ILX Plays: The Legend of Zelda for NES

actions have consequences

meanwhile the shops with low prices thrive because they have side-deals with Link and their employees are safe. and you, with the controller in your hand, just playing along and supporting all of this. you all make me SICK

also you wouldn't believe the overhead for a shop concealed down a flight of stairs underneath a statue, it's hard out here. grumble, grumble . . .

NES didn't have the processing power to communicate the psychic pain of these creatures, wandering, never sleeping. the sun never set in Hyrule in those days.

not to mention other bills. you have your never-extinguished pile of fire on the left. and don't even get me started on that never-extinguished pile of fire on the right.

LET'S PLAY MONEY
MAKING GAME.

"BOY, THIS IS REALLY EXPENSIVE" refers actually to the cost of doing business. poor guys.

just realized that despite all its other RPG-esque developments, zelda ii gets rid of the economy! how strange now that i think about it... and a mistake, imo, much as i admire that game. marshaling your one water of life, and having to hike back and save up to get it refilled, was a nice part of the first game's rhythm.

Would you guys judge me if I told you I am creating a 3D reboot of this game by coding it completely into Minecraft? And also adding the prologue as a playable aspect and another Minecraft-elements-homage easter egg side quest as well? I've been shy about sharing this with ILX for some reason...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhuhdw_9Hnk

?

Great idea, Evan. This Polygon post is about your game, I'm guessing? Looks really good.

http://www.polygon.com/2015/2/26/8110555/zelda-in-minecraft-overview

Thanks! Yeah that's it. I was very much not interviewing well during that tour, yeesh. I blush anytime someone watches it in front of me.

Project has come a long way since then, too. I get a ton of fan mail about it. People are really excited for the release, which is cool for us.

wow, that looks awesome

Thanks! It'll be a free download once it's all done.

that's super exciting Evan! I have been looking for an excuse to boot up Minecraft again. I do hope you keep ILX posted now :)

damn that minecraft remake looks amazing. congrats!

seriously, very cool!

yeah, impressive work and then some!
i got to the first dungeon last night and have resolved to throw away my current controller.

i never had this as a kid so after the first dungeon i have to consult a walkthrough =( for all the crap people give Castlevania II for being obtuse, this game feels just as foggy to me.

you need to live that vandal lifeystle, just wandering hyrule burning down trees, blowing up shit, pushing over gravestones

only then can you find what you need

i've never beaten a zelda, so i'm going to give this a shot tonight. i'm going to try to avoid a walkthrough, but if i get frustrated i'll probably just consult the image forks posted at the top of the thread.

you should stream it. i used to be able to beat this game on one life, no continues. also had a theory abt the most efficient way to beat this game i think it was like 1-3-4-5-2-8-6-7-9 iirc. getting the best sword asap makes the game a lot easier and there are so many heart pieces easily accessible from the start

lamp otm multiple times

this game is completely beatable and still very playable. difficult but learnable with some effort.

Thanks for all the support, everyone! I'll definitely keep you all in the loop going forward.

Yes please Karl stream yourself playing this game!

Here's a nice resource for all the maps in one place: http://ian-albert.com/games/legend_of_zelda_maps/

i'll stream it if i have the house to myself for a while, but i feel weird doing it when anyone's around! also i am very bad at zelda and usually drink too much when i play videogames, so there's that too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aM7kg0-6ys

fwiw this is a cover (sort of) of the Zelda dungeon music from a band i used to play in. i played theremin.

i wasn't impressed by the gee-wow polygon interviewer who seemed to be aiming for the little kid demographic.

i like the various additions you put in. hope you don't get a cease&desist letter.

Yeah, Sometimes Jon and I will laugh about his giddiness for flying behind the old man in the cave. He's a nice guy though.

There is a TON more additions now, that whole idea kind of snowballed. For example, as I said we are building a whole playable prologue into the game based on the text in the original instruction manual (pages 3-4). Also there will be a side quest where you have to collect items hidden in all of the Minecraft homages tucked away throughout the map. The incentive for doing this will involve the story of a character we are adding in. That being said, all of this will not conflict with the flow of the original narrative/gameplay.

Not incredibly worried about the cease & desist as many people have built Zelda stamped Minecraft projects before, also functional. This one got attention for being a unique spin and particularly ambitious but we aren't exactly developing an actual indie game that utilizes brand equity, it's still really just a big Minecraft project?

i got to the first dungeon last night and have resolved to throw away my current controller.

same here! I need a real usb controller I think. PS4 controller wasn't working for some reason.

really? it works perfectly for me! i'm using OpenEMU on a mac. i just plugged the controller in, it automatically detected it, and there's no lag.

Yeah I don't know. The controller application saw the controller and recognized it as a DS4, but Nestopia didn't recognize it anymore. Not sure what the deal is.

But whatever, I'll just get a USB controller.

