emtilt
the cow of horses
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Reply 80 of 450 (Originally posted on: 11-23-14 11:27:08 PM)
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I'm not sure how you are using "context" here. I'm not suggesting it isn't a notable historical moment (sales, the - first on that sort of console, as you suspected - save feature, Nintendo's legacy, and the popularization of more open worlds attest to that). I'm suggesting that it is poorly designed, even for what could be done on an NES. The fondness for many games of that era is ultimately an economic one; we had few games so we learned to be amazed by the ones we had (I loved - and still love - the shit out of some shitty early 90s games because I only had like 5 games). I'm taking away that context, but that's about it. This game capitalized big on that, because the implied scope of the game really plays on that desire.
I've played both of the other games you mention (recently, within the past year, not having played them as a kid). Metroid has many flaws, but it achieves a tone in a way that (so far) Zelda doesn't and I think it is a very important moment in games. It's a good point of comparison to Zelda, because fundamentally they are both exploratory action sequences. Metroid uses this to suggest an oppressive, lonely, alien feeling. The narrative is scant, but like effective survival horror games of later eras, it has a focused tonal goal.
Zelda does not - it just suggests hey, maybe, you know, like, explore, or something? I suspect that this is largely a result of it being a Miyamoto game. Miyamoto has very apparent anti-narrative tendencies, which is perhaps why early Mario games are such sublime, focused meditations on kinetic actions - they are dances through gamespaces. But Zelda has never really seemed to have a reason to be. It seems to exist as the anti-Mario. Mario goes left to right? Well, maybe our other series should have exploring or something. The most focused, designed aspect of the first Zelda (again, this is an early impression) is the combat because it is, in essence, a synecdoche for the game as a whole. It relies on a positional understanding of your place on screen, like Snake, much as the game hopes that the player will develop a positional dexterity with the gamemap. But the overworld exploration is random, the barriers designed to lengthen play instead cripple the combat, and the game suggests this is a developmental quest but can't decide if it wants a narrative. It's a mess (at least about a third of the way into it).
It is interesting to note the unit of searching required to upgrade and progress in the two games. In Metroid, it is primarily the screen/room. In Zelda's overworld, it is every single tile, randomly with soft limitations on number of secrets per screen/room. Zelda has mistook pixel-hunting for exploration.
That said, I like The Legend of Zelda a whole lot more than Ocarina of Time, at least, with its lengthy moronic narrative, telegraphed pathways, and contrived world.
Regarding Kid Icarus, I perhaps exaggerated when I said I played it. I didn't finish. I can count the number of games that I've started but not finished since high school or so on my fingers. I see redeeming features in things like The Legend of Zelda. I don't think it works as a whole, but it has glimmers of beauty. But with Kid Icarus, I just think it is stupid, and I don't think it achieves anything at all, and I have no interest in playing it any further. (Ok, that's not fair. It does interesting things with its musical score, and there are hints of a clever vision, lost somewhere early in development, of an elegant genre mashup and deployment of mechanics.) It just deploys arbitrary features to create difficulty, and none of them work together in any meaningful way. I imagine that it was a lovely idea for a game at some point, which was then destroyed out of fears of it being too easy or something. Kid Icarus is an interesting counterpoint to the first two Kirby games which came out a few years later (on the GameBoy and NES, respectively), because those games are such a clear rejection of literally every design philosophy used in Kid Icarus.
This reply was last edited on 11-23-14 11:39:50 PM by emtilt.
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