From this day forward, my most feared enemy of all time shall be PATRA 3.
I contemplated whether I would fail to beat this quest after coming so far, thanks to this enemy. In fact, I did everything I could up to this point:
A shiny piece of the triforce is missing, and Link's Tomb has two extra rooms just waiting for me. All I need is that last triforce piece and all will be right with the world...
Spoiler
!!!!! I don't believe this, instead of staying in the middle of the room and almost always hitting me, it stays in the lower right corner for a good 10-15 seconds.
Before this, after some embarrassing losses, I actually went to the ZC wiki to read up on all the patras. One thing that struck me was patra3 won't shoot from the center blue eye, so as long as I can kill a few of the inner circles, the barrage of bullets will slow down, as well as not having to deal with the bigger outer circle expanding every so often.
I actually got hit a few times, and just barely survived. Lost my sword beams (felt so horrible when that happened) with maybe half of the inner eyes still left to kill. If by some accident I died with just that inner eye left...
Finally, liberation (of link's tomb) achieved. One thing I can't decide on though:
Which of these rooms made me go "hell yes" more than the other? I couldn't possibly pick one room...
Unfinished business... complete set of hearts
This'll be my last update before I hopefully beat the game. Haven't broken 400 deaths yet but we'll see what Level 9 has in store. When I beat this quest I'm totally going to play it again but get all the extra items immediately for a victory lap repeat and see how much the difficulty is reduced.
QUOTE(Gleeok @ Apr 23 2012, 05:41 PM)
When I'm playing it I feel like the game was designed to test the next gen of AI or something, and not for humans to be playing. ..I feel like many parts or this quest so far is almost devoid of humanity.
Have you ever played I wanna be the guy/boshy/etc? Those are very hard platforming games with lots of retro callbacks to NES games etc. Once you play a screen 5, 10, or 50 times, your brain commits it to muscle memory and it becomes doable. In many ways I feel this quest needs to soak in your mind before it can finally click. Also, I play using a wired 360 controller. I highly recommend against using a keyboard for challenge quests... however I'm not sure if a controller with a proper dpad would help me more or not.
Well, I must say, that is some feat. But lets see how you fare on my ultimate challenge - Fortress 9. This must be the most difficult challenge ever created - even with the Master Sword, Medicine, 8 Super Bombs, Large Wallet, Golden Arrow and Super Bracelet. I was only barely able to kill Ganon on all the occasions when I beat my quest. Have fun fighting 10 Super Darknuts with only your sword. Heh!
By the way, make sure you save your game before going into Level 9. ZC sometimes crashes that level and ShadowTiger also experienced similar crashes. I don't know why ZC crashes like that - I haven't used scripts at all for this. I guess that's one additional challenge.
H@ly#hiii***atthef$**k^kk... You are telling me that the Gleeok fight is unfair? You are sick sick sick sick sick.
Anyway. Level three IMO is much funner than fortress 1 and 2. Some very good ideas with the use of money also. So sick. I tried your suggestion and went to LV 5. O_o ...Unfortunately I only beat one of them. Apparently my sword beam against fast target skills are very poor. I died so many times. I also can't figure out the seemingly simple conveyor room trick to beating the death knight there. The best I came up with is
Spoiler
attack when he is above the blocks then run away. ...It's very hard to get 16 strikes in like this though. Am I too impatient?
I hereby dub this fortress the "Death Knight Games". From now on you should call it this. Let the games begin. Eh..My progress lately on this quest is minuscule. :\
QUOTE(yowza @ Apr 24 2012, 03:50 PM)
Also, I play using a wired 360 controller. I highly recommend against using a keyboard for challenge quests... however I'm not sure if a controller with a proper dpad would help me more or not.
I am not even close to 100% capacity unless I've got a proper gamepad with a d-pad. Mine are all worn out now and I can tell you from comparing D-pad to Analog: It sucks. :\ ..Luckily I've ordered an adapter so in up to 6 more business days I can use my PS/PS2 controllers (hopefully).
