I played a bit of the Oracles games and Minish Cap but they just didn't quite do it for me. But even the top-down ones haven't managed to capture my interest. My gripes about the 3D Zeldas are well-worn and don't need repeating. I've only really found one: Link's Awakening. I've spent the past twenty years trying to find another game like LttP. Don't go writing checks you can't cash, now, Nintendo you wanna use that title you'd better be damn sure. It's kinda funny how Parish's Anatomy of Zelda 2 series got me interested in replaying the game, and now it's halfway to convincing me not to finish it.Īnd talking of Zelda, Nintendo's gone and announced A Link to the Past 2. Tags: Game Mods, Nintendo, Nostalgia, Reviews, SNES, Zelda Zeldas That would be a shame - but it'd still probably be worth playing through once or twice. Or maybe it'll be pretty much a remake with less-inspired level design. Maybe it'll be a lot more ambitious than it looks. It's like a cover tune on open mic night - it's fun to hear somebody new try out your favorite song, even if they're not as good as the original band.īut I haven't had any great urge to finish it, either. It's not that I haven't had a bit of fun playing Ancient Stone Tablets. Why the fuck does the Water Temple look like the East Palace inside, and have the sandworms from the desert level as its boss? Who the fuck knows? ![]() The puzzles are simple (though in at least one case the "push a block down a hole" bit is implemented much better than its original use in LttP's Ice Palace, one of the weakest, most convoluted puzzles in the game - though it at least rewarded players for taking the levels out of sequence), and the thematic elements of the dungeons are gone, replaced with a weird sort of mishmash of different tilesets and bosses. They're shorter, they're smaller, and they're a lot more straightforward. Indeed, from pretty early on you're encouraged to make use of instantaneous travel rather than encouraged to hoof it across Hyrule before being given the keys to the ocarina.īut if the overworld doesn't seem to offer much that's new, the dungeons just seem perfunctory. Part of this is simply the nature of its design - it was designed to be played across four days, with each day revealing a different portion of the world map - but, well, just because there's a design constraint giving it a good reason to feel confined doesn't make it feel any less confined. Good big chunks of the world are covered by Fog of War as the game begins, and it doesn't feel like the world opens up naturally to you as you go so much as that you're ushered through it region by region. It's about what you'd expect from a modestly-talented developer playing with the LttP engine: the pieces are there but they just don't fit together as well.įirst of all, there's the exploration. So what happens when you do get a professionally-created fangame based on A Link to the Past?Īs it happens, there is one: The Legend of Zelda: Ancient Stone Tablets, a game for the Japanese Satellaview add-on. Jeremy Parish, who played the demo at E3, wrote a piece called Yoshi and Zelda Demonstrate the Trouble With Playing It Safe which articulates my concerns about the game perfectly: so far it seems to be running on nostalgia, a glitzy cover tune lacking in the genius of the original.Ĭould be it's just a professionally-created fangame. ![]() I see stuff like thisĪnd there's a part of me that's giddy in spite of myself - I feel excitement at how good this game could be, and trepidation at how mediocre it will probably be. Tags: Frank Zappa, Zelda Hyrule: Just VisitingĬategories: Games, Stream of ConsciousnessĪs I've said before, the upcoming Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds has me torn between excitement and cynicism. ![]() I'll be honest: it's a lot better than Ancient Stone Tablets. Speaking of covers that might not be as good as the original but can still be plenty of fun: Magic Fingers as performed by Katie Jacoby, Eric Slick, Eric Svalgard, CJ Tywoniak, and Matt Rothstein, posted by Eric Slick.
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