I didn't include the CD-i Zeldas because they were abominations, and Nintendo had little to do with them other than licensing.
I didn't include the BS Zeldas because they were of limited exposure even in Japan, because they never made it to the States, and because they were only even playable for very short periods of time. They've only become widely known recently because of the general Nintendophile's mania for all things Zelda, but they're largely a footnote, really.
I didn't include Minish Cap because... I forgot about it. (I even own it, and I forgot about it. Sheesh!)
You're close, but either played way too much of the original, or not enough of LttP.
I played a great deal of both games. I happen to like the original more because of its difficulty and much greater number of secrets to find, however.
I was referring to non-linearity of the game structure, but it's in fact possible to take levels substantially out of order in the first game, too. You can take the levels out of order in LttP as well, but the non-linearity feels a fair bit stricter there, especially if you haven't played a huge amount of Zelda before.
Further, LttP doesn't even let you explore specific areas until you get key items (from dungeons), and overworld exploration is the definitive Zelda attribute, I'd say. I believe it's possible to make a Zelda game WITHOUT dungeons (Wind Waker, which you could say only had five-to-seven, approached this), but a Zelda without an overworld would lose more than could be made up.
On Ocarina of Time's people-fading-out, you realize that only happened with the Kokiri, didn't you? I always thought that was an intentional attribute of the kids, and not a hardware limitation.
If you're going to discard all the 3D Zeldas based on the behavior of Wall Masters, well, I don't really know what to say. I would say that the Four Swords games, while cool for what they were, due to their enforced level-based nature, felt more like generic action games than anything specifically Zelda-ish. (It didn't help that all players needed a GBA, either -- how many people really played it the way that God intended?)
I personally think that the Zelda series is one of the ones that made the best transition to 3D... but I would be sad if all Zeldas were 3D from now 'til doomsday.
I'm going to present a few speculative ideas as to where the series could go after Twilight Princess, but before that, here are the main Zelda games to date, sorted by type and numbered according to release order:
The Legend of Zelda (#1)
Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (#2)
A Link to the Past (#3) Link's Awakening (#4) Oracle of Ages (#6A) Oracle of Seasons (#6B)
Ocarina of Time (#5) Majora's Mask (#7) Wind Waker (#8) Twilight Princess (forthcoming)
I don't count Four Swords Adventures in here (which would be #9) as it was more of a multiplayer action game with levels with a Zelda theme than a "real" Zelda.
Notice, the later eight games don't actually have that much in common with the first two. The three primary developments in the series were, undoubtably, the original NES Zelda, Link to the Past, and Ocarina of Time.
But it's kind of amazing, really, how much the series changed between the original NES game (#1) and LttP (#3). In contrast, the differences between LttP and Ocarina had less to do with gameplay and more to do with control and perspective. Those eight games are what Zelda has come to mean to players: a primary exploration gimmick, sequential dungeons with bosses that usually require the dungeon item to beat and caught up a Heart Container and a McGuffin when defeated, the hunt for hidden Pieces of Heart and minor McGuffins, get-this-to-go-there Metroid-style game progression, and a fairly leisurely game world when it comes to monsters and difficulty.
It's easy to forget, however, that much was changed between The Legend of Zelda to Link to the Past, things that cannot be explained away just by moving to the SNES, or the intervening (and even more different) Zelda II.
The biggest of these are:
1. The game was actually hard. The first Zelda is a good workout, and it gets much tougher (some may say too hard) in the Second Quest. Pieces of Heart are almost meaningless in later Zeldas; I eventually completed all of Ocarina of Time quite easily with only the three hearts I began with, and only had trouble during the fight with Ganon (and Nayru's Love took the edge entirely off of that). But in the original Zelda, the first thing you do is get *all* the Hearts you can easily get before even stepping foot into Level One.
A new Zelda could mark a return to the difficulty the series began with, and was also seen in Zelda II and Link's Awakening. (One problem with that, however, is that the current head of the Zelda series has said he doesn't like the original game's difficulty.)
2. The original Zelda had meaningful choices, something not seen a lot of in adventure games these days. Not that anyone really chose the Red Potion over the Heart Container, of course, or ever picked to lose a HC instead of 50 rupees if they could afford it in one of the Second Quest's infamous Money-Or-Life rooms. But the point is, that adventure games with meaningful failure states are quite rare.
My own personal favorite idea for how this could be made done (something I spent a fair bit of time playing around in Zelda Classic trying to figure out) is a system where each dungeon has *two*, mutually-exclusive, items, which allow the player to reach different areas in each game depending on the choices he's made.
3. As said before, starting with Link to the Past, the design began to resemble Metroid in progression. You get an item (usually in Level One) that lets you reach Level Two, the item in Level Two lets you reach Level Three, and so on. There are places where this skips, but most of the items work like this.
