Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess - hands-on

For the most part, the first dungeon unfolds in a very traditional Zelda manner. Find keys in impractical places to open doors that lead to another brain-mashing puzzle until you eventually find something big enough to kill hard. What you will find in this one though, is a family of helpful monkeys who swing you from place to place after they're freed. Once you free their big, boomerang throwing leader (and net a tornado boomerang in the process), he helps you take down the super bad boss at the end.

It's actually a boss that was shown at E3 some time ago. You use the boomerang to first target an exploding bug, then the boss' gaping mouth. Multi-targeting with the boomerang is a puzzle method that shows up a lot in the early part of Princess, so don't forget about it. Lots of people were getting stumped by some basic puzzles that, at least to us, seemed pretty damn obvious.

So you slay the giant plant monster with an eyeball in its mouth, get a heart container and then... something else that Midna quickly snatches up. She's pretty vague as to what it is, but says she needs two more for the full effect. Armed with this knowledge, and no better plan, Link sets out into the rest of Hyrule to make the world safe again.

And that's pretty much everything that happens through the first dungeon. We can't stress how impressed we are after just hours with the game. Initial estimates have put the game at nearly 70 hours, but we're assuming that's getting everything under the sun (pieces of heart, bug collecting and all that). It's a fair criticism to say that, underneath all the gloss, it's the same game we played in 1998. But when that game is Ocarina of Time, widely accepted as one of, if not the greatest game ever made, we can deal. In one week we'll take you even further into this classic in the making - any sooner and a cascade of fanged lawyers would eat our eyes and break our precious gaming hands. And then probably eat those, too.