[EDIT]
QUOTE(James24 @ Apr 24 2012, 08:37 PM)
By the way, make sure you save your game before going into Level 9. ZC sometimes crashes that level and ShadowTiger also experienced similar crashes. I don't know why ZC crashes like that - I haven't used scripts at all for this. I guess that's one additional challenge.
Can you find out which screen causes this crash? This definitely needs to get fixed.
The crash can happen on any screen in Level 9. Sometimes you're fighting mid-way through and then boom. Sometimes you can go through level 9 and it never crashes. I think its something caused by the bombs and super-bomb upgrades and uses...but its just a theory. Maybe when you get there, and if it happens to you you can better diagnose why its doing that.
The Gleeok fight is possible with 6 hearts but very difficult.
Yes, the style in level 3 changes. You can make a mistake but it will cost you $$$ and you need them to win.
Strategy for the conveyor belt death knight to get the hookshot is as follows:
Spoiler
Stay in the middle of the conveyors. Only attack the death-knight if he is separated from you by the row of blocks in the middle. And yeah, it would help if you had a good aim. If the death-knight is about to hit you, you need to run away using the conveyors because you won't ordinarly be able to outrun a death-knight. All the while, you've got to keep an eye on that timer so you know when the conveyors switch and be ready to jump to the opposite one when it does. Yes, you need to hit it 15 times for a win.
Wait till you see The Liberation of Hyrule: Insanity's End. I have 6 more diabolical ideas for death knight fights that I've implemented
I have enhanced music for LoH but I never distributed it. At the time, yes I was listening to enhanced music. But ShadowTiger could not have possibly got a copy of the enhanced music...
The Liberation of Hyrule is easy. Easy to quit, rage quit, cheat, you name it. The one thing that's not easy about it is playing it the way it was intended to be played. This is a 'challenge' quest, a rare breed of quest type on ZC and at PureZC. I often think this quest is never meant to be completed, but mostly test the limits of players and see when they throw in the towel. I'll admit that James24 is most likely the best ZC player ever, and even though I beat this quest, I often felt several steps behind in what I thought I knew about my skills when starting this quest.
I played most of the "others" - Demo/Ex, James Quest 1 and 2, Armageddon Quest, Armageddon Quest Forever, and more I'm likely forgetting about. If those weren't enough for you, if you felt you were the supreme master at Zelda then by all means, PLAY THE LIBERATION OF HYRULE!
Gameplay:
The Liberation of Hyrule is mostly focused on combat. You start with a single heart, and appropriately so, no sword. Once you start collecting heart containers though, you will notice that when you die/continue, you only have one heart. While there are fairy tiles outside the fortresses (super elite hint – go behind the windmill which is level 1 for a refill on hearts), this forces you to go outside, resetting the dungeon from being partially cleared. I assume that's why James24 did this, to make sure there were no corners to cut with continually dying and only needing to beat what remained of a room.
Since you don't have the sword early on, another gameplay decision used throughout the quest is your own maneuverability. Dodging enemies that hop over you, spikes from floors, tons of digdoggers slowly moving in a room are some examples of this. The exit has no locked door, so all you need to do is make it to the other side. These can be considered puzzles as you need to study the room and plan exactly how you want to move. Once you get the candle, the game relies on that quite a bit, as you can damage yourself with fire for minimal damage, often pushing you through an obstacle and granting you invulnerability for some time.
Your hearts mean nothing when you're faced with these kinds of tasks. Learn to love the red candle.
Early on you're given the option of going to the Resistance HQ with a lot of shops strangely labeled "OUCH" on them. If you don't know what this means by now, this quest was inspired by the user OUCH!'s Armageddon Quest and Armageddon Quest Forever, which are notoriously difficult but far easier than this quest. In these shops are items sold for one rupee that grant you a great advantage early on. You are clearly told these are "cheat" items, only meant to allow a wider group of players experience what the quest has to offer. Recent games on Nintendo systems often have this "casual" mode in the form of a video guide, or reduced difficulty (NSMB Wii, Fire Emblem 3DS and Etrian Odyssey 4) to let more people play the game without feeling intimidated. Great, but if you want to prove your skills, you cannot get any item from these shops, ever.