Also, it isn't that bad to use the keyboard. It has some advantages actually.

i used a keyboard up until i got a ps4. i felt like it worked alright for some games, but was was nearly impossible to use for games where you need to move diagonally

Stream happening or no?

not sure...leaning toward no. i won't be at home for another 2 hours, and then i think i'd only be able to play for about an hour and a half or so before stopping. if i decide to do it, though, i'll post the link here!

gonna play this on my Dreamcast which has an NES emulator. so i can use that sweet CRT

K I lied, I'm gonna start streaming in about 10 minutes. I'll just get as far as I can in 90 minutes or so (precog spoiler: not far) and resume it another day

http://www.twitch.tv/weinventyou

Aw crap. I just saw this now.

I'm coming back on in just a bit actually. i thought i only had til 8:30 but it turns out i have more time, so i thought i'd eat a quick dinner.

i suck really bad.

beat the 1st dungeon with the help of tips from a friendly advisor, then wandered and eventually landed in 3rd dungeon.

just about to fire this up via NesterDC

or wait, never mind for tonight!

"its a secret to everybody"

could be good pop music lyrics

feel like someone's done that

i never had this as a kid so after the first dungeon i have to consult a walkthrough =( for all the crap people give Castlevania II for being obtuse, this game feels just as foggy to me.

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Wednesday, December 2, 2015 4:41 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you need to live that vandal lifeystle, just wandering hyrule burning down trees, blowing up shit, pushing over gravestones

only then can you find what you need

― LEGIT (Lamp), Wednesday, December 2, 2015 4:43 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

when i played link to the past for the first time recently (which is way less obtuse than this game is afaict) i found myself frustrated by the amount of wanderin' around the game wanted me to do. but also wanted me to want to do--like i really think this is me playing wrong (or playing anachronistically), not bad game design

i don't know quite what i'm trying to articulate. it seems a weird interpretive sticking-point as to how i feel about zelda. but one that doesn't have an analogue in books. well, i guess it's a bit like wishing you'd already read dickens so you knew which bits you'd feel okay skipping.

it's interesting, the points about how not-quite perfectly worked out this game is. i think of it as SUCH a classic but yeah, the parts that involve semi-random exploring, and the early availability of heart containers, sort of push against that a little - like you'd figure in a really finely-tuned, perfectly-optimized game machine those things would really be paced out a bit better. link to the past basically solves this and then some IIRC. but i still can't really hold it against zelda! another example of a game where, if the basic mechanics are satisfying in themselves, then roaming around exploring can make for a completely enjoyable play session in itself.

just now reading thwomp's last posts and yeah - this is probably a key dividing line that would keep somebody from really loving this game! they absolutely count on you finding the experience of wandering around to be a dazzling and immersive adventure in itself. you're miyamoto discovering the cave. some of that is lost to the sands of time because it's the shock and delight of such amazing graphics and such a huge world, playing so fast (i.e. not a CRPG). only seven years separate adventure on the 2600 and zelda on the famicom!

another one we were playing, in between:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaKtZYMBbwM

so i was also well-prepared to fill in a fairly abstract landscape!

i like that the world is JUST big enough that making it all the way to the top of the mountains without dying is certainly practical but, especially early on, is pretty daunting. no need for extra creepy music or animated lava or anything to give you the sense that you're far from home and in the forbidden hostile wastelands.

http://www.zeldadungeon.net/Zelda01-the-legend-of-zelda-walkthrough-01.php

I am using this walkthrough, which loads you up w hearts, the blue ring (2x DEF), the silver sword (2x STR), candle, bombs, etc. before the first dungeon.

I still think this is the best Zelda. Just having no dialog at all but some mysterious world dwellers. Every time I give OOT a try I get stuck watching a cutscene of a dumb fairy telling me a tree is sad or something.

Zelda was good because of the mystery. Kind think they missed that in the rush to be cinematic in 3d.

the self-writing map is brilliant. is this the first game to have that?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahTyGckSJqw

secret/treasure sound effect of all time

the rom i have is translated from the japanese but the english font fits the text box poorly, accentuating the horse_ebooks quality of the game

yeah i loaded it up when you mentioned it before and i was like woah that's kinda crazy. it seems like a lot of work maybe, for something so unrewardingly early-genesis looking. i might play warsong first.

'landstalker' which is just started is also, man, such an ugly early-genesis festival of browns and greens

played this (LoZ) a little last night while projecting suffragette because cinema is dead. had forgotten it is by any definition an open-world game! such exciting scale and variation and yet no sprawl: you pass quickly from biome to biome like link's crawling across a terrarium, and though it suggests the kind of epic heroism the series would later chase it's also cozy, a little wild toy world. one-button swordplay visceral and tense. boomerang useful in top-down zeldas as it never is in the 3D ones, where it's mostly there to solve certain puzzles designed for it; in loz and lttp you can wipe out roomfuls of bats by maneuvering to change the boomerang's return path. not sure i've ever cleared more than four dungeons in this game--as a kid i wandered and wandered. (lttp is almost as open but much less cryptic; zelda 2 is linear in a final fantasy way, with successively opened zones. i found them both easier.)

it's interesting how many people have come back to the size of the world here. feel like a lot of mid/late-90s games that went for 'epic' often did it by sheer bigness. i found a lot of ocarina of time very enjoyable but a lot of it also felt empty. like they had to add the horse just to make moving from place to place less of a chore. interesting to hear that the final fantasy vii remake might eschew its overworld entirely... sounds funny in a JRPG of that genre but also makes a lot of sense.

