ILX Plays: The Legend of Zelda for NES

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/