Yeah I think the N64 Zelda games had pretty easy dungeon puzzles, maybe some of the other stuff was a little obtuse
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yeah a lot of 90’s games have a thing where you have to make some kind of silly leap in logic to solve a puzzle that you would just never be expected to do now. but by the time OoT came out it was more smoothed out and less present than in earlier games… so it’s more just sprinkled in throughout. which makes it feel more kind of ‘quirky’ to me than like a serious obstacle. it’s not really a modern sensibility for design but not the punishing one of 80’s games either. but i also have no bones about looking up solutions to puzzles in games at this point if i need to, because life is too short.
uncontroversial point i know but i think OoT is still a really good game and i like the fever dream quality of the dungeons. that sort of quality maybe why i responded so much to playing Thief for the first time like five years back. or why i play i still play Doom wads.
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im playing through it with a friend who has never played it before and holy shit is this the case. i’m like “oh yeah i know what to do” and then i watch him struggle for 15 minutes before just mercy killing the secret and then he goes “what the fuck”
its pretty funny but uh
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I think it’s cool, it’s supposed to be an adventure where you experiment and solve things. You can catch a lot of stuff in bottles, it doesn’t seem that obtuse to me. It’s certainly not Sierra obtuse. Yet another cool feature about OoT that makes me like it more, TBH.
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yeah, I think they had very strict rules to make sure any puzzle thing involved a mechanic you’d use in other circumstances, and they hint at the solution with the shopkeeper selling the bottle, they just didn’t add the intermediate step where you pick up and store items by swinging the bottle otherwise – fairies are the real common interaction but this is early enough in the game players were probably getting by with milk. I wouldn’t be surprised if an earlier design had things like the seed pods or Deku Nuts collected with bottles, and when it got removed they accidentally lost a bridge.
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I think it’s cool for games to have bad puzzles too, I bought and didn’t refund Colossal Cave
just, using a bottle to catch a fish IS obtuse especially in a game that already has a fishing minigame
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I know I got stuck there for a few days. I bet it caught more people than the up-and-behind Water Temple switch.
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it’s an adventure where you experiment and solve things except every combat encounter takes 2-5 minutes if you don’t know what you’re doing, and enemies often respawn. drives me nuts.
also you have to talk to ingo twice while riding epona, BUT you can’t do two right in a row, you have to ride epona TWICE then talk to ingo each time, it’s a weird fucking choice. also you have to pay each time you ride epona which feels a bit like a weird minigame with no point and honestly like, that whole scenario baffled me even as a kid.
there’s lots of little weird shit in there that is either Very Cool (shoot an arrow into the sun) or Very Annoying (pay for a minigame twice, play a special song each time, talk to an NPC using a weird interface each time, win two horse races in a row and if you mess up any of the above you might not have enough rupees to complete it).
also cannot emphasize enough how bad the combat feels if you don’t already know all the tricks for making it go faster.
anyway i kind of think OoT is like…really really cool but i also had the strategy guide so i have no idea how much of this i would have ever ever figured out on my own
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I was replaying ocarina recently for the first time since it came out and was enjoying how non condescending and kind of obtuse it was compared to a modern zelda, especially the capturing the fish to get in the dungeon. I did then get annoyed with the giant fish dungeon though and take a break to play the next life is strange instead (also because it takes place may 7th-9th of course).
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I think I remember being stumped by the fish puzzle as well.
I had a friend who’d already passed this point watching me play and his absolute most favourite thing to do seemed to be calling me all kinds of ableist slurs if I didn’t instantly know how to do anything that he already knew. And so after 5 seconds of me aimlessly wandering about he started doing that, and yanked the controller away so he could condescendingly show me the solution.
After spoiling the puzzle, I jumped down and hit the reset button because I didn’t want him spoiling the rest of it. He got pissed, and I think that was when he said he would hold all my Pokémon hostage that I traded to him for safekeeping unless I sold him my Controller Pak for $6.
Pretty sure all of this contributed to me getting suspended for hitting him with a chunk of wood the following year
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I mean, one of the reasons I haven’t tried Death Stranding is how long it seemingly is so a ton of new content and missions sounds more like a threat than anything else?
Someone mentioned Nier and regarding the original game the reason it appealed to me is the combination of some of my favorite characters of that generation combined with probably the best soundtrack of it. Combat was always a bit simplistic (by the later playthroughs you can become powerful enough where it no longer is a concern as everything melts to my fave weapon) and you did have to revisit areas a bit likely due to budget issues, but for me the important stuff outweighed that. Automata was more polished and pretty with “better” combat but that’s basically just improving things that weren’t the point in the original while not topping what the first game did best.
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the missions are the fun part though! anything that increases the game to cutscene ratio is a plus in death stranding.
i still regret that i sat through his feature length film of bullshit at the end of the game.
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How long to beat puts the length of Death Stranding at like 60-110 hours based on your playstyle. I don’t need a director’s cut that adds X amount more, I need a cut that subtracts like half of that.
Like I adored Elden Ring; the thought of DLC for it terrifies me as I already got stuck in that world long enough. My #1 hope for the eventual follow-up is that there is less of it.
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do the missions you want to do and stop when you’re not having fun! don’t let game developers trick you into playing more than you enjoy. kojima doesn’t know shit about pacing.
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which one? i was mulling over playing one recently and taking place at the same time of year is a strong appeal (april is for mgs2, august is for mgs3)
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before the storm
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weirdly i find that the game is somehow both condescending and obtuse? that fucken owl…
anyway i apparently have a lot of feelings about OoT lol
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well it’s still zelda
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the deed trading sidequest from majora’s mask could be in grim fandango
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playing Sunless Skies… I have pushed my luck in freezing temperatures promising my starving crew that we’ll reach port in the next few hours (a lie), dealt with horrible sprouting seeds in the cargo hold that would thrash everyone that comes near them, and watched star-crazed ships crash themselves against space rocks trying to kill me… I keep thinking it lacks the intense horror vibes of Sunless Sea, but shit keeps happening to me that makes me think that Sunless Skies just owns bones
a frozen corpse lodged itself into the guts of my machine and then later knocked on the outer window of the driver’s compartment of my space train to be let in, which I of course did!!!
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