presented the keynote address at the annual Game Developers Conference, where they also revealed Phantom Hourglass for the first time and presented a demo. Nintendo also revealed that the game would be released in late 2006. For the holiday season, Nintendo launched two special edition Nintendo DS bundles, each in a different color, on November 23, 2007. One of the bundles, the Gold edition, was emblazoned with The Legend of Zeldas signature Triforce logo and sold alongside Phantom Hourglass. The same development team that worked on Four Swords Adventures also worked on what would become Phantom Hourglass. In the game's first prototype, the action took place in the upper screen while the touchscreen was a flat map that allowed Link to be controlled. However, the developers believed that this interface caused the player to be too disconnected from the game's action, thereby prompting them to switch the two screens. They felt that this interface would appeal to Japanese players, who they said prefer simple interfaces. The developers added a battle mode that was played over Wi-Fi to appeal to American players. The game takes advantage of the Nintendo DS's stylus in several different ways. The player can draw shapes to open certain doors and plot out the path of ships on the ocean, among other tasks. The device's touchscreen can also be used to direct Link's boomerang. Phantom Hourglass features cel-shaded graphics, similar to that of The Wind Waker, with some influence from Four Swords Adventures. Link and Zelda's appearances in Phantom Hourglass closely resemble those from The Wind Waker. At E3 2007, Aonuma said that Phantom Hourglass "opened up the [Zelda] series and [gave] a fresh, new control scheme to the aging Zelda formula". He also said that, despite the disappointing sales of The Wind Waker affecting him personally, he still wished to continue the game's style in another Zelda iteration, leading to the inspiration for Phantom Hourglass. Aonuma believed that the game's simple controls, with the help of the Nintendo DS's touchscreen, helped make Phantom Hourglass the first Zelda game to attract casual gamers. Reception Phantom Hourglass was released in Japan on June 23, 2007, in the rest of the world in October, and in South Korea on April 3, 2008. The game was considered to have received "universal acclaim", receiving aggregated scores of 90/100 from Metacritic and 88.82% from GameRankings. Praise focused on the game's use of