ILX Plays: The Legend of Zelda for NES

http://www.zeldadungeon.net/images/News/10-10-10-Legend-of-Zelda.png
how quickly can you beat it?
http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/art_thelegendofzelda_overworldmap.png

it looks so small

open image in new tab

but yes, it's amazing how little real estate there genuinely is in a game that felt so infinitely sprawling when i first played it.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/20/master-of-play

When Shigeru Miyamoto was a child, he didn’t really have any toys, so he made his own, out of wood and string. He put on performances with homemade puppets and made cartoon flip-books. He pretended that there were magical realms hidden behind the sliding shoji screens in his family’s little house. There was no television. His parents were of modest means but hardly poor. This was in the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen-sixties, in the rural village of Sonobe, about thirty miles northwest of Kyoto, in a river valley surrounded by wooded mountains. As he got older, he wandered farther afield, on foot or by bike. He explored a bamboo forest behind the town’s ancient Shinto shrine and bushwhacked through the cedars and pines on a small mountain near the junior high school. One day, when he was seven or eight, he came across a hole in the ground. He peered inside and saw nothing but darkness. He came back the next day with a lantern and shimmied through the hole and found himself in a small cavern. He could see that passageways led to other chambers. Over the summer, he kept returning to the cave to marvel at the dance of the shadows on the walls.

(btw, that map in the OP has the prices of everything in the respective stores, the order of the dungeons, what's in every cave and the answers to the mazes; should prove useful)

That block quote about Miyamoto is fantastic. What a perfect origin story.

not so perfect:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-qBkWerZDg

let me blow your mind: the guy in that commercial was the voice of the Crypt Keeper
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0440885/

woah

rarely felt so bereft as when losing my shield to a likelike

later installments, coddling, let you get it back

otm

I like how the desert really is a desert. No secrets or landmarks at all.

I've beaten this game multiple times. I love it. It gets right to the action without having to wait through an annoying tutorial or opening section.

Here's some impressions from playing it today.

- if you go immediately left, the screen has rocks that look like an arrow pointing back to the right. wrong way.

- you can't reach the zoras without first encountering octoroks, giving you the blockable projectiles before the unblockable ones.

- weird how the boomerang isn't in a special room. no treasure chests in this game, just caves within caves.

- I dislike how shops can have different prices for the same items. I'm glad they didn't include this in later Zelda games.

- I love how far you can go in the map without any special items. It does exploration excellently.

- I think of this as the game that finally got away from the arcade game model. It's meant to be gnawed at through multiple sessions instead of being a quick shot of a game where you can see everything in one short sitting.

- Original code name: Adventure Mario. "Adventure" after the Atari game, which was named after the text game "Adventure" because the room exits were in the compass directions. (Also, dragons.) This is how "adventure" came to describe both action-adventure games like Zelda and graphic adventure games like Myst.

I was so into Zelda when I was a kid. I played that and the TMNT game so much one summer she eventually disconnected my NES and hid it from me. Of course I found it right away and would hook it back up to play every time she left the house. She came home one afternoon when I wasn't excpecting it and caught me playing Zelda. Without skipping a beat she ripped the NES out, took it to the back dack, and smashed it to pieces with a hammer. It was very traumatic. Still, this was the best game.

- I think of this as the game that finally got away from the arcade game model. It's meant to be gnawed at through multiple sessions instead of being a quick shot of a game where you can see everything in one short sitting.

first console game with battery saving, i think-- the launch title for the famicom disk.

The sound effects used the Famicom's PCM channel in the cartridge version. It also used the microphone built into the Famicom's controller that was not included in the NES.[37] This led to confusion in the U.S. as the instruction manual reads that Pols Voice, a rabbit-like enemy in the game, "hates loud noise".[38]

this really was very confusing.

Ohhh, really? I was replaying this a couple weeks ago and confused about that.

Pols Voices die really easily to arrows anyway.

