Month: December 2012

Anatomy of a Game: Zelda XIV

Finish the Legend of Zelda and press Start and you begin the Second Quest. This goes back to a long arcade tradition of “flipping” the game and playing through a second cycle of stages in which everything is a little faster and a little more dangerous. It goes back to Space Invaders, I guess. But […]

Anatomy of a Game: Zelda XIII

I didn’t mean to give the impression with yesterday’s update that Zelda was the first game with a strong bestiary, or a diverse one, or a well-crafted one. However, what you would typically find in the early ’80s was that RPGs had large casts of monsters with diverse powers, but those unfolded primarily through the […]

Anatomy of a Game: Zelda XII

Just a couple last wrap-up pieces on The Legend of Zelda and then we’re on to, I don’t know… Zelda II, maybe? (Whereupon cartman414 will respond to every post to tell me why I love the game insufficiently.) We’ve looked at Link’s powers, the lay of Hyrule’s land, and the structure and purpose of each […]