Last weekend I was up during the day on Saturday so I joined in on the second of the 'Get Yourself Speedrunning' races. It was for the SNES Zelda game, A Link to the Past. I managed to get in a few practice runs and actually knew where all the keys were located and where to go for the entire run. I didn't get lost and I only game overed once, and it wasn't even much of a time loss since I'd just entered a dungeon and dying in that game takes you to the start of your current dungeon. Since it healed me back to 4 hearts it might even have been faster than not dying!
The race winner finished in 22 minutes and 1 second. I finished in 28 minutes and 33 seconds. This means I only took 30% longer than the best person which is way better than my Mario 3 result where I took more than 4 times as long as the best person. In the Mario 3 race I did come 91st out of 140 people. In Zelda I only came 121st! Which sounds worse, except attendance for Zelda blew the attendance record set by Mario 3 out of the water. 301 people showed up! 290 of them even finished the race!
The rating system the SRL website uses is clearly flawed though, as this race showed. The guy currently in 7th place overall on the A Link to the Past leaderboard has only done one race. This one, where he came 34th. 33 people beat him, but only 6 people are ranked higher than him on the leaderboard. Presumably the system treats initial races as more important, or only cares about how many people you beat, or how many higher ranked people you beat, or something of the sort. I feel bad for the people who may care about the Zelda leaderboard since this huge race clearly messed things up.
121st place was actually good enough to get me some ranking points. Not enough to skyrocket me to the top of the charts but I have an actual number for a game now which is pretty cool. And it was fun!
Showing posts with label Zelda. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Zelda. Show all posts
Sunday, February 01, 2015
Friday, January 23, 2015
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
Tomorrow will feature the second race in the series of three being put on by the speedrun racing site SpeedRunsLive. The whole thing is flying under the banner of 'get yourself speedrunning' and I was really hoping these races would exist to help bootstrap people into speedrunning, but it turns out that isn't really the case. Anyone can create a race in SRL for pretty much any game as long as they have an opponent lined up so the only things that actually seem special about these races are that they have a scheduled start time and there's a stream running with commentary on the top players.
What I was hoping would happen would be that there'd be a lot of information easily available to let people know what sorts of things they should be doing in these games. A 'cheat sheet' if you will of the core tricks to the game and a sample route to follow. The Mario 3 one eventually had a route put up in a pastebin document. It was a good start, but there was no mention that such a thing existed on the website or in the main IRC channel. Or if there was I sure didn't see it. I only found out it existed when I joined the race specific channel an hour before it started and the link was in the topic. I didn't set aside any time to practice but part of that was not knowing what I should even be practicing. If I'd had that document in advance I'd have been more encouraged to at least do a trial run.
I have done some research and practice for the Zelda race. It's much shorter than the Mario 3 race (it only covers the very start of the game up until you get the Master Sword which is right after the 3 pendant dungeons) which is nice. But I wasn't sure what I could or should be doing. The rules for the race are rather cryptic to the uninitiated:
Rules: S&Q allowed. Glitches banned: EG, YBA, OoB.
Ok... What is S&Q? What is EG? YBA? OoB? What run should I watch to model my game after? Are they abiding by those rules?
S&Q it turns out is the 'Save & Quit' option in the game. This lets you essentially teleport to any of the starting locations in the game which is rather convenient once you've finished a dungeon. Instead of walking to the next dungeon you warp back to your house and take the shorter route. It's not clear to me why people would run without using this option but apparently people do.
OoB stands for Out of Bounds. EG stands for Exploration Glitch. YBA stands for Yuzuhara's Bottle Adventure. All three are ways to skip past large chunks of the game. OoB is clipping through walls to take shortcuts. EG is an extreme form of OoB where you end up getting onto another layer entirely. This lets you walk anywhere on the map. Different dungeons and stuff are all actually just on one big map in memory (or two?) so with this glitch you can pretty much walk to anywhere you want as long as the destination has a way to end the glitch (a cliff of some sort to jump down I think). YBA is a crazy glitch where you use a potion in a bottle on a screen transition to rewrite stuff in memory to do all kinds of crazy things. Like getting the flute well before you should have it, which lets you warp to places you shouldn't be able to reach.
So basically they're banning all the things that let you skip parts of the game. Sort of like how in Mario 3 they banned the warp whistle but still let you use p-wings and clouds to skip/cheat your way through individual levels. With a whistle you skip entire worlds in one action and that's not good for a nostalgia run. In Zelda they ban all the weird glitches but they let you warp back to your starting point. That only cuts out some boring running around on the world map.
