game's budget—one developer claims there was "no budget at all" while Bakutis claims (possibly facetiously) it had "at the time, the biggest budget ever for a video game". Reception Zelda's Adventure was widely panned by critics. The graphics of Zelda's Adventure were called "blurry and digitized". Wired magazine said that the graphics were some of the worst ever encountered. The game's acting was criticized as unprofessional. Another flaw that has been identified is that the game could not produce both sound effects and music at the same time. Scott Sharkey of 1UP.com called the box art of Zelda's Adventure one of the 15 worst ever made. Zelda's Adventure was released as the Philips CD-i was being discontinued and has become very rare over time, as have the first two Philips Zelda games; Zelda's Adventure is regularly sold for over $100. Despite giving positive reviews for Faces of Evil and Wand of Gamelon, neither Danny Cowan of 1UP.com nor RetroGamer John Szczepaniak would extend them to Zelda's Adventure, which Szczepaniak described as demonstrating arbitrary and illogical design, sloppy visuals, nearly non-existent music, excruciatingly high difficulty and cumbersome loading and controlling. Gameplay for Zelda's Adventure has also been portrayed as a trial-and-error effort to guess which items can be used to defeat which enemy. Cowan called Zelda's Adventure "practically unplayable" due to the jerky frame rate, unresponsive controls, and long load times, summarizing his review with a warning to avoid the game at all costs. In discussing the popular online conception that Zelda's Adventure is superior to Wand of Gamelon and Faces of Evil, RetroGamer pointed to the top-down perspective as fomenting misinformation regarding the game's similarities to the original Zelda when, according to RetroGamer, the game is actually not worth playing. USgamer staff ranked Zelda's Adventure as the second worst The Legend of Zelda game, noting that it is counted separately from the other CD-i games due to being less terrible than the others. They considered it a "well-meaning attempt" to recreate the original The Legend of Zelda on the NES, as well as crediting it for being one of few video games to let players play as Zelda, but felt that the lack of experience on the designers' part as well as the CD-i's technical limitations made it a "dreadful" game to play. IGN writer Peer Schneider was excited that a new developer was chosen instead of the one behind