In the original game, however, you could explore, if I count right, 126 of the game's 128 overworld screens before going into even the first dungeon. And there's something to be said for this degree of player freedom, even if it's unfashionable in the game industry these days. The thing I loved best about the original game, that's never been duplicated in any of the later installments in the
The sales numbers though are not all that impressive as has been noted on this board and in reality it is just PR spinning from Nintendo.
Well, it likely *is* the best selling game this week. That's not exactly bad. And again, one in seven DS owners bought the game in the first week.
What it is is excellent numbers for a game released for a fairly new, portable system, and it's (probably) much better than anything yet released for the PSP.
In other words -- it's not just PR spin, though I think you're wise to look out for it.
I thought the mailbags over at the same place had been saying that it was looking less and less likely, it's been delayed so long.
This is a game that seriously needs to come out over here. It might not be a big seller, but it would do a lot to show that Nintendo's not just all-talk and Japan-only when it comes to innovation. And after they hyped Electroplankton at E3, it seems awfully odd that there's no solid date for its release, either.
Re:Hard to find something to ridicule here, but...
on
Yet More 360 Details
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· Score: 1
While ordinarily I'm not one to question a moderation, I'm finding it difficult to see how my post is redundant when I was one of the first respondants here, and no one had mentioned the "blades" thingy before me to my memory....
It's no big deal really, just odd.
Hard to find something to ridicule here, but...
on
Yet More 360 Details
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
The pages of the Xbox 360 user interface are called "blades".
BTW, I think the greatest crime is that Slime World's designer is currently reduced to programming Christian educational software. (Well at least it's his own company.)
Umm, he's hallucinating, so it's not REALLY sauteed cockatrice. There's no telling what that poor @ ate in his potion induced state.
But it was instantly fatal, and very few edible things are instantly fatal. The riders and Medusa are the only ones I can think of, of those only Medusa can be tinned, and she turns you to stone as well.
Bah, I gotta stop reading rec.games.roguelike.nethack so much....
Alas, I don't think writing will help. This would require someone in the industry to have the vision to uncover the rights-holder, license or buy the rights, then make the game themselves, most likely. Considering that Slime World is woefully unknown in gaming these days, and I'd have to say the chances of that happening are slim unless one of us starts our own company.
Wow. Can you supply a link to this? I tried watching the video at their site, but it's so damn small without paying their annoying "Insider" subscription fee (which was what caused me to stop going to IGN's damn website, and I've never looked back) that I can't tell which video it is.
I think Advance Wars was slightly overrated also, but I wasn't clear if the writer was considering only the multiplayer aspect but also letting bias for the single player creep in.
Having spend hundreds of hours on Advance Wars 2, I think I can safely say that the article does not overrate multiplayer. Even if it changed absolutely nothing in the game over the GBA version, it'd be so, so cool....
"Embrace and extend" refers to Microsoft's habit of taking open standards and adding "improvements" that are cunningly incompatible but not open, in an attempt to get people behind their software, which of course has the only perfect implementation of the improved stuff. I don't see anything like that in the Business 2.0 article (the On The Media one has no transcript available yet, so I haven't read it). I do see, in the Slashdot story text, a mention that Google could create a captive ad audience. Could != will!
And it's typically bad to deride those who will disagree with you before they disagree. Smacks of manipulativeness. Nothing is more likely to make a Google apologist out of me than trying to preemptively say those who disagree with you are Google apologists.
Playing Mario Baseball on demo reveals that it's surprisingly interesting.
The character art for Mario Strikers is the coolest stuff Nintendo's ever done for their characters. (They have a drawing of ol' Peach that's actually -- dare I say it -- hot....)
Mario DDR I'm not sure of, but word is that breakdancing Bowser is hilarious, at least.
Planet Gamecube reviewed the GC Fire Emblem just today, and gave it amazingly high marks in gameplay (less so in graphics though). Could be one to watch.
The cartoons, alas, don't hold up. Especially compared to the best things they showed on WB and Fox a few years later. (The Tick! Freakazoid! Earthworm Jim! Why are these things not on DVD yet? Okay, I know why for Tick, but still....)
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, you made the connection. To this English grad student's mind, that's worth all the props right there.
I didn't include the CD-i Zeldas because they were abominations, and Nintendo had little to do with them other than licensing.
I didn't include the BS Zeldas because they were of limited exposure even in Japan, because they never made it to the States, and because they were only even playable for very short periods of time. They've only become widely known recently because of the general Nintendophile's mania for all things Zelda, but they're largely a footnote, really.
I didn't include Minish Cap because... I forgot about it. (I even own it, and I forgot about it. Sheesh!)
You're close, but either played way too much of the original, or not enough of LttP.
