5 replies to this topic

[Dart Zaidyer]

Come for the quest, stay for the commentary!

 

Recently elsewhere on the internet, Brickroad made the following post in a thread I started about Zelda Classic.

 

If you can do LA-style items in ZC now, then a quest where you don't get a sword might be pretty fun. I mean, as long as it's not built to mimic a Z1 swordless run, the way many ZC quests are.

Example: start the game with the boomerang, design Level 1 to be populated exclusively (or almost exclusively) with bats and blobs. Put a (respawning?) bomb drop in the treasure room so you can kill aquamentus.

Get the red candle in Level 2, and populate it with ropes (which are fast, but the candle can kill in one hit) and gibdos (which are slow, but take a lot of hits). Both of these monsters should be manageable with the candle in one hand and the boomerang in the other.

Bow in Level 4, Wand in Level 7, and then finally Master Sword in Level 9 (so you can kill Ganon).

I think it would work.

 

 

Little does he realize that this has been going on forever.

 

Determined to prove this, I went back to the oldest attempt at this that I can remember: the one and only ALTADD.qst, by Sludge.

Armed only with a dodgy video stream, I sit down for an hour and venture into the dark past of Zelda Classic. I am joined by BEAT and FanboyMaster on a quest to critically examine game design gimmicks that have been in ZC since time immemorial. Have we learned anything after all these years? Let's find out together.

 

Check out Part One, featuring Level-1.

 

[Moosh]

Hey boss, I dropped your sword back when we were still in the other dimension. You didn't need that, right?

 

I have to agree with the general attitude in this video that A Link to Another Dimension is pretty bad. There are ways to go about not giving the player a sword and the most important way is to either not present them with a lot of enemies early on or give them a consistently damaging item. A quest that I feel made particularly good use of the no sword mechanic was ToTheTop, which didn't give out a sword until Level 6. It's probably a lot harder than this quest, but its difficulty felt a lot more legitimate too because it didn't rely on abusing game mechanics to get through.

 

On a somewhat unrelated note, what exactly happened to Talking Time? I went to check out this topic you mentioned only to discover I'm no longer welcome to lurk there. Did raocow's LPs of STTB and STTB2 bring too much unwanted attention?

[Dart Zaidyer]

Marvel at Part Two, wherein Level-2 is reached, BEAT comes down with an acute case of tape delay, and the secret of ZC's longevity is finally revealed.

 

ALTADD is bad, no question. But back in its day it was kind of a big deal, and it's the first quest I can really remember that does everything it does. Remember that Sludge created cooldgn.qst at about the same time, and it codified a lot of tricks we now take for granted, because nobody had tried them or really had them figured out up to that point.

 

As for Talking Time, it's been under constant siege from the endless swarm of spambots that lurk the internet, hungry for forums to deface. At last count there were well over ten thousand spambot accounts registered. We thought we could stop them by not activating anyone unless they asked a moderator. Unfortunately, that doesn't keep the spambots from crawling around slamming the "new thread" and "reply" buttons on every page.

In just the last few days it got so bad it was starting to crash the server, so lurking had to be disabled until some housekeeping can be done. External fame had nothing to do with this, it's just how the internet works nowadays. It's like ants at a picnic. I've had this happen to test forums I've left running on my own webspace!

[Dart Zaidyer]

Gaze in slack-jawed amazement at Part Three, wherein the gang beats the dead horse of hard Zelda fangames, finally clears Level-2, and pulls back the curtain on the legacy and inner workings of ZQuest.

[Dart Zaidyer]

The ALTADD saga continues with Part 4, wherein I explain the finer points of overworld design, complain about other engines inspired by ZC, encounter the second green dungeon in a row, and remark on ZC's devotion to authenticity.

[Dart Zaidyer]

Don't miss the stunning conclusion in Part 5, in which I finally snap and the terrifying truth of ZQuest is made known.