I remember when we got out first game box back in 1988. We got it for the kids, it was very educational.
Of course we had to try one of the games just to see what all the excitement was about. My kids were only ten or eleven years old so I had to show them all the tricks of navigating the maze in Zelda. If I remember correctly, it was me who taught them everything they know about computer gaming. Well, almost everything ... Okay, so they whipped my butt. They got lucky.
Sweet. I remember borrowing A Link to the Past from a friend in high school and being utterly addicted. I'm working my way through Twilight Princess now, and I love the little homages to Miyazaki (the big elk-looking light spirit) and to LOTR (the mounted battle with orc-looking things riding boars; the battle has a lot of the look and feel of the warg-rider battle in Jackson's TT).
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting, though, how the narrator in the video talks up the openness and non-linearity of the original NES game; the series has steadily strayed back into a straight narrative. It's gotten to the point in Twilight Princess where instead of an area being blocked off by a barrier that you need a specific item to remove or surmount (e.g., fire arrows to melt ice or Epona to jump over a fence) there'll just be arbitrarily locked gates that conveniently are found open a little later. Or sometimes there's no obstacle at all, and your little sprite-helper just complains that you're not ready to go that way yet. And it won't let you pass. That, and it's heavy on the triggered cutscenes. It's still beautiful and addictive; it's just strayed a bit from that open feel.
It's quite interesting to see the
ReplyDelete"evolution" of LoZ from the NES times to now, and how it slowly streamlines itself to a more traditional style in terms of RPG-likeness, and that the old "open RPG genre" has almost been completely taken over by the American developers in games such as Elder Scrolls (Oblivion). It's almost as if the storyline-based gaming has become so "entrenched" in Japanese gaming that this has become a common occurance.