I had to look up where to find the power bracelet. This game can be so random.

in Phantom Hourglass there is a point where the game tells you to yell into the mike. afterwards it says you could have just snapped your fingers. that doesn't actually work in PH, but I think it did work in the original Famicom Zelda.

great posts so far, everyone.

I dislike how shops can have different prices for the same items. I'm glad they didn't include this in later Zelda games.

disagree actually! it's a very small thing but in such an abstract world your mind fills in a lot and it somehow gave this place more texture to think to yourself, as you're chugging across the landscape, "ugh, that's the ripoff shop, don't go there, i hate that guy."

yes, definitely. had to write down prices and shop around for deals.

did you ever consider the possibility that the reason some of the shops have elevated prices is because they're dealing with supply-chain disruptions caused by the ruthless murder of untold numbers of Hyrule creatures, many of whom work in the transportation industry?

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.

if the dungeons have different depths, they are not overlapping in space

perhaps somebody already said this

still a very fun map ty

i did say "this could easily be explained by just saying they're at different levels or whatever" but it was in the midst of a kind of rambley post.

Every time there is one of these side-view rooms I am happy.

http://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/l/312916-the-legend-of-zelda-nes-screenshot-finding-the-raft.png

yeah no kidding. even when it's just the stair down/stair back up, it feels really special.

The other thing I'm not sure you're even accounting for in the map is the space allotted for the caves as well? Really, we're just talking about some staircases being really really long.

i did say "this could easily be explained by just saying they're at different levels or whatever"

but yes, it's true, i probably should have stayed up at studio until 2:30 rather than stopping at 1:45, to add the caves. or taken a shorter donut break (possibly wendy's, or pizza) - based on date modified i was totally off the grid between 11:04 PM and 12:42 AM. architecture school is rife with pathetic work habits like that.

Heh, I only mean the caves add even more craziness to the twisted labyrinth of networks below the overworld, not that you weren't being thorough enough.

anyway, miyamoto probably wanted the player to feel the horror and confusion of an impossible space

the "moon's tears" in Majora's Mask are miyamoto basically admitting that he staged the US moon landing

ha, no worries evan! you've put way way more thought and effort into your zelda project than i ever put into mine, my hat's off to you.

for my part, i am wondering what the let's play of Links Awakening which shows where to get all the items has to do with the layout of the dungeons in comparison to the overworld. there are many video-related mysteries on this thread this morning!

― Karl Malone, Thursday, December 3, 2015 4:17 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

in links awakening all of the dungeon/cave room are stored on two big grid 'maps' that the game pulls stuff from to make the dungeons. so a lot of the doors on the big map silently warp you to another bit.

http://s3.amazonaws.com/zeldaspeedruns/app/public/system/images/1041/original/LADX%20Underworld%201%20Map.png?1408116175

the links awakening let's play is using a glitch to move around on these two base maps and break the order of the game, because when you leave other than by a doorway it just looks for the next room across

like there is a 'real' architecture to links awakening which is different to the one the player experiences, i find this endlessly fascinating

lamp are the langrissers any good? i saw the hilariously packaged saturn omnibus the other day:

http://img.gamefaqs.net/box/6/4/1/31641_front.jpg

wwooooah that's crazy w/ link's awakening. must have been a nightmare to keep that straight while designing the game.

Yeah that's awesome thomp!

if you're familiar with the game you should watch that's let's play, it's a fantastic piece of comedy/games crit/performance

lamp are the langrissers any good? i saw the hilariously packaged saturn omnibus the other day:

i've been really, really enjoying 'langrisser ii' but its probably more satisfying than it is good. its genuinely challenging in a way that i find rewarding and i like the half-finished and awkward look of the game. 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. also theres just lots of mostly unnecessary stat and class manipulation available that i am enjoying figuring out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyU7Fscd2KU

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

http://www.gog.com/game/oceanhorn_monster_of_uncharted_seas

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/

This is a beautiful, funny, and fascinating thread.

aw yeah, lotta fun talk here