I played a great deal of both games. I happen to like the original more because of its difficulty and much greater number of secrets to find, however.
I was referring to non-linearity of the game structure, but it's in fact possible to take levels substantially out of order in the first game, too. You can take the levels out of order in LttP as well, but the non-linearity feels a fair bit stricter there, especially if you haven't played a huge amount of Zelda before.
Further, LttP doesn't even let you explore specific areas until you get key items (from dungeons), and overworld exploration is the definitive Zelda attribute, I'd say. I believe it's possible to make a Zelda game WITHOUT dungeons (Wind Waker, which you could say only had five-to-seven, approached this), but a Zelda without an overworld would lose more than could be made up.
On Ocarina of Time's people-fading-out, you realize that only happened with the Kokiri, didn't you? I always thought that was an intentional attribute of the kids, and not a hardware limitation.
If you're going to discard all the 3D Zeldas based on the behavior of Wall Masters, well, I don't really know what to say. I would say that the Four Swords games, while cool for what they were, due to their enforced level-based nature, felt more like generic action games than anything specifically Zelda-ish. (It didn't help that all players needed a GBA, either -- how many people really played it the way that God intended?)
I personally think that the Zelda series is one of the ones that made the best transition to 3D... but I would be sad if all Zeldas were 3D from now 'til doomsday.
This has got to be the first time anyone's compared Leatherstocking to Link....
I'm going to present a few speculative ideas as to where the series could go after Twilight Princess, but before that, here are the main Zelda games to date, sorted by type and numbered according to release order:
The Legend of Zelda (#1)
Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (#2)
A Link to the Past (#3)
Link's Awakening (#4)
Oracle of Ages (#6A)
Oracle of Seasons (#6B)
Ocarina of Time (#5)
Majora's Mask (#7)
Wind Waker (#8)
Twilight Princess (forthcoming)
I don't count Four Swords Adventures in here (which would be #9) as it was more of a multiplayer action game with levels with a Zelda theme than a "real" Zelda.
Notice, the later eight games don't actually have that much in common with the first two. The three primary developments in the series were, undoubtably, the original NES Zelda, Link to the Past, and Ocarina of Time.
But it's kind of amazing, really, how much the series changed between the original NES game (#1) and LttP (#3). In contrast, the differences between LttP and Ocarina had less to do with gameplay and more to do with control and perspective. Those eight games are what Zelda has come to mean to players: a primary exploration gimmick, sequential dungeons with bosses that usually require the dungeon item to beat and caught up a Heart Container and a McGuffin when defeated, the hunt for hidden Pieces of Heart and minor McGuffins, get-this-to-go-there Metroid-style game progression, and a fairly leisurely game world when it comes to monsters and difficulty.
It's easy to forget, however, that much was changed between The Legend of Zelda to Link to the Past, things that cannot be explained away just by moving to the SNES, or the intervening (and even more different) Zelda II.
The biggest of these are:
1. The game was actually hard. The first Zelda is a good workout, and it gets much tougher (some may say too hard) in the Second Quest. Pieces of Heart are almost meaningless in later Zeldas; I eventually completed all of Ocarina of Time quite easily with only the three hearts I began with, and only had trouble during the fight with Ganon (and Nayru's Love took the edge entirely off of that). But in the original Zelda, the first thing you do is get *all* the Hearts you can easily get before even stepping foot into Level One.
A new Zelda could mark a return to the difficulty the series began with, and was also seen in Zelda II and Link's Awakening. (One problem with that, however, is that the current head of the Zelda series has said he doesn't like the original game's difficulty.)
2. The original Zelda had meaningful choices, something not seen a lot of in adventure games these days. Not that anyone really chose the Red Potion over the Heart Container, of course, or ever picked to lose a HC instead of 50 rupees if they could afford it in one of the Second Quest's infamous Money-Or-Life rooms. But the point is, that adventure games with meaningful failure states are quite rare.
My own personal favorite idea for how this could be made done (something I spent a fair bit of time playing around in Zelda Classic trying to figure out) is a system where each dungeon has *two*, mutually-exclusive, items, which allow the player to reach different areas in each game depending on the choices he's made.
3. As said before, starting with Link to the Past, the design began to resemble Metroid in progression. You get an item (usually in Level One) that lets you reach Level Two, the item in Level Two lets you reach Level Three, and so on. There are places where this skips, but most of the items work like this.
In the original game, however, you could explore, if I count right, 126 of the game's 128 overworld screens before going into even the first dungeon. And there's something to be said for this degree of player freedom, even if it's unfashionable in the game industry these days. The thing I loved best about the original game, that's never been duplicated in any of the later installments in the
The sales numbers though are not all that impressive as has been noted on this board and in reality it is just PR spinning from Nintendo.
Well, it likely *is* the best selling game this week. That's not exactly bad. And again, one in seven DS owners bought the game in the first week.
