The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's opening sequence is, for me, the most evocative of all video games. First you hear the galloping of a horse, joined by soft minor-key piano and melancholy, soaring ocarina notes as a young man in a green tunic rides under the setting moon. It prepares you for a game that could be as melancholy as it was exciting, as emotionally affecting as it was technologically innovative. Released in Europe on this day in 1998, Ocarina of Time was one of the first true 3D adventures, a capsule world on a game cartridge, and it remains one of the very best. It's a dark story, when you think about it.

Link as depicted by the wonderfully talented artist Katsuya Terada. Earlier in the week, we finally received the Western release of The Legend of Zelda Encyclopedia. Within its pages, it shows some interesting geographical correlations between the original The Legend of Zelda and A Link to the Past. In that, it seems that the entirety of the first game in the series is set around the area of Death Mountain from A Link to the Past. Now, the two areas don't match up exactly, but they are very close and some deviation might be inevitable as the first Zelda game is in fact set a long time after A Link to the Past.

You wake up, it's dark and you're lying in a pool. You don't remember how you got here. You stand up, stretch your aching limbs, walk towards the exit and out into the brilliant sunshine. As your eyes adjust to the light, the world comes slowly into focus – and it is beautiful. The greens of the open plains contrast with the dark black of Death Mountain, which is streaked with orange lava on the distant horizon.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a mind-blowingly good videogame. That omnipresent quest of defeating the primal evil Ganon, rendezvousing with the eponymous princess, and saving all of Hyrule from destruction has been given an open world twist, and it's utterly compelling and endlessly thrilling. Aside from the general plot and Link, the protagonist, the series has also featured a few other constants too – puzzles, dungeons, the Master Sword, the Triforce, bombs, boomerangs and scary big bosses, just to name a few. A quixotic, towering volcano named Death Mountain is also a fixture of the series, and, during a recent stint on Breath of the Wild, it suddenly occurred to me that it's a pretty unusual volcano. Death Mountain can be seen lingering towards the center of Hyrule's horizon.