Rewriting The Past With Zelda

The Hegemon writes: "Someone hacked the rom for the original Zelda on NES. He created an entirely new game called Zelda Outlands or ZeldaC. You can see it at this site. I am sure most of us remember how great the original was. I think it would be interesting to play it over in an entirely different way." Now I need to download and play with this, but projects like this are tres cool, I think. Taking a legacy piece of technology and creating something new with it, in a framework that's familar to people.

Comments

A Zelda challenge

[BobGregg]

My brothers and I played the original Zelda to death. One thing we loved was the flexibility - you could skip certain items or visit the dungeons out of order to grab special weapons, and that allowed you to play the game in a somewhat different order or fashion than the designer intended.

At one point we decided to see if we could play through the game without getting the final sword. Turns out you can, the enemies just take 2X hits. Harder, but not impossible. Then we decided to see if we could do it without the intermediate sword either. Again, you can, but everything takes 4X hits.

However, at some point it occurred to me that maybe, you could play through the game without any sword *at all*. It seemed impossible, since the first thing you do on the first screen of the game is pick up the first (wooden) sword. Also, you start with no other items, weapons or money. However, there are certain places where you can find coins, and certain items you can buy to get started...

In short, it turns out you *can* play through the entire game, in *both* quests, without ever getting a sword at all. It requires quite a bit of creativity and figuring out alternate weapons to use against different monsters, but in every instance it is possible to find an alternate way to pass each game obstacle. The only thing you can't do is defeat Ganon at the end of the game, as that really does require a sword (though any sword, so even the initial wooden sword works there). But you can go through the entire game, right up to the last room, without any sword at all.

I was impressed that there was so much flexibility built into the game - in most games, creature X can only be defeated by weapon Y, there's only one path to each item, one possible order you can do things in, etc. Zelda, in contrast, was *very* well designed to allow alternate solutions to just about everything, right up to the extreme of never using a primary weapon at all.

So if anyone is in search of a challenge (i.e. buggered bored :-), here's one from the annals of Classic Games: "beat" Zelda (that is, get to the last room with Ganon) without ever picking up a sword.

Did the Zelda old man ever get on your nerves?

[locutus074]

Remember... you could hit him with your sword, or boomerang, or whatever, but you couldn't kill him, and some of the old men would shoot fireballs at you? Ever wanted to fight back?

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And this is news?

[Guppy06]

Anybody who's ever looked at Zophar's Domain (here) in the past two or three years or so knows that there are lots of re-writes and edits of old NES games, from Metroid to Super Mario.