It had everything: swordfights with lizards, magical tennis, shrieking mummies, a whole world to explore – plus a rousing score you could play along to. This joyful/scary chapter in Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda has inspired designers ever since 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. The camera pans over a blocky, low-resolution, yet spartanly beautiful landscape as the sun rises. 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.

The discovery comes just two months after another major bug with the condemned social network

OSIRIS-REx craft only arrived at asteroid Bennu in recent days

Google was represented by empty chair at earlier hearing

Service to be closed four months earlier than expected in light of lapse that exposed names, email addresses and other information Google is still having trouble protecting the personal information on its Google+ service, prodding the company to accelerate its plans to shut down a little-used social network created to compete against Facebook. A privacy flaw that inadvertently exposed the names, email addresses, ages and other personal information of 52.5 million Google+ users last month convinced Google to close the service in April instead of August, as previously announced. Google revealed the new closure date and its latest privacy lapse in a Monday blogpost.