Keys. There are no keys in the main quest. Each fortress does have the boss key usually serving as a checkpoint, but there are no regular keys whatsoever. This waters down the game somewhat for me, as keys don't always have to be used for cheat or shortcut paths. As an example from Armageddon Quest, James24 wrote a pdf review/guide in another thread about getting the white sword from dungeon 3 after only finishing dungeon 1. You had to go to another dungeon, bomb a wall in a minigame etc, but if you knew how the game was structured, you could get 5 keys and the white sword early on. That's one great example of how the key system could be used to get yourself an early advantage, without the need to collect 255 rupees and buy keys slowly. That is entirely gone from this game.
Rupees are also used differently. In each dungeon you will encounter three items being sold, two of them usually blocked off by blocks requiring the bracelet/power glove. Most of the time these are a single heart, fairy, or a complete refill of your hearts, serving as your only controlled source of 'medicine' in the game. Regular enemies will not drop hearts or the occasional fairy. Compounding this is the fact that some dungeons require you to have enough rupees at the end to buy the final prize, or the fact that the cost to buy hearts is pretty steep.
Need a boost? Pay up!
No Zelda game these days would be complete without some minigames. There are a good handful of minigames that test your skill with an item of yours. You're given a limited amount of time (with the timer clearly visible, counting down to your failure) to complete a room or two with a puzzle built around the item in question. Your reward for beating each minigame is a FULL heart container!
Nintendo should put this minigame in their next Zelda game, since fans often complain Zelda games are way too easy.
Difficulty:
Spoiler
Disclaimer about the death count – ZC froze/crashed in level 9 (my computer's fault, not the quest I believe...) saving me maybe 25-40 extra deaths and an hour or so of playtime for what it's worth.
Hardest quest ever, most likely hardest game in the world, THE END! Really though, the luxuries you're used to in Zelda are gone. No ring, no medicine* and almost every item you acquire just barely helps you get that much farther. I am about to say something controversial – the blue ring should have been in the main quest as a legit (not cheat) item, probably near the latter half of the game. Yes, I said that. I understand that the red and gold ring will nullify almost all damage, making the difference in damage between a red and blue darknut insignificant, but if that's the case, then why is there a white/magic/master sword available in the quest, if it's offensively the same premise as the lack of rings? If Armageddon Quest had a blue ring in it, I wonder whether this game would too or not.
*For all practical purposes, once you can get the medicine the game is nearly finished. Even Armageddon Quest let you juice up on medicine early on. There's no mercy in Liberation.
Using your bait to survive this impossible room? Awesome design that shows how easy the difficulty can be managed if you think through things a bit. This room by the way was much worse, I only got a screen when it was safe to do so
The one criticism I have about the difficulty is a good portion of the quest banks on you surviving a long series of rooms without screwing up. If you mess up, you have to do everything all over again. Some of the time there's a nasty boss at the very end, giving you minimal time to repeatedly practice on the part that's giving you trouble. I guess any other alternative would be considered watered down, for kids, not a 'true' challenge quest etc, so I don't have any actual recommendation for this. In the design section below I mention the leave your money or life room type. I loved that and felt there needed to be slightly more checkpoint systems in the quest. In fortress 7 there's bombable walls housing a blue bubble, serving as another example of a checkpoint system. That's good, there's plenty of different clever uses of it in this quest, but just a tad too little for my taste. There is a magic key that grants you tons of extra shortcuts, but it's in the good ole 'cheat' shop and doesn't count for this review of the difficulty.
Why is this screenshot here? There's no enemies on this screen. Would you believe you need to do this whole segment (consisting of almost a dozen James24 rooms) THREE times before properly beating Level 8? Clever use of checkpoints to design this, but still it feels like everyone will suffer post traumatic stress after they encounter this part of the quest. I think there should be a direct checkpoint shortcut to patra 3 after proving yourself through this gauntlet of unrelenting pain twice. Otherwise it feels like RPG-esque padding/grinding just for the sake of making the game last slightly longer.
