|
lentilsonlent's The Legend of Zelda (NES)
|
| [January 30, 2007 02:40:08 AM]
|
Continuing my LoZ adventure I was able to find the next dungeon. The boss was such a pushover that it went down after one bomb. As my great reward for this victory, I was sent back to the world map for more aimless wandering! The last thing I did that could be considered progress was finding a cave where I got to swap my crummy wooden sword for a metal one. After that, the rest was…you guess it, aimless wandering. While doing this, I come up with the brilliant idea of turning off the harsh, repetitive music and listening to something (anything) else on headphones.
I really hate having to return to the same spot every time I die. How am I supposed to discover anything like this? Link is a pretty lousy fighter in this game too. Instead of swinging his sword in an arc, he merely stabs forward, which severely limits your range and forces you to be directly facing your enemy if you want to hit it. Furthermore, he doesn’t have his spin-attack! There is really no way to guard your back or even you side in combat! So I just keep dying and not caring, waiting for my 45 minutes to be up. Yeah, I could look up a guide, but I don't swing that way: this game is getting judged on its own merits.
In the northeast I discover a man selling keys in his shop. Are these really the same keys that you earn in dungeons to advance to the next room? Well that’s just great. Now I don’t even have to bother completing the challenges and puzzles in the dungeons, I can just earn 100 rupees and give them to this guy! And how do I earn my money? How else? Killing enemies while aimless wandering! Either that or playing “money making game.” Why not? It’s more fun than this. Hell, they should have just gone and made “The legend of Money Making Game” instead.
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Jan 30th, 2007 at 02:43:56.
add a comment 
|
| [January 30, 2007 01:08:49 AM]
|
The LoZ world is a big green and beige vacuum in which your only friends are couple of ubiquitous bearded men who function as nothing more than signposts, conducting single sentence conversations in broken English.
You play as Link, who is just about as complex of a character as the Quaker on the oatmeal box. Of course, this was the standard for video game characters at the time, so one can’t hold it against LoZ.
However, when one is forced to wander aimlessly for long periods of time, the experience sure feels empty without towns to visit, comrades to interact with, and so on. Furthermore, having an intriguing story gives the player motivation to keep playing in those tedious times of wandering aimlessly without any immediate goal. Also, a good story reduces the chances of such aimless wandering because, as Aristotle observed, a good story contains time and place within a logical structure. A well-written story in a game helps you know where to be and when.
I’m not saying that a game of exploration needs exciting characters or a brilliant story to draw one in. The SNES Zelda game, Link’s Awakening, certainly doesn’t have any compelling writing in it, but the story is nevertheless necessary for making the game compelling because it keeps things moving. Furthermore, the visuals weren’t limited to two colors and the music wasn’t limited to two songs looping over and over again. Of course, the reason why I am harsher on LoZ than other NES games in these categories because they are necessary in a game that doesn’t provide constant action like, say, Mario Bros. If you are made to wander in circles without making any progress, your boredom should at least be of the aesthetically pleasing variety, as experienced in lava lamps and new age music.
As for what I did:
The first dungeon wasn’t that hard to find. I managed to beat it. Some old man told me to go to the peninsula on the east coast. So I headed east and got some scrap of paper to show to an old woman. I eventually found the old woman and all I got was the “privilege” of purchasing medicine at outrageous prices. Great. So then I went east again and decided to “play money making game” with the old man for a while, which isn’t even a game, according to Costikyan’s definition. I walked around and killed some monsters, accomplishing nothing in the process.
Still, I give LoZ a 4 for its importance in video game history. Besides, I'm biased because I never played it back in the day like everyone else. I guess it was just one of those "you had to be there" things.
This entry has been edited 2 times. It was last edited on Jan 30th, 2007 at 02:40:50.
add a comment
|
|
|
 |
lentilsonlent's The Legend of Zelda (NES)
|
|
Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Tuesday 30 January, 2007
|
|