I couldn't find any routes for this category anywhere so what I did was watched a bunch of different videos people had posted for categories that sounded like they could be this one. They had enough similarities that I got a pretty good idea of what I'd need to do. Because you aren't using any crazy glitches you need to do the dungeons in order. You need the running boots from dungeon one to knock down the book to enter dungeon two. You need the gloves from dungeon two to pick up a rock on the way to dungeon three. Then the only thing left to do is run into the forest and pick up the sword. I saw one guy who went and got an optional ice rod to help kill the bosses but most people skipped that. It seemed like the only optional thing most people did was pick up the heart from a chest in the sanctuary you take Zelda to at the start of the game.
There are still all sorts of tricks to cut frames out by walking on some diagonals and people plan out specific arrow usages so they know how many pots they need to pick up. I'm a bad aim so I need to pick up all the arrows I can find!
I did a test run this morning and got done in a little over an hour. Real people finish in 23 minutes (or maybe less now... who knows how good the people I watched actually are) so this was already a better ratio than my Mario 3 run. And I got lost lots, and got knocked out of the third boss fight several times. I expect to do much better in the actual race.
And maybe they're intentionally making it hard to find this stuff. That's what speedrunning is... Find different tricks and glitches from a wide variety of sources and watch the people who claim to be good to see what they do. Try to copy it. When you're good enough to do what they do then you can tinker with ways to make it faster by doing different things. Which you either find yourself through insane amounts of trial and error or you find by watching other people in the hopes they stumble across something new.
I'm definitely going to get up in time for the Zelda race tomorrow. But after how much effort it took this week to find what I needed to do in a game I understand I feel like trying for the Sonic one next week is probably crazy. Maybe I could show up and expect to come last? I don't want to show up and end up forfeiting though, so that may well come down to if I think I'll be awake for 6+ hours after it starts.
I may even practice more in the morning... I didn't get any ranking points for coming 91st in Mario 3, but I feel like I could probably do well enough in Zelda to get some ranking points. Assuming as many random new players show up as last time, anyway! I don't think ranking points really do anything but they're a number that I could make get bigger, so I must make it bigger!
What I was hoping would happen would be that there'd be a lot of information easily available to let people know what sorts of things they should be doing in these games. A 'cheat sheet' if you will of the core tricks to the game and a sample route to follow. The Mario 3 one eventually had a route put up in a pastebin document. It was a good start, but there was no mention that such a thing existed on the website or in the main IRC channel. Or if there was I sure didn't see it. I only found out it existed when I joined the race specific channel an hour before it started and the link was in the topic. I didn't set aside any time to practice but part of that was not knowing what I should even be practicing. If I'd had that document in advance I'd have been more encouraged to at least do a trial run.
I have done some research and practice for the Zelda race. It's much shorter than the Mario 3 race (it only covers the very start of the game up until you get the Master Sword which is right after the 3 pendant dungeons) which is nice. But I wasn't sure what I could or should be doing. The rules for the race are rather cryptic to the uninitiated:
Rules: S&Q allowed. Glitches banned: EG, YBA, OoB.
Ok... What is S&Q? What is EG? YBA? OoB? What run should I watch to model my game after? Are they abiding by those rules?
S&Q it turns out is the 'Save & Quit' option in the game. This lets you essentially teleport to any of the starting locations in the game which is rather convenient once you've finished a dungeon. Instead of walking to the next dungeon you warp back to your house and take the shorter route. It's not clear to me why people would run without using this option but apparently people do.
OoB stands for Out of Bounds. EG stands for Exploration Glitch. YBA stands for Yuzuhara's Bottle Adventure. All three are ways to skip past large chunks of the game. OoB is clipping through walls to take shortcuts. EG is an extreme form of OoB where you end up getting onto another layer entirely. This lets you walk anywhere on the map. Different dungeons and stuff are all actually just on one big map in memory (or two?) so with this glitch you can pretty much walk to anywhere you want as long as the destination has a way to end the glitch (a cliff of some sort to jump down I think). YBA is a crazy glitch where you use a potion in a bottle on a screen transition to rewrite stuff in memory to do all kinds of crazy things. Like getting the flute well before you should have it, which lets you warp to places you shouldn't be able to reach.