Another example is in level 1. Once you get the sword, you have to go backwards through the path you just survived through (you can start at the sword room now that you can break pots, so it's all good). I personally think this is a clever way to experience these rooms in a slightly different manner (you use your sword to break the vire into bats that can damage you through spikes, sweet stuff), but please, please, be prepared for these moments as much of the quest tests your skills with variations on what items you need to use to make it through.
The bottom line though, is that almost no single room ever felt completely broken or cheap or unfair. A lot of care was taken in planning each room, so don't feel like you're ever being trolled or faced with artificial difficulty (room after room of 10 death knights).
Design (overworld/dungeons):
The overworld is very small, for the most part there is no feeling of a wide open expansive world for you to explore and get lost in. This quest is almost entirely focused on conquering each fortress. Of course, the actual overworld does have plenty of variety. Almost every dungeon is in a different setting (desert, snow, forest etc) so there is still nice attention to detail. On most screens there's a secret which may be cleverly hidden and just barely out of sight, offering a refill on rupees. No need to walk a few steps and bomb every wall or whistle/candle everywhere as most things are clearly marked or intuitive to figure out.
Dungeon design is fantastic. Check out any screens people have posted in this thread and you'll see something different on each screen. I feel the leave your money or life room type is underused in all quests – but wait, who would ever pay with a heart? Just get some rupees and pay the fee, right? Not that easy! Borrowed from OUCH!'s Armageddon Quest is clever use of environmental barriers to stop you from paying with rupees. Instead you must take the long way around and unlock these check points, all while collecting enough rupees along the way to pay the fee off. Unfortunately it's only used in one dungeon. Is it possible to change the heart container and rupee out for something else (say, your medicine, or heart piece instead)? It would be a good way to use this room type way more often to structure more than one dungeon around this.
ZC 2.50 Features:
This is technically a 2.50 quest, but do not expect a heap of new items over previous versions. There is no profound scripting breakthrough made into a crazy new gameplay twist with newer items such as the roc's feather, any of the scrolls, rings and so on, so just be aware of that. This isn't a mark against the quest, as not all quests need every item possible, but there could always be more, and in the future I'm really looking forward to what kind of challenges there can be with all the new items in 2.50.
No bugs to my knowledge, played with 1401 build.
Story:
Spoiler
In classic fashion, 90% of the story is contained in the beginning and ending of this game. The rest is considered unimportant filler about saving hyrule. If you are expecting gripping narrative and cutscenes each time you beat a dungeon, you won't find it here. In each dungeon though is a room with 3 hints, and a room with lore on Link and his tomb and whatnot, if you want to count those as 'story' despite being more gameplay related.
Thanks for the useful tip!
I just killed Ganon in "Link's" most difficult quest ever, and Zelda refuses to even give me a high five or a kiss? There will be blood.
Almost 400 deaths later and you're about to be swept under a rug and forgotten?! I was kind of wishing there'd be a huge gauntlet of weak enemies that Zelda sent to try and stop you as you relentlessly slaughtered all of them.
Let's see what the trusty Lens of Truth has to say. WHAT THE?! I knew it! This isn't Zelda, it's some minion of Ganon disguised as Zelda trying to stop me! There's no other explanation! Kill it fast! But with what?
It's HAMMER time!
You see? Even though the story was bare bones, I personally enjoyed what little there was.
Sound:
Ah yes, anyone who's playing Zelda Classic probably grew up playing old retro games and is likely familiar with music from those games. There's a wide variety of music from many great games, used appropriately and fit the theme it's trying to convey. Three examples from Final Fantasy - if you lose a minigame, the game over music from Final Fantasy 1 plays. The HQ/home town/hub world plays Matoya's Cave, also from the same game. Death Knight fights play the FFV battle theme, which has an accelerated feel which fits perfectly with the enemy. Ninja Gaiden boss music should seriously be used in everyone's quest.
It may seem arbitrary to list random tracks and say how cool it is, but it really did add some oomph and flavor to the game, instead of having the same Zelda music you're used to. I heard a tune from Crystalis late in the game and began wondering if anyone would make a Crystalis Classic, or perhaps it's doable in ZC through heavy scripting.
