LEGEND OF ZELDA FIRST IMPRESSIONS and a comparison to Castlevania

I grew up with siblings who emulated Ocarina of time and A Link to the Past. However I had never played the original, so I was looking forward to this.

First off, again the clunky controls. I didn't figure out you had to use the 'select' command to move the selection tool, having been used to joystick commands moving the selection tool. I mean it worked that way in Castlevania. Again, this was an era where standard controls were still in the making, there was no universal A, B action button mapping. This game is from a time where sometimes A was jump and sometimes the up command was jump.

I get into the game and instantly find the classic old man cave where you learn 'caves have treasure! Go exploring in them!' and that the world you're in will require you to be equipped with a weapon, as the old man says 'It's dangerous to go alone take this!'

This seems a little more in game explanations orientated than Castlevania, since you're put in an environment where there is only one differing patch of pixels, so of course you go looking at it to find out what it is. The old man explicitly tells you that you have received something to fight off danger, and now to face the danger ahea- wait a moment there are lasers?

Old man you didn't tell me anything about lasers! I knew from previous game knowledge that you can only fire them when you have full health but I didn't know you got sword lasers right off the bat! Previously in games like Majora's Mask and Minish Cap they were a final upgrade to your weapon. But no you immediately have sword lasers, best of luck to your adventuring young sir, and may you zap your enemies with mystical cave-sword powers!

And, as is classic with Zelda games, we have a menu screen!

Now in Castlevania when I pushed the Start button it paused the game, pretty handy. But in Zelda you have an inventory, a record of your keys, rupees and a map. This also pauses game play, but doesn't really pause the 'game' itself. With a menu you suddenly have a lot more diversity in your game than in Castlevania. You have the option for multiple weapons, rather than just the one picked up secondary item of holy water or throwing knife like in Castlevania but I'm getting ahead of myself. Where can I find some explosives to go bomb some dodongos? Oh wait wrong installment.
As you can probably tell I really love Zelda.
Back to game play features. So here we have 'Life' labeled out for us, which is pretty neat in case you weren't familiar with game life, or hit points. In Castlevania and a lot of fighting games like Street Fighter, you just got a health bar next to your name. When you get hit and you see the bar deplete, then you understand that it represents how many hits you can take before your 'life' depletes and it's game over. I guess it's interesting to have a 'score' on Castlevania, but I don't see much point in it beyond bragging rights and a new personal best 'score' Zelda also lacks a time limit, making the journey, and not the destination the key appeal to the stages, or levels. I feel like with a time pressure in Castlevania it was more important you reached the end in time than explored every secret or random drop available.

Additionally it was never really explained what 'hearts' were. They certainly don't replenish 'life.' It wasn't until the end of the stage that I found out they were score bonuses. instead health replenishing comes in the form of what the Game Grumps have influenced me to to call 'Wall Meat'.

Yay ... ?

But back to the Zelda menu. Boy that was a tangent and a half. Zelda is even more explanatory with the 'Use B Button for this' description. You could read the manual like a responsible Castlevania player would, or you could be so giddy you got a new game and completely forget about and hop right into the game and learn game mechanics on the fly until you beat the game and then read  the manual to find out more. 

Zelda even hints at the end goal objective with the empty 'Triforce' slot. Remember that big yellow flashing triangle thing on the game title screen? You'd think 'Yeah I wanna get that, looks like I'll have to look for it first though.' and now you have an end goal. Castevania you just kind of, go through places to find new things to kill until you find a really hard monster. Maybe if you had prior knowledge to the story of Dracula and read the novel you'd think the character might be Jonathan Harker with an Indiana Jones whip and armour about to rescue his Mina from being turned into Dracula's Stockholme Syndrome wife and ruin her 'purity' with his evil Transylvanian ways as xenophobic Victorian London was so gosh dang paranoid of. God protect the good Christian people from those impulsive foreigners ruled by lust and instinct. But no this is Simon Belmont, a guy you've never heard about in the novels, and Castlevania is not a game adaptation of Dracula it just reuses the setting and main antagonist of the original to create an interesting and new narrative with a familiar evil. However if you read the manual apparently Simon has a blood feud with Dracula, and wants to kill him to restore peace to Transylvania. I'd never have guessed. I mean you can just see the look of vengeance in Simon's dead, blank, pixelated non-eyes 

That wall meat was delicious.

But maybe i'm being a bit unfair, there probably wasn't enough sophisticated programming yet to tell the story Castlevania wanted to tell, so they had to print all the backstory in the all important manual. 

ANYWAY AGAIN WITH THE SIDE TRACKING FROM ZELDA

What I find interesting from Zelda is the near instantaneous reaction to pushing the A button Link would swing, and the swing would be over in about the same frame, and if not the very next frame at least. This gives the player more finely tuned controls as they can instantly react to an obstacle with little to no recovery time to react instantly to the death, or lack thereof of an enemy in succession. Swing once, instant hit, is the obstacle cleared? Instantly hit again. There is no waiting recovery period to remain exposed and vulnerable to enemy attacks. Zelda allows you to live in the moment without the need to plan ahead like Castlevania.

