Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
It’s not always easy to find these kinds of videos? Youtube’s hated algorithm is heavily influenced by the last things you watched, so if you get in a mood to watch restorations of old arcade games, it doesn’t take many of those until your homepage is loaded with them, to the exclusion of other things.
And honestly, who beside me is going to link to videos like this, an animation of Link in Breath of the Wild, in the much appreciated by fans Gerudo Outfit, breakdancing out in the desert, with unexpected accompaniment? That’s what Sundays here are for folks. Showing you the things that Youtube doesn’t want you to see, if only by accident (30 seconds).
When you’re attacking Vah Naboris but the music is really good (Youtube, animated, 30 seconds)
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
It’s not easy to find romhacks that measure up to our exacting standards, that strike me in just “that way,” but a conversion of the NES Legend of Zelda, one of the few mainline Zeldas never to have been really remade in any form (unless you count the abandoned Satellaview versions), fits the bill like a duck in well-made dentures.
This screenshot may look nearly exactly like The Legend of Zelda. In fact it is the Legend of Zelda, just converted, nearly exactly, to the SNES.
Link doesn’t wait for the transition to finish to start climbing out of caves.
The question has to be asked: why? I mean, to a degree it is kind of pointless. There’s been nearly exact (although always unofficial) re-implementations of The Original The Legend of Zelda since Zelda Classic (Set Side B). All of Nintendo’s own rereleases, from Virtual Console to Gamecube bonus disks to a stand-alone Game & Watch unit. But recreating it on SNES does have certain uses. First, it fixes a handful of issues with the earlier game, notably it doesn’t have flicker or slowdown. It also uses the L and R buttons to allow for quick inventory cycling without having to go into the subscreen.
The colors are slightly better as well. And the top of the screen display labels the buttons Y and B, instead of B and A.
It speeds up game transitions: it uses the Link to the Past-style iris in and out effects, using the SNES’ display masking feature, instead of the slower curtain closes and opens from the NES version. It allows you to use custom soundtracks via MSU-1 support. Health refills instantly instead of pausing the game for up to 15 seconds while all your hearts load up with red. And the sound is very slightly different: by default the low-health beep is less insistent, there’s an extra sound when you kill an enemy, and the candle sound is a little higher in pitch.
But perhaps the best reason to convert it to the SNES is, SNES emulators are nearly as common as NES emulators. You can play this modestly improves version of LoZ on anything with an SNES emulator, which isn’t something you can say of Zelda Classic.
Yes, I used this hack as an excuse to play completely through the first quest again. And yes, I did it without dying. I still got it.
I’m kind of an outspoken fan of the original LoZ, I still think it’s well worth playing today, although I think you should seek out its manual should you do so. (The opening demo even tells you to look there for details!) You’ll die a lot, it’s true, but there’s little penalty for it except for going back to start or the beginning of a dungeon, and having to go refill your health before you try again. It takes real skill to weave around its fast-moving enemies and projectiles, but it’s doable, and you don’t need speedrun skillz to do it.
It is rather difficult to find it through search. It’s not on romhacking.net. Creator infidelity’s announcement was on Twitter, where he offered only a direct download.
Along these lines, it’s a good time to revisit Mapstalgia, a defunct blog made by Josh Millard (cortex from Metafilter), that’s filled with player-made maps of this sort!
If you’ve followed the speedrunning scene for a while, you’re probably familiar with fcoughlin‘s Zelda Randomizer. It’s a program that can take a rom file of The Legend of Zelda and “scramble” it, in ways that the user can specify, in order to make it playable afresh, even for people who have played through it dozens of times already. It can move dungeon entrances, dungeon layouts, item locations, enemy placements and much more. And its changes can be encapsulated into a seed value so multiple people can be guaranteed of playing the same version of the game.
But for everything Zelda Randomizer can do, one thing it cannot do is change the game’s overworld. All of the familiar Zelda landmarks, the Central Lake, the Lost Woods, Spectacle Rock, and the rest, will be present and in the same places. That is where Infinite Hyrule (forum post, BitBucket) comes in. It’s a program whose purpose is to randomly create new overworlds for The Legend of Zelda, and to insert those into a rom file.
Gah, Lynels! Nice waterfall though.
I should take a moment to impress upon you how difficult that job is. There’s a good reason fcoughlin never built an overworld randomizer himself. The Legend of Zelda doesn’t store its game world in an obvious format. To get around this, Infinite Hyrule actually expands the rom file, so it can avoid the original game’s convoluted system, which stores each overworld screen as a set of links to vertical sets of tiles.
