Nintendo game stories are almost never necessary or entertaining, they're slapped on and it shows.

I'm not much of a Zelda fan insofar as that I haven't played much of the series, so I don't necessarily know what I'm missing. I've seen many gamer type people wearing triforce hats and triforce messenger bags though. I've even seen people with triforce shot glasses and bumper stickers, so there has to be a deep, DEEP connection with the game.

I think I've only played the first 10 minutes or so of the very first NES version of the game. I pretty quickly got the impression that this game was big, in the sense that there appears to be a very non-linear way of going about this game (compared to other known NES titles like Mario, Contra, or Double Dragon) but I didn't actually own the game myself so I never got to play much of it. Some day I'll watch a longplay of it.

I had a friend who gave me their GameCube a few years ago and I went searching on ebay for some games to get for it so my wife and I could play together. I was shocked that I couldn't find Zelda Windwaker for less than $80.00!

I have a few questions about the Zelda series if any of you don't mind filling me in:

1. Are the games meant to be played in chronological order? For example, are there references made in later iterations of the series that won't make sense to me if I didn't play the previous games?

2. Similar to question 1, but is the time period of the plot in these series in chronological order too? Like does the end of the first game meet the start of the next one? Or are all the Zelda games the same plot but with better technology and maybe some new twists here and there? Are they meant to resemble the same time period but in an alternate universe?

3. Have the games gradually gotten better, or has the Zelda series devolved in a manner that seems more like it answers to it's fanbase rather than keeping the fundamentals of the original game? See: something like modern Sonic the Hedgehog games that are far more story driven and functionally retarded than the fast paced 2D platformer of the original Sonic 1-3, or to give another example, like Doom 3 being closer to a horror thriller game and lacking the speed and action of original Doom.

4. Is the fan base retarded? If I bother playing this game, will I have trouble talking to any rational people about it (outside of here,) or are the majority of it's players and adoring fans a bunch of mongoloid weirdoes who write fan fiction about it and have sexual fantasies with the feminine characters in the game?

this one and the Oracle games are my favorites. It's awesome how they were made.