More Zelda
Jul. 25th, 2007 08:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amethyst73(BTW orichalcum - won the first level of the Star Game. Many arrows now.)
I *finally* got to the real honest-to-goodness Sacred Grove entryway puzzle after a longish session Friday night. I was annoyed by the sequence in what (for anyone who's seen that far in Ocarina) was clearly the Lost Woods immediately beforehand. Its failings were twofold, and worked together to make the sequence highly irritating. First, Wolfie had not-too-random encounters with groups of enemies literally every three to five seconds. Because the enemies stayed in groups, the most efficient way to fight was to use Midna's energy attack to get all of them at once.. but this tended to end with Wolfie facing in some direction totally unrelated to whatever direction he'd been facing when the fight started.
Normally this would not be terribly problematic, but now we come to issue #2: no map! No nice little picture in the lower left-hand corner of the screen showing the shape of the current 'room' with a blue arrow indicating where Wolfie had come in and a yellow arrow indicating Wolfie's location and orientation at any given time.
Now, there were probably only about six 'rooms' like this, and that there was really only a single path through them. But the near-constant battles (with resultant disorientation) meant that I probably backtracked a number of times. And I never got the chance to sit and enjoy the obviously pretty and well-crafted scenery of the 'rooms' because, well, enemies simply couldn't restrain themselves from attacking me for more than three to five seconds at a time.
All of this, interestingly, exactly mirrors the problems with some RPGs that I've talked about before.
After that sequence and the silly miniboss fight at its end, the moving-knights puzzle felt downright refreshing. I took about ten minutes just determining the parameters of how the knights moved: what happened at edges of the puzzle, what happened when they tried to occupy the same space, etc. Then I copied the board out onto some paper and spent a little while with the board and three coins that represented myself (a nickel) and the two knights (a dime for the one who moved with me, and a penny for the one who moved opposite). The solution I came up with was perhaps not the most elegant - fifteen moves compared to IGN's thirteen - but they did the job when I played again Saturday morning.
The exercise reminded me rather of the Pegboz puzzle in the old Infocom game Zork Zero, in which I did pretty much the same thing, solving the puzzle offline with physically manipulable objects. Which is somehow a very satisfying feeling. There's no time pressure and nobody trying to whack you. I also find it easier to think about spatial-relationship puzzles if I've got a real-world version that I can physically play with. No wonder I enjoyed the first month or so of organic chemistry; students in the class were required to purchase molecular modeling kits, build models of the small molecules we were studying, and play around with them.
Now - ha ha! - I have the happy ability to change from wolf to human and back again pretty much anytime I darn want to. I can therefore use warp points basically anytime. I have a sword with a cool-looking purple guard. I've learned the backslash, weird move that it is. (There's another hidden skill just waiting for me to go learn it, but I'll go practice this one for a bit first.) Off to get more heart pieces, more poes, mebbe some minigames... Then I'll go advance the plot some more.
orichalcum - won the first level of the Star Game. Many arrows now.)I *finally* got to the real honest-to-goodness Sacred Grove entryway puzzle after a longish session Friday night. I was annoyed by the sequence in what (for anyone who's seen that far in Ocarina) was clearly the Lost Woods immediately beforehand. Its failings were twofold, and worked together to make the sequence highly irritating. First, Wolfie had not-too-random encounters with groups of enemies literally every three to five seconds. Because the enemies stayed in groups, the most efficient way to fight was to use Midna's energy attack to get all of them at once.. but this tended to end with Wolfie facing in some direction totally unrelated to whatever direction he'd been facing when the fight started.
Normally this would not be terribly problematic, but now we come to issue #2: no map! No nice little picture in the lower left-hand corner of the screen showing the shape of the current 'room' with a blue arrow indicating where Wolfie had come in and a yellow arrow indicating Wolfie's location and orientation at any given time.
Now, there were probably only about six 'rooms' like this, and that there was really only a single path through them. But the near-constant battles (with resultant disorientation) meant that I probably backtracked a number of times. And I never got the chance to sit and enjoy the obviously pretty and well-crafted scenery of the 'rooms' because, well, enemies simply couldn't restrain themselves from attacking me for more than three to five seconds at a time.
All of this, interestingly, exactly mirrors the problems with some RPGs that I've talked about before.
After that sequence and the silly miniboss fight at its end, the moving-knights puzzle felt downright refreshing. I took about ten minutes just determining the parameters of how the knights moved: what happened at edges of the puzzle, what happened when they tried to occupy the same space, etc. Then I copied the board out onto some paper and spent a little while with the board and three coins that represented myself (a nickel) and the two knights (a dime for the one who moved with me, and a penny for the one who moved opposite). The solution I came up with was perhaps not the most elegant - fifteen moves compared to IGN's thirteen - but they did the job when I played again Saturday morning.
The exercise reminded me rather of the Pegboz puzzle in the old Infocom game Zork Zero, in which I did pretty much the same thing, solving the puzzle offline with physically manipulable objects. Which is somehow a very satisfying feeling. There's no time pressure and nobody trying to whack you. I also find it easier to think about spatial-relationship puzzles if I've got a real-world version that I can physically play with. No wonder I enjoyed the first month or so of organic chemistry; students in the class were required to purchase molecular modeling kits, build models of the small molecules we were studying, and play around with them.
Now - ha ha! - I have the happy ability to change from wolf to human and back again pretty much anytime I darn want to. I can therefore use warp points basically anytime. I have a sword with a cool-looking purple guard. I've learned the backslash, weird move that it is. (There's another hidden skill just waiting for me to go learn it, but I'll go practice this one for a bit first.) Off to get more heart pieces, more poes, mebbe some minigames... Then I'll go advance the plot some more.