LTTP's twin worlds are just at the outside edge of being too far to slog across just to try something out or check on a hunch, and there they add blinking icons on the map to tell you what you're actually supposed to do next. wonder if it'd be remembered more or less fondly without that feature.

i found a lot of ocarina of time very enjoyable but a lot of it also felt empty.

stepping into hyrule field for the first time is often and rightly remembered as a major moment in gaming, but the field's aged a lot worse than most such totems, because yes it is barren. (pc snobbery: the likes of betrayal at krondor dulled oot's impact for me on the 3D-world front, tho i was totally enraptured by the cinematic stuff.) hyrule field in the daytime is almost void of enemies (though i love that they unexpectedly decided the peahats were the size of houses); in the older ones moving across each screen is a little like playing a shmup.

tons of evocative moments in oot of course, including plenty of denser, richer environments than the field-- am thinking of kakariko village and its graveyard; the forest temple; the shuckling scientist's little house by the lake. majora's mask's relatively small scale was the right move, i think, even if the four-spoked world is a little overregular. (incidentally clock town probably belongs in the discussion in the fallout thread about virtual cities.)

oh man, i have some memories of betrayal at krondor. not coherent ones, and i'm wondering if i should save them for the relevant poll thread... but man there was so much there that hooked into certain parts of my brain i didn't know i was missing from other games, and so much that confirmed my sense that CRPGs were way, way over my head.

i liked majora's mask much more and certainly this compactness (though on some level an absolute necessity given the time-limit gimmick) was part of that. the goron environment in MM is much clearer in my brain than the one in OOT, clock town beats all the equivalent areas, etc.

i remember having the almost inconceivable sum of $60 and making an agonized choice between return to krondor and ocarina of time. i chose return to krondor, which was wrong.

ocarina of time was the last cool thing i beat, i would've played that game forever. zelda nes is fun, that map in the o.p. has been v helpful

Has anyone played Oceanhorn? Is it more Zelda 1 or more endless tutorial 3D Zelda?

I played it through, and it's more like Link to the Past: technically an open world, but you can only get to certain locations once you've gained certain objects. It's not perfect, but I'd still recommend it... The fact that it imitates Zelda is very obvious (and I doubt the developers would deny this), and the final boss is a but of a letdown, but it has a cool world (a Waterworld-style post-apocalyptic planet consisting of small island, except they're in bright-coloured fantasy style), a simple but neat story, and the exploration is fun. Basically I think it's the one PC game that I've ever played that comes closest to replicating the LttP experience, so if that's what you're after, it's well worth playing.

"consisting of small islands"

Great deku tree and stepping into hyrule field hold up very well for me

like they had to add the horse just to make moving from place to place less of a chore.

and so many games with big worlds have something like this (horse, hot air balloon, etc.) because every world, while impressive at first, becomes a slog.

i do think it's a good aesthetic move--commitment--for wind waker to be like, you think THAT was big and empty?

I could imagine a pretty good top twenty list of games where the first couple hours sees you through a very carefully-realized small world giving way to an "oh shit!" unveiling of the bigness of the world overall --- thinking again here of FF7. My sense is that very few such games are able to sustain the wonder and joy of the great big world for all that long. But it's still a cool and memorable moment.

that's at the heart of all the elder scrolls games

And fallout!

it's very good in oot where your little-kid quest to save the world ends up destroying it--ganon taking the stones off you cuz turns out an eight-year-old is not a better hiding place than three separate monster-stuffed dungeons scattered across the world--and the second and much longer part of the game is in a sense atonement.

sorry, that's really analogous to lttp's lightworld/darkworld shift, not to the immediate post-tutorial wow! of hyrule field/oblivion/f3.

I am basically always on board for "wow, this game was awesome but kinda weird that it feels like I'm almost at the final boss" followed by OH MAN THERE'S A SECOND WORLD ENTIRELY, see: symphony of the night, final fantasy VI, etc.

that's the miyamoto cave system revelation, yes? it's deeply optimistic and kind, this suggestion that there's so much more than we thought and it's waiting for us to step up.

http://kottke.org/15/12/beating-legend-of-zelda-without-a-sword

We posted an update for our Minecraft map reboot if anyone is still interested:

https://zeldaminecraft.wordpress.com/2016/02/22/the-legend-of-zelda-30-year-anniversary-map-updates/

excellent. :) wishing you all the best on this, it looks amazing already.

Thanks!

are you doing this as your main gig or just in your spare time? i can't imagine the amount of time..

Spare time...

I still go out and do things, believe it or not. I don't know where I find the time, but only one or two nights a week are actually dedicated to working on it. There's still a lot left to do. I essentially built the majority of the whole thing myself. Jon wrote some plugins to so I could create mountains (cones with customizable values) and we're using something called "Spigot" that helps me do other sweeping things like clear areas, copy and paste sections or replace block types. But much of the detailing is by hand.

Meant to delete that "to" in there.

sad lonely ILE thread

Legend of Zelda

goddammit nintendo, stop cease and desisting people's cool projects
https://www.zelda30tribute.com/