Top 10 lists: If anyone's interested I'll make a top 10 hardest/easiest list, but for now here's my top 5 most and least useful items.
Spoiler
Good
1) Hammer – Darknuts reduced to nothing, great damage, helped out so much. 2) Bombs – Glorious bombs, dealing great damage to a decent range. Easiest way to clear 30 digdogger kids is to stand in the middle and spam bombs. Most excellent! 3) White Sword – Turning point where enemies fell twice as fast as before. Also came packaged with SWORD BEAMS (pretty sure the wooden sword didn't have any). 4) Boomerang 1 – Stun many enemies, nullifying most threats. Useful in every single quest. 5) Wooden Arrows – Great sniping weapon early on, counts as white sword hits when I still had wooden sword. Double manhandla in level 3 fell quickly.
Bad
1) Silver Arrows – Can't recall a single moment I relied on these to save my life. Needed for two gohma bosses, but only because wooden arrows couldn't damage them. Didn't really care. 2) Magic Boomerang – I always preferred the wooden over this blue failure. No help at all. 3) Letter – Oh boy, after all that work in level 6, I finally get medicine... wait, bombs, rupees, worthless arrows?! 4) Hookshot – Finally, super darknuts and death knights will... wait, they aren't stunned by this! 5) Magic Sword – Necessary upgrade, but the hammer already covers this WITH darknut ownage.
Conclusion:
If you're expecting a star rating here, I don't know what to tell you. I do have some problems with some of the design choices in terms of how the difficulty is established, and the beginning of the quest is especially brutal which may be considered bad incremental difficulty scaling, but should that make me rate it *ZERO STARS* because I died too much? No, not at all.
For someone who loves challenge quests, this kept me engrossed for a good 25 hours, constantly pushing for more. Getting a new item made me go 'oh yes I'm so unstoppable with this, no matter what's next' throughout the entire quest. I expect challenge quests to make me grateful for every new item or room I advance through, and The Liberation of Hyrule did that.
Well done Yowza. You are the first player besides me to have beaten LoH without cheating. I will have to take your word that you never pressed f3, since that too is cheating but you don't have to go to HQ to get it. You are truly elite. As your reward, I shall do 3 things. First, if you wish, I will send you LoH's password via PM. You've earnt the right to view this in the editor. Second, admission to my hall of fame (see my signature when its updated). Third, if you wish, I'll allow you to beta test Insanity's End. I will warn you, that if you though LoH was hard, you haven't seen ANYTHING yet. To my knowledge you're the only one who would be capable of beta testing it.
I do accept your criticism about the checkpoints. I thought I got the balance right but obviously not. In Insanity's End this will be fixed, but to compensate, the rooms will be SUPER difficult. And if you thought you saw difficult before, you haven't seen anything How does 10 red knights on ice with a wooden sword and 3 hearts sound?
I g2g now - urgent matter - but I'll edit and update this post later with my response to your review. Well done once again!
Good job yowsa! ..So glad someone else beat it. Now I can quit playing. ...I kid, I kid. But seriously, I've had the benefit of seeing LV9 already and I can honestly say I am not looking forward to that.
I have some slight problems of my own right now that I need to attend to. Maybe I can get a little insight by some experts? *cough* -Need a half heart to complete a full container. I see that one darknut requires the hammer to beat. Where can I find the hammer? -Also there has to be some better ways to refill bombs. This is a problem. Bomb refill, how to? - ..Shoot. I had another more precedent question but I forgot what it was after reading through your review yowsa. .Great.
Hammer is in level 7. I don't recommend that you try to get that - but you are welcome to challenge if you believe you are good enough. You can get 4 HCPs in the death knight fortress with the white sword relatively easily. I recommend that you get the hookshot and ladder in that order. Then, beat the death knight standing on the water given by an armos, the death knight on ice by doorsniping, the death knight in the teleporter room and the death knight in the maze. Of course, you could substitute any of those challenges by the death knight with the like-likes, the death knight on spikes - but I don't recommend those.