So basically they're banning all the things that let you skip parts of the game. Sort of like how in Mario 3 they banned the warp whistle but still let you use p-wings and clouds to skip/cheat your way through individual levels. With a whistle you skip entire worlds in one action and that's not good for a nostalgia run. In Zelda they ban all the weird glitches but they let you warp back to your starting point. That only cuts out some boring running around on the world map.
I couldn't find any routes for this category anywhere so what I did was watched a bunch of different videos people had posted for categories that sounded like they could be this one. They had enough similarities that I got a pretty good idea of what I'd need to do. Because you aren't using any crazy glitches you need to do the dungeons in order. You need the running boots from dungeon one to knock down the book to enter dungeon two. You need the gloves from dungeon two to pick up a rock on the way to dungeon three. Then the only thing left to do is run into the forest and pick up the sword. I saw one guy who went and got an optional ice rod to help kill the bosses but most people skipped that. It seemed like the only optional thing most people did was pick up the heart from a chest in the sanctuary you take Zelda to at the start of the game.
There are still all sorts of tricks to cut frames out by walking on some diagonals and people plan out specific arrow usages so they know how many pots they need to pick up. I'm a bad aim so I need to pick up all the arrows I can find!
I did a test run this morning and got done in a little over an hour. Real people finish in 23 minutes (or maybe less now... who knows how good the people I watched actually are) so this was already a better ratio than my Mario 3 run. And I got lost lots, and got knocked out of the third boss fight several times. I expect to do much better in the actual race.
And maybe they're intentionally making it hard to find this stuff. That's what speedrunning is... Find different tricks and glitches from a wide variety of sources and watch the people who claim to be good to see what they do. Try to copy it. When you're good enough to do what they do then you can tinker with ways to make it faster by doing different things. Which you either find yourself through insane amounts of trial and error or you find by watching other people in the hopes they stumble across something new.
I'm definitely going to get up in time for the Zelda race tomorrow. But after how much effort it took this week to find what I needed to do in a game I understand I feel like trying for the Sonic one next week is probably crazy. Maybe I could show up and expect to come last? I don't want to show up and end up forfeiting though, so that may well come down to if I think I'll be awake for 6+ hours after it starts.
I may even practice more in the morning... I didn't get any ranking points for coming 91st in Mario 3, but I feel like I could probably do well enough in Zelda to get some ranking points. Assuming as many random new players show up as last time, anyway! I don't think ranking points really do anything but they're a number that I could make get bigger, so I must make it bigger!
Wednesday, May 09, 2012
Minish Cap Conclusions
This morning on the bus to work I finally beat the final boss of Minish Cap. He has three phases and I'd died to the third phase a couple of times before I finally got him. He worked pretty much the same way as every other boss in the game. He was invulnerable to damage but had one Achilles' Heel. Use the right special item in the right way to knock out his defenses for a short period of time at which point you could beat him up with your sword. The trouble I had with the final stage is how much damage he put out. I couldn't try all the items I had on all his different bits to find out his vulnerability before he'd kill me and force me to restart from the beginning of the zone. Once I put it together and found the way to actually damage him he went down like a ton of bricks.
In all the game was pretty fun. It had several new items I hadn't seen in a Zelda game which was a nice change of pace. It had lots of secrets to find. It was a decent length. Not too long, not too short. It did suffer by being a GBA game. It didn't use enough of the buttons and required entering the menu entirely too often to change items. The instructions on what to do next were not always clear and it wasn't possible to get a reasonable recap from your annoying buddy. I had to turn to the internet a few times when I got stuck. I believe this was mostly because I was playing the game in short chunks while tired but I feel like a handheld game should take that into account. Also, twice I had to bomb unmarked walls to progress and that really makes me mad.
It was definitely worth the price I paid (free!) but I do think it was a fair bit worse than Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time.
In all the game was pretty fun. It had several new items I hadn't seen in a Zelda game which was a nice change of pace. It had lots of secrets to find. It was a decent length. Not too long, not too short. It did suffer by being a GBA game. It didn't use enough of the buttons and required entering the menu entirely too often to change items. The instructions on what to do next were not always clear and it wasn't possible to get a reasonable recap from your annoying buddy. I had to turn to the internet a few times when I got stuck. I believe this was mostly because I was playing the game in short chunks while tired but I feel like a handheld game should take that into account. Also, twice I had to bomb unmarked walls to progress and that really makes me mad.
It was definitely worth the price I paid (free!) but I do think it was a fair bit worse than Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time.
