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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   1986 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 12, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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To be clear, I did play the original Zelda a couple of years after it was released, and I liked it, but I was also eight years old and mildly autistic, so I didn't mind wasting hours systematically trying to burn every bush and bomb every exposed rock surface on the overworld. But in retrospect, that's just really bad design and not much fun compared to games that came out just a few years later.

I think that there was probably intended to be a social aspect to the exploration, where friends would get together, divvy up areas to search, and then share findings with each other. And we did do that a little, but not really systematically. But I lived in a semi-rural area and didn't have many friends who owned the game.

When I was a kid playing Zelda, or Mario, or most games for that matter, "beating" them never entered my mind. Mostly because I was terrible at games. So I used them more like a toy clockwork world I enjoyed exploring. I'm under the impression this isn't dissimilar from how a lot of small kids still play games, and now there are tons of open world games without any win conditions that kids especially love.

So all that said, whether Zelda was fair or not, or beatable out of the box without any outside information, didn't matter to me as a kid. I only wanted to explore the far corners of the map, to see if I could even survive that far. Or maybe I'd really go nuts in a dungeon I'd already beat trying to wring every last secret out of it, not for any power gaming aspect, but because the limited technical vocabulary of the game wasn't immediately obvious to me and I thought anything was possible. I remember being particularly excited when I'd stumble onto one of those stairwells that took you to the small sub dungeons that had a side view instead of a top down view. Something good was always in one of those.

I don't know if Nintendo knew any of these things when they made Zelda, or if they tried to make a massive game you were supposed to beat fairly and failed, and lucked into making a fun, primitive, open world game with win conditions you could mostly ignore.

I am sorry to have doubted you. That you are aware of the idea of playing games collaboratively, shows your age. Such games are rare today, but were common in the era of Japanese arcades. There and then games such as The Tower of Druaga or The Quest of Ki would have a notebook on the arcade machine, for each player to document their possible discoveries. An implemention of collaboration was notably implemented in much later Dark Souls in the form of messages players can leave for eachother.

No offense taken. I'm assuming that you were just misled by my youthful figure.

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