To refill bombs, there's a house to the north of level 6. Just cross the bridge west of the cemetary and there's a fake wall going up. Use the lens of truth if you're still stuck. Bombs can be got a dozen at a time. There's also a house to the north of level 7 with Link there, but you will need proof of courage - so forget it for now. If you're in level 4 though, the only way to refill bombs is buying them.
Now, in response to Yowza's review:
Yes, I deliberately made the player start with 1 heart with healing outside for that very reason Yowza. Hopefully I can fix this in Insanity's End with scripting.
I also felt that dodging the enemy is a key skill that's missing from most quests. In LoH it is very important to dodge a superior enemy until you have the means to fight them.
You might be right about the keys. I didn't put them into LoH because I didn't think it was necessary. There might be a situation where I want a player to have defeated two bosses before allowing them to move forward. Keys might come into that.
I love my new rupee system. First, the amount is based on how hard I perceive the enemy to be. The more difficult, the more $$$ to encourage players to fight them. Second, rupees are used to buy essential things like jinx cures, bombs and life so it encourages players to conserve those resources as much as possible.
The minigame you have a screenshot of is, in my opinion, the world's most difficult minigame. You need to be familiar with a brand new skill - red candle walking. You can become virtually invulnerable if you are able to throw your own red candle flame and walk around with it - but it takes a lot of effort to master that skill.
I do accept criticism that my checkpoint system may have been too much off balance towards the "not enough" side. But you must understand that if players can save wherever and whenever they like then the fear of death will be forever snuffed out. I mean, lets say you could save your game mid-way through the patra 3 battle. You'd no longer fear it. You'd only fear it if you had something substantial to lose if you lost. In Insanity's End, I will address this by making more checkpoints but I still think there needs to be some kind of "stick" involved in dying.
Thank you for the last comment. I say again, challenge quests should never be about cheap difficulty or slogging. They are quests about outsmarting, outthinking and outplaying a superior enemy. In their own way, challenge quests are very much like the puzzles that most zelda players are fond of. You need the right strategy going into a fight - otherwise your odds are very slim.
With scripting, I don't see why I couldn't do what you're suggesting with regards to giving the player a choice of what item to give up.
Not much to say about the story, except for the ending, which is most diabolical in my opinion. I see you chose to do what James thinks at the end. Good for you, dictator!
Thing is that I had to make things difficult at the beginning because that's the time when James is very weak with only a couple of hearts. Even a moderate enemy would be challenging at that stage. Its also the only time when I can put in dodging and the notorious vire room and have it make any meaning since hearts are so few. I know it scared off a large portion of ZC players, but hey, I warned people that this was a challenge quest right from the outset.
And how can you rate the hookshot so lowly? It got you through the death knight battle and won you the precious ladder right? And the blue boomerang is needed to get the meat in level 4...
Anyway, thanks for playing Yowza. Please PM me about the things I mentioned earlier.
Please Gleeok, feel free to air your irks and complaints. I strongly welcome it... Congratulations on making it to level 6, you are a very good player and its quite an accomplishment.
There are a few things, though the first one is big enough that I'd rather wait for an updated version that fixes it before finishing. This is the one-heart continue bug. I know this was brought up before but the reason for it is not properly justified. Here is why it is a bug and not a limitation: 1a) The player is NEVER meant to be able to beat a level without anything less than full health, and even with full health you will die many, many times. 1b) Yet despite what was intended, you continue with one heart, have to go get life, then come back later. This is how you are rewarded for dying. Lovely. -This is definitely a logical error. 1c) It is always the responsibility of the game designer, and never that of the player, to make the game playable. There are already so many breaks in continuity just from having to replay rooms over and over again. To add insult to injury like this is really bad design. I don't know how this got past the initial beta-testing phase??? 1d) This can be fixed either by a simple script, or, you could take a page from the book of C-Dawg or Peteo and use a few proxy screens with warps. (Some dungeons may not even need this, and could probably just use the 'enemies always return' in a few spots.)