Friday, March 30, 2012
The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap
I'd been doing a lot of reading on the bus recently but having polished off the Ender's game series and the Hunger Games series it was time for another change. Nintendo recently gave me 10 VBA games through the 3DS virtual store (because I was an early adopter and they reduced the price a couple months after release) so I thought I'd play around with those. One of them was a Zelda game I hadn't heard of and I figured I'd give it a spin.
It feels a lot like a Zelda game. It's a straight port so it doesn't make use of the extra buttons or touch screen on the 3DS which is a little annoying (I have to enter the menu way too frequently to change items) but can be dealt with. I've already met Zelda (she is apparently the main character's best friend as opposed to just a strange princess), I've found my annoying sidekick (a talking hat), I've cleared out a dungeon, and acquired a cool item. It feels a lot like a Zelda game.
I've also gotten hopelessly stuck. I feel like I was told precisely where to go early one morning and have since forgotten what it was. (I'm not exactly awake on the bus in the morning.) I've wandered to every NPC I can find to talk to them but none of them are willing to let me know precisely what I need to do. My hat tells me I need to visit some blacksmith in the hills but I don't know where the hills are. The hat won't tell me. The map doesn't tell me. I've wandered completely around the world that I can currently access with no luck. I did recently acquire bombs so it's entirely possible that there's something I can blow up that I haven't thought to attack. Also I've uncovered some musical panels which which I can't find a way to interact.
I've spent 2 days stuck at this point (I've cleared out some side quests in the meantime) and am at the point of giving up. I can quit the game or I can turn to the internets for help. I'm leaning towards the internets but I hate looking up what to do in puzzly games since it really feels like cheating.
It feels a lot like a Zelda game. It's a straight port so it doesn't make use of the extra buttons or touch screen on the 3DS which is a little annoying (I have to enter the menu way too frequently to change items) but can be dealt with. I've already met Zelda (she is apparently the main character's best friend as opposed to just a strange princess), I've found my annoying sidekick (a talking hat), I've cleared out a dungeon, and acquired a cool item. It feels a lot like a Zelda game.
I've also gotten hopelessly stuck. I feel like I was told precisely where to go early one morning and have since forgotten what it was. (I'm not exactly awake on the bus in the morning.) I've wandered to every NPC I can find to talk to them but none of them are willing to let me know precisely what I need to do. My hat tells me I need to visit some blacksmith in the hills but I don't know where the hills are. The hat won't tell me. The map doesn't tell me. I've wandered completely around the world that I can currently access with no luck. I did recently acquire bombs so it's entirely possible that there's something I can blow up that I haven't thought to attack. Also I've uncovered some musical panels which which I can't find a way to interact.
I've spent 2 days stuck at this point (I've cleared out some side quests in the meantime) and am at the point of giving up. I can quit the game or I can turn to the internets for help. I'm leaning towards the internets but I hate looking up what to do in puzzly games since it really feels like cheating.
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Ocarina of Time: Thoughts
I recently completed the normal mode version of Ocarina of Time on the 3DS. It is definitely a good game, though the controls seem a little outdated. I can remember when Z-targeting came out and how it was a big deal. It switched to L-targeting on the 3DS but it's essentially the same thing. It works (aiming at moving targets is annoying; there's a reason I don't really play first person shooters) but it doesn't feel right. It breaks immersion. I'm a dude with a sword and a shield and I get jumped by 2 were-wolves. If I manage to target one of them then suddenly his friend backs off? Me and my target do a little dance to the death that I can't possibly lose if I'm semi competent and then his friend starts in. Having him targeted and using my shield makes me practically invincible.
The game had lots of great dungeons with interesting puzzles to figure out. Boss fights tended to be very gimmicky and were often trivial if you could get the camera to show you the boss (and therefore lock on with L-targeting) and very hard if you couldn't. I died quite a few times to being unable to make the camera do what I wanted it to do. (It didn't help that I had just played Dead Rising 2 which has an entirely different camera scheme and that you start off in OoT with 3 health. By the end of the game I was both more used to the eccentricites of the camera and had 56 health plus 50% damage absorption.
I enjoyed playing the game, and will likely play through on the Master Quest difficulty at some point, but it didn't make it up into the best game of all time category for me. Maybe I'm just a 16 bit kinda guy, but Link to the Past had lots of cool dungeons and interesting puzzles and gimmicky boss fights. It didn't have an annoying camera to control. So it still comes out ahead in my book. I should probably hunt down an emulator version of the initial one and give it a spin. (I have the NES cartridge on my floor but my NES doesn't work. Maybe I should fix it instead.)
