Wherein I drop a lucky bomb and discuss Zelda’s ‘fractal’ dungeon design Since I am now mapping Hyrule by hand, I decided to spend a good portion of this session filling in empty spaces. As a result, I'll do a little less screen-by-screen narration and try to focus on the major milestones. I decide to head directly to dungeon 3 and exact my revenge on the Darknuts. Unfortunately, I enter the dungeon with a single heart (thanks to a few mistimed swipes ...
Wherein I discuss de Certeau and the poetics of handmade maps Allow me to digress. Capturing video of each Zelda playthrough serves the practical purpose of letting me to focus on the game at hand without needing to pause to write or, worse, recall my explorations from memory. But it has the added benefit of letting me review and map my progress. Mapping was a big part of games before the Internet arrived. Players could not rely on the game to track their ...
Wherein I bomb for secrets and luck into the entrance to dungeon three I revive in the familiar starting screen and decide to head directly east. Last time, I thought I could recall the entrance to dungeon two from memory, but I got lost and killed in the forest. This time, I check the hint at the back of the manual and head towards the dungeon properly. As I proceed, forest transitions abruptly to mountainsides and hopping Tektites. Two screens in, there's ...
Wherein i die in the first dungeon and get lost in the forest The Legend of Zelda's opening gameplay screen is iconic. Link, viewed from a skewed overhead perspective, faces away from the player with four possible path options: north, east, west, and a small cave puncturing the rock face. Compare this screen with the opening of Super Mario Bros., a game developed by the same team at the same time as Zelda. Mario is positioned just beyond the left screen ...
Wherein I describe the cold run project I never owned The Legend of Zelda. When your parents are in charge of your game library, it tends to remain small. I think I had ten games at most; they all fit in a slotted, plastic carrying case: Super Mario / Duck Hunt, Major League Baseball, Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior (free with Nintendo Power subscription!), Mega Man 2/3, Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, Duck Tales, Super Mario Bros. 2, and one or two others I ...
The master of disguise. The heist. The narrow getaway. The obsessive police inspector. The inside man. The prison note. The body double. The last-minute escape from execution. 1913 French serial Fantômas hits all the beats of a modern crime thriller, but its pace and plotting are so divorced from modern conventions that it is hard to group it alongside contemporary films like Mission: Impossible or Ocean's Eleven. Fantômas I: À l'ombre de la guillotine (In the Shadow of the Guillotine) ...
Replicating a Japanese glitch While researching my chapter on the US NES launch and subsequent game localizations, I came across Mato Tree's site. Mato does Japanese-to-English videogame translations for a living. He also does a fantastic series of localization comparisons on vintage NES/SNES games called 'Legends of Localization.' The Super Mario Bros. article exhaustively details the translation choices made to bring the famous platformer to the states, such as changing the 'Great Demon King Koopa' to the more American-friendly ...
Combat turns are tricky. My current tabletop group plays Dungeon Crawl Classics, which borrows the standard combat sequence from D&D and its kin. Once combat commences, players and GM roll initiative on a d20. The result of the roll (plus or minus any modifiers) determines combat turn order. Typically the GM will roll a single die for all enemy combatants (or group them according to kind) to keep things speedy. Thus, if the fighter rolls a 4, the cleric rolls ...
Though not all tabletop roleplaying games use dice, the majority do. And most players consider dice to be the lifeblood of the genre. Part of the appeal of D&D in my childhood was rolling all those funky four-, eight-, ten-, twelve-, and twenty-sided dice. Dice introduce probability into roleplaying, for better or worse. Even the mightiest wizards and warriors have a slim chance of falling on their swords or botching a spell. The threat of great success and great ...
Sinter RPG features six trade types: Archinxect, Curia, Gemyltan, Kybernan, Mallei, and Smolders. Each trade is associated one of six characters attributes: Craft, Temperance, Wit, Bearing, Might, and Devotion. (There is also a seventh derived attribute called Binding that I will detail in a later post.) Once players roll their attributes, they may rearrange their scores and choose the trade that a) best benefits the party's bond and b) best benefits their attribute score arrangement. These two aspects are clearly drawn ...