2) It starts out too hard (annoying factor; high), then gets slightly easier (still hard) ..but then gets really hard again. I can see why most people would give up trying to get the sword.
3) Because you die so many times every nth little thing gets magnified greatly. Example: You know the quests with tons of strings and story? Well, by the time you beat this (I can imagine) you would have read more strings than even the most verbose story driven quest. Since these look like mostly shops mixed in with fighting rooms I might suggest using the "bypass strings with B button" rule.
4) As far as I can tell there are no keys, only the master key that you can buy for $1? I don't get it.
5) Why not offer the blue ring as a cheat item? Maybe someone is a good player and the gold ring would make it too easy, but with no rings it is too hard for them.
1a) True. It is assumed that full health has been obtained prior to challenge b) I never thought you should be "rewarded" for dying. In fact, quite the opposite - there should be a punishment for dying othewise there's no incentive to stay alive. Is there any quest - normal or challenge - that rewards a player for dying?? c) I disagree with that. Its the responsibility of the player to improve his/her abilities so that they make the quest playable to themselves. I put in the gold ring concession in but that's as far as I'm going. I mean how would you like some nOOb asking you "oh please Gleeok, make Dungeon Impossible just easy mode and call it "hard" - get rid of the hard ones because they offend my ego and I rage quit too much"?
As for breaks in continuity, I can make it through most gauntlets in LoH with 10 deaths tops. So to me, it isn't really bad design. Guess its just a matter of perspective. If you think the gauntlets are moderately challenging, its no problem. But if you die too often, then yeah...it could be a problem. But it wasn't a problem for me... Same logic could apply to your Dungeon Impossible. What happens if you die just before reaching the boss heal room? Its a restart having to go through the whole gauntlet again.
As for beta testing I did ALL of that myself with no cheats. All my testers used the cheat items.
d) It takes at most 15 seconds to recharge after each death. Is that too much? And when I started, I had no knowledge of scripts. When I asked for people to help me with scripts - well - I was very disappointed. Tell you what Gleeok, if you write me the script - I'll put it in and fix it. Then I'll make a special edition of LoH just for you. How's that? Wait on, you're a dev...you can open my quest and do that. I give you permission and I'll say its not cheating if you reset James's health to full after a death provided he starts OUTSIDE the dungeon after each death. Can't use enemies always return coz sometimes I want it that way. Hard to distinguish.
2) Seriously? I always thought the opening gauntlet was moderately challenging if you know the right techniques for dodging. I tried to get a quest that had consistent difficulty throughout but I guess that depends on perspective. Besides, the opening is the only chance where "little" enemies like vires and armoses can kill James with one hit. Its a unique opportunity that needs to be exploited. If they came later in the game they'd be too easy.
3) I did enable that rule. If you hold down the B button, the text string will display almost immediately. Don't believe me? I give you permission to open my file and see that that rule is checked. Otherwise its a bug in ZC...
4) Yeah...you should never get any normal keys in the quest. There are boss keys. The magic key is meant for people to cheat. If they are really suffering in a gauntlet its like a "gimme" that lets them bypass it.
5) Ok, if you wish to play with blue ring instead of the gold then please do so. I give you permission to modify my quest file to change the gold ring to a blue one. But note that that still is cheating.
If anyone else wants these changes I'd make a new quest for them but since Gleeok is a developer he can open it up and implement the changes far more quickly and efficiently than I can.
James: Only one of those (num. 2) was a criticism. 3 and 5 were merely suggestions to make it more appealing to a wider audience. Stop trying to argue with me. :whack: ..I think I must have broke the messages in my version though...Guess I'll not commit anything 'till I undo that then.
The first one is a bug. You even said it yourself. You tried to fix it but couldn't because you didn't know how to script at the time. If you want I will try and write you a script for this.
#2) OK, fair enough. If you balanced it already then I believe you.
One last thing: You ever see the movie "Four Rooms"? At the end some gangster bets his finger that he can light his lucky lighter ten times in a row, right. Guess what happens next? -Can you pass the Digdogger room in LV.1 ten times in a row without dying?