This partially explains the unusual structure of Zelda’s landscape, and why a number of structures, like the round boulders of Spectacle Rock and the dungeon entrances, are reused in multiple places: there is only room for so many vertical strips of surface tiles in the game’s ROM chips. To create a program capable of generating new overworld, a programmer must not only keep this limitation in mind, and work within its stricture, but must also follow the usual checks to ensure the game is still winnable.
Note that tree in the bottom-left
But it’s not even necessary to combine the two tools into one, for Infinite Hyrule can work work with Zelda Randomizer! You just have to make sure you use Zelda Randomizer first, and that you restrict yourself to only using certain flags. I personally find the flag string cHBRDMIhioEeNCb14OPhBo useful for mixing things up acceptably.
In addition to mixing up the overworld and maintaining the unique feel of The Legend of Zelda‘s map, it implements a few new kinds of screens, including a village with houses, and can produce a map of the generated world too. That should keep you going for quite a while. And, if you’re not 14 any more, it can even be set to reveal LoZ‘s infamous secret caves with graphical tells of their location. That’s such a nice feature if you want to explore a map in a reasonable time frame, instead of resorting to the original game’s technique of testing every square. Since, after all, none of us are 14 anymore.
Showing off the new village biome
If for some reason you want a similar treatment for Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, you sadist, there is no need. The randomizer for that game can generate new overworlds without need of a separate utility. I’ve played quite a bit of that, and will tell you, if you thought the original game was hard, the randomized version can be ludicrous.
Source: Art and Artifacts – Upload credit: Melora of historyofhyrule.com
This is a collection, made by Melora, of various Japanese publications related to The Legend of Zelda and its sequels, including manuals, hint books, strategy guide and manga. There’s a lot to go through! Some of it is translated, a lot isn’t. But it’s all nice to leaf through. There’s four heads to this particular Gleeok: a home page, a blog, a Twitter feed, a Flickr image archive with tons of images, and a substantial amalgamation on the Internet Archive. If you’re as familiar with Zelda games as I am, you might not even particularly need the strategy guides translated!
I still remember the first substantial thing I read about Zelda, long ago, a review in, of all places, Games Magazine. I must have been about 13 at the time. It seemed like an awesome thing to my games-addled brain, but at that moment I didn’t even have an NES. When I first played it, it was amazing. I spent months uncovering every item and secret (finding Level 7 in the second quest was a major roadblock).
So, when I think of The Legend of Zelda, I think of challenging game play, exploring a huge world, finding deviously hidden secrets, and overcoming a formidable challenge purely by my own efforts. All of these side various comics are a bit lost of me, as it is not often that I get into the lore of the series (The Wind Waker was a major exception), but I understand that a lot of other people do, and I think that’s terrific.
I have not had that the kind of experience I got from The Legend of Zelda from many other things since the era of the NES, but two places I did get it from were Breath of the Wild, of course, and Fez. I hear Tunic‘s pretty good, I probably should look into that soon….
Some more images, from various materials related to the first game. All are from this Flickr album, and were uploaded (and many of them, scanned) by Melora of History of Hyrule:
Publication Source: Million Publishing Guide – Contributor Source: Zelda Dungeon
Publication Source: 3 Game Guide Contributor Source: Donated by Mases of Zelda Dungeon
Originally found in the comic magazine Monthly Shonen Captain May 18, 1986, discovered thanks to twitter.com/kazzykazycom
Found by kazzykazcom on Twitter, unknown originSource: From the The Legend of Zelda: The Mirage Castle by Akio Higuchi and Yuko Tanaka, 1986
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
Greetings to all humans down there on planet Glorb-III, also known as Earth. Let’s get started, drebnar!
A lament from Reddit on how Streetpasses are impossible to get now. If only Nintendo had thought to include them on the Switch. Probably it’ll take another ten years before they realize what a good idea they had.
Chris Friberg of Den of Geek tells us his picks for the 15 best NES RPGs. #1 is Dragon Quest III! (What do you mean, don’t spoil it? I’m an alien, I spoil everything drebnar!) He also ranks Wizardry pretty high, he has great taste!
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
Greetings, humans! Here is the gaming news I could glean from decrypting your internet broadcasts from my flying saucer floating above your atmosphere!
Jordan Devore, Destructoid: Rogue Legacy 2 Drops Vertigo From Its Traits List. You see, each character you play in that game is part of a lineage of characters, and they have semi-random traits. One of those traits flipped the screen upside-down during play. Or it did. Now it’s not in the game anymore!
Alex Donaldson at VG247 warns us that Sonic Origins probably won’t have Sonic 3‘s original soundtrack, due to rights issues related to Michael Jackson’s involvement with the project. Sega has been hampered with music rights across several games, including the soundtrack for some ports of Crazy Taxi.
More from Ars Technica, Sam Machkovech tells us about Rifftrax: The Game!