One thing I noticed, was the abundance of health

Understandably with a life count of three 'hearts' with a minimum damage of half a heat leading up to a max hit count of a whopping 6 is a bit unforgiving, so there is plenty of opportunity to heal up. From hearts, to fairies, to great fairies, Zelda wants you to live. It's a little misleading in Castlevania that the hearts are extra score points when we associate hearts with 'life' while the food actually heals you, but here in Zelda you see a line of symbols labeled 'life' so you know to get more life you have to get more of those symbols. The rules of the world of Zelda is a lot more intuitive and self explanatory. However there is a bit of lack in direction for Zelda, and it's clear why when you know the backstory of Miyamoto. Miyamoto wanted to create an open world to explore, hence the lack of direction. In Castlevania the stages had a clear direction. go away from where you started and eventually you end up somewhere important.In Zelda all four directions are open. In fact you start at the very bottom-center of the map. You can go to the four corners of the map to find adventure. Where you go and how far you travel is all up to you. The most direction I got was from an old hag in a cave once telling me to talk to the old man at the graveyard. Where is the graveyard in this huge place? What's with this world and old folks living in caves? Is there a hermit convention I'm not aware of? 

Anyway I gave up trying to locate the graveyard when all I could find were deserts, rocks, beaches, and more cave people trying to sell me things I couldn't afford. The game pretty much tells you go look in caves to meet nice people and find neat things. Caves; Probability of finding loot and/or friendly old folks and dungeons: Weirdly High. 

I do have to say the shield mechanic is weird though, because it's totally intuitive to face towards the danger you're running away from. 

CASTLEVANIA FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Admittedly I couldn't get a single SNES emulator to work, they just kept crashing when I tried to load up a game. So I just used fan ports of SNES games into a Gameboy Emulator because that's what works for me.

Castlevania doesn't have much of an introduction, just throwing you in to test buttons to see what they do.

Welcome to the game "Player." You don't even get a name. Just ambiguous male character equipped with a whip to vanquish evil. Actually your character's name is Simon Belmont, but you only learn that from the instruction manual you were supposed to read and receive with the psychical copy of the game. No in game 'guide' like in most modern video games to tell you that "hey, this is who you are, this is your objective, and you have a weapon!" No, you don't get that. You were supposed to sit down, and read the manual like you'd read one to construct your Lego masterpieces.

Okay, so I get that early on video game controls were still getting their footing, should the up joystick command be for jumping, up screen movement or jumping? Like how in Megaman it was for jumping, but for some games with  top overhead views like Legend of Zelda up would be upscreen motion

but WHY would you dedicate the up joystick command to solely going up stairs?

I know in later games they gave you the option for an upwards whip motion, but in this game as far as I have played, the up command is solely for going up stairs. At least the down joystick command lets you crouch as well as descend stairs, but otherwise a whole 1/2 of your joystick movement is dedicated to up and down stair traversing. How strange.

Pitfalls leave no room for error, pretty unforgiving game. You also auto-lose all your whip upgrades and secondary items upon death. Your attack also has a few frames of delay, resulting in some mildly frustrating game play and forces you to plan out your movements more carefully beyond 'if you see the thing push the hurt-y button' because you have to approach with caution so you can see and prepare for an enemy attack long before it gets into hurting range, I played only up to the second stage, by which time I was getting tired of the pitfall precision jumping. So I loaded up Legend of Zelda instead, feeling that I had sufficiently experienced the basics of Castlevania's game play design.

Final animation link

Rationale

My animation aimed to create a dramatic horror recreation of Big (1988)'s iconic keyboard scene under a different genre, the one I chose being drama/horror.
I wanted to use the classic screeching strings music, or echoing organ music similar to Dracula. For this idea I wanted to use a makeshift keyboard using wineglasses like the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy  featured on Youtube, only with blood instead of water to fulfill my 'horror' theme.

However, when I tracked down Darren Curtis' royalty free music channel featuring Creepy Horror Bell Music Halloween #2 2013 I changed my idea to a keyboard made from reverberating knives, like rows of tuning forks, as bells and knives are both made of metal and make a more plausibly similar sound.








The animation I planned used animated lights to increase the 'drama' of my shots and add to the loud, dramatic notes of the song, as well as accentuate the accuracy of the 'notes' my character hits.

.My chosen music have a slow dramatic beginning that builds to a dramatic crescendo at the end, thus I imitated this build in my storyboard and shots, starting with simply a hand, building to two hands, the reveal of the character, reveal of the scene, to the final shocking stab of the knife to finish of my character's 'bow'

 This worked very well to accomplish a dramatic feel.

Things I notice now in my final animation that I wish I had time to do better is the cape animation. Since the cape was trailing behind the exaggerated hand movements that moved very fast, it became difficult for me to decide what action the cape should be doing at a certain point of time, and with limited time I was not able to create in my opinion satisfactory animation for these secondary actions. The cape glitched in places that were visible, in some instances in attempt to fix the glitching there were too many keyframes creating a juttering effect, and in some scenes I forgot to keep the pole vector for it still until the next shot, creating awkward background gliding/floating.

I also wished I had thought to add painted shadows and blood splatters to my character and prop's textures to create a better illusion of depth, reality, and 'horror'. The initial background I had planned would have hanging pig carcasses and blood splatters on the wall, like a highly unhygienic Hannibal, Thus the character and prop would have looked out of place if they weren't covered in blood stains. However I did not have the time to add these details.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAxjngMl1PI
https://youtu.be/jeOY62GcMWs
Back up Youtube links

3D initial blocking out of my piano knife table. May rearrange knives so they look less cut/pasted into place.

Cotton texture, http://i.imgur.com/EEjPuzg.jpg
Silk texture https://humidfruit.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/raw-silk-7.jpg
Metal texture http://img00.deviantart.net/0392/i/2010/149/2/9/metal_texture_by_beyn.jpg