Perhaps the most telling aspect is that I would play the game for 45 minutes on the way to work, and for 45 minutes on the way home, but wouldn't just sit around and play it at home. I'd much rather bust out some League of Legends or Final Fantasy II. (Though the latter is not because it's a better game but because I really want to get to FFVI!) Yesterday I started reading a book on the bus, and I ended up spending about 6 hours last night reading it, and 2 more this morning. I only really stopped to write this, and because I need to shower and clean up for D&D in a couple hours. But the book, which is easy to read on the bus, snared me and forced me to keep reading it. Ocarina of Time wasn't able to do that.
The game had lots of great dungeons with interesting puzzles to figure out. Boss fights tended to be very gimmicky and were often trivial if you could get the camera to show you the boss (and therefore lock on with L-targeting) and very hard if you couldn't. I died quite a few times to being unable to make the camera do what I wanted it to do. (It didn't help that I had just played Dead Rising 2 which has an entirely different camera scheme and that you start off in OoT with 3 health. By the end of the game I was both more used to the eccentricites of the camera and had 56 health plus 50% damage absorption.
I enjoyed playing the game, and will likely play through on the Master Quest difficulty at some point, but it didn't make it up into the best game of all time category for me. Maybe I'm just a 16 bit kinda guy, but Link to the Past had lots of cool dungeons and interesting puzzles and gimmicky boss fights. It didn't have an annoying camera to control. So it still comes out ahead in my book. I should probably hunt down an emulator version of the initial one and give it a spin. (I have the NES cartridge on my floor but my NES doesn't work. Maybe I should fix it instead.)
Perhaps the most telling aspect is that I would play the game for 45 minutes on the way to work, and for 45 minutes on the way home, but wouldn't just sit around and play it at home. I'd much rather bust out some League of Legends or Final Fantasy II. (Though the latter is not because it's a better game but because I really want to get to FFVI!) Yesterday I started reading a book on the bus, and I ended up spending about 6 hours last night reading it, and 2 more this morning. I only really stopped to write this, and because I need to shower and clean up for D&D in a couple hours. But the book, which is easy to read on the bus, snared me and forced me to keep reading it. Ocarina of Time wasn't able to do that.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Ocarina of Time
A couple months ago I was talking to Andrew about Zelda games (I think it was the day I picked up my 3DS) and he mentioned he'd never played A Link To The Past. I remember telling him that he had to play it since it was definitely the best Zelda game of all time.
As Robin Williams is letting us know, Ocarina of Time comes out on the Nintendo 3DS this weekend. I know people who say this game isn't just the best Zelda game. It's the best game, period. Now, it turns out I haven't actually played it. Or actually, any Zelda game at all except for A Link To The Past. So while it may be the best Zelda game I have no real basis for making that claim, except that it's awesome and the one I grew up with. I used to be a big Nintendo fan but it turns out when I moved to University I was broke and my brother won custody of our Nintendo 64. (After a drawn out legal battle I did get the SNES. I think I won!) As I moved through University the people I lived with had just a Playstation or eventually a Playstation 2. So no chance to play the newer Zelda games. I do recall watching OoT get played a little bit when visiting my family between terms but I never really had time to play it myself.
That will all change today as I have errands to run at the mall. (Hair cut, allergy pills, fatter pants...) The eB there claimed they'd be getting it in today, so hopefully on the subway ride home I will be starting in on playing 3D Zelda. It may not live up to being the best game of all time but it should at least be pretty good.
As Robin Williams is letting us know, Ocarina of Time comes out on the Nintendo 3DS this weekend. I know people who say this game isn't just the best Zelda game. It's the best game, period. Now, it turns out I haven't actually played it. Or actually, any Zelda game at all except for A Link To The Past. So while it may be the best Zelda game I have no real basis for making that claim, except that it's awesome and the one I grew up with. I used to be a big Nintendo fan but it turns out when I moved to University I was broke and my brother won custody of our Nintendo 64. (After a drawn out legal battle I did get the SNES. I think I won!) As I moved through University the people I lived with had just a Playstation or eventually a Playstation 2. So no chance to play the newer Zelda games. I do recall watching OoT get played a little bit when visiting my family between terms but I never really had time to play it myself.
That will all change today as I have errands to run at the mall. (Hair cut, allergy pills, fatter pants...) The eB there claimed they'd be getting it in today, so hopefully on the subway ride home I will be starting in on playing 3D Zelda. It may not live up to being the best game of all time but it should at least be pretty good.
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