What it is is excellent numbers for a game released for a fairly new, portable system, and it's (probably) much better than anything yet released for the PSP.
In other words -- it's not just PR spin, though I think you're wise to look out for it.
I thought the mailbags over at the same place had been saying that it was looking less and less likely, it's been delayed so long.
This is a game that seriously needs to come out over here. It might not be a big seller, but it would do a lot to show that Nintendo's not just all-talk and Japan-only when it comes to innovation. And after they hyped Electroplankton at E3, it seems awfully odd that there's no solid date for its release, either.
While ordinarily I'm not one to question a moderation, I'm finding it difficult to see how my post is redundant when I was one of the first respondants here, and no one had mentioned the "blades" thingy before me to my memory....
It's no big deal really, just odd.
The pages of the Xbox 360 user interface are called "blades".
Mock, mock, mock, mock!
Generally, in Nethack, the message right before the "You die...." message is indicative of what did the killing. Like in:
The mumak hits! (more)
You feel here:
A cockatrice corpse.
(more)
You eat Pestilance's corpse. (more)
You genocide humans. (more)
Moloch hits you with a wide-angle disintegration beam! (more)
The killer bee's sting was poisoned! (more)
Beware, there will be no return! Still climb? (yn)
Hmmm, could be cool....
BTW, I think the greatest crime is that Slime World's designer is currently reduced to programming Christian educational software. (Well at least it's his own company.)
Umm, he's hallucinating, so it's not REALLY sauteed cockatrice. There's no telling what that poor @ ate in his potion induced state.
But it was instantly fatal, and very few edible things are instantly fatal. The riders and Medusa are the only ones I can think of, of those only Medusa can be tinned, and she turns you to stone as well.
Bah, I gotta stop reading rec.games.roguelike.nethack so much....
Alas, I don't think writing will help. This would require someone in the industry to have the vision to uncover the rights-holder, license or buy the rights, then make the game themselves, most likely. Considering that Slime World is woefully unknown in gaming these days, and I'd have to say the chances of that happening are slim unless one of us starts our own company.
Wow. Can you supply a link to this? I tried watching the video at their site, but it's so damn small without paying their annoying "Insider" subscription fee (which was what caused me to stop going to IGN's damn website, and I've never looked back) that I can't tell which video it is.
But sir, you're forgetting the obvious fact that
Software patents suck!
You consume sauteed cockatrice.
You die...
Great post, except it should be "You turn to stone."
Hack hack hack hack!
I think Advance Wars was slightly overrated also, but I wasn't clear if the writer was considering only the multiplayer aspect but also letting bias for the single player creep in.
Having spend hundreds of hours on Advance Wars 2, I think I can safely say that the article does not overrate multiplayer. Even if it changed absolutely nothing in the game over the GBA version, it'd be so, so cool....
Oh yeah, it would be *perfect* for the DS! With download play, you'd only need one cartridge to play the legendary eight-player modes.
So... who owns the rights to it now?
Wow. Game, set, match!
What'd I tell you? The art for Wario and Mario (kicking a soccer ball, looking angrier than he ever did at Bowser) is also fairly cool.
Shame that, by the look of things, the in-game character models are Nintendo Traditional.
Er... how exactly would this be evil?
"Embrace and extend" refers to Microsoft's habit of taking open standards and adding "improvements" that are cunningly incompatible but not open, in an attempt to get people behind their software, which of course has the only perfect implementation of the improved stuff. I don't see anything like that in the Business 2.0 article (the On The Media one has no transcript available yet, so I haven't read it). I do see, in the Slashdot story text, a mention that Google could create a captive ad audience. Could != will!
And it's typically bad to deride those who will disagree with you before they disagree. Smacks of manipulativeness. Nothing is more likely to make a Google apologist out of me than trying to preemptively say those who disagree with you are Google apologists.
Maybe not....
Playing Mario Baseball on demo reveals that it's surprisingly interesting.
The character art for Mario Strikers is the coolest stuff Nintendo's ever done for their characters. (They have a drawing of ol' Peach that's actually -- dare I say it -- hot....)
Mario DDR I'm not sure of, but word is that breakdancing Bowser is hilarious, at least.
Planet Gamecube reviewed the GC Fire Emblem just today, and gave it amazingly high marks in gameplay (less so in graphics though). Could be one to watch.
I could do without Pokemon though....
The cartoons, alas, don't hold up. Especially compared to the best things they showed on WB and Fox a few years later. (The Tick! Freakazoid! Earthworm Jim! Why are these things not on DVD yet? Okay, I know why for Tick, but still....)
And I can't think of any better hands for Star Trek to be in at the moment, then its fans.
Let the endless tide of "Slash" fiction... begin!
Uh, that is, continue!