[quote name='JSweeney']Instead of pick apart all your complaints and reply to each one of them instead I will pose one simple question:
What about my review is negative that's based on the game being old? The main complaint I hear is that I was judging it by today's standards, which I tried not to do. Anyone have any specific examples from my review?
I didn't care for Ocarina of Time (OOT) that much. I really wanted to like it, but I had a lot of pretty major problems with it.
First of all, I should mention my nostalgia with the Zelda series. The first Zelda along with the orinal super mario bros was the first videogame I ever played as a kid. And the SNES A Link to the Past was my favorite SNES or earlier console game of all time. But after playing OOT I'm not sure if I've simply outgrown the series, or if Zelda just didn't translate to 3D that well.
I'll start with my problems with the game. For one, Link moves too slow. Watching that pitter-patter of his footstesp strolling along Hyrule Field got real old real fast.
This has a great deal to do with the technical limitations of the N64. I could be interpreting what you are saying wrong, but to say that he moves to slow, you must use a metric about what the speed of a character should be... I have a feeling that you're expecting GC/PS2/XBOX era response times from a game made for the N64.. that's just not going to happen.
I also didn't like how he keeps grabbing on to ledges if he wants to climb anything. A personal pet peeve of mine is the inability to jump in these kind of games.
That's another limitation forced onto the game, as well as a design choice.
It's a design choice insofar that the developers did not want Zelda to get bogged down in the mire of percision jumping that was plauging many of the other 3-D games, thanks to the still developing 3-D engines, and the problems the were expericencing with collision dection and such ...Considering that Zelda is primarily about puzzle solving and exploration, I think that's a very good choice.
The sounds Link makes are pretty annoying too, esepcially his rolling grunt which you hear way too much throughout the course of the game. Playing this character really hurts the pacing in the game in a lot of places.
Again, this reads like you're expecting a character that moves like he's right out of a PS2/GC/Xbox game. In a game this old, it's not going to happen. Even Sonic wasn't as fast in Sonic 3-D or even Sonic Adventure, thanks in part to design choices, but more-so in the limitations inherent of the software of that day and age.
Also, Hyrule field just plain sucks. It's long, bland, and the time shifting makes it os there's either a ton of enemies to fight in a constant state of respawning, or there's nothing to fight. I deffinitely prefered the older Zeldas where enemies were just spaced out around the map.
You're again expecting things out of a game that weren't done correctly until long after the game had shipped. Calling Hyrule Field long and bland shows that you ARE using today standards to judge the game graphically, as back when the game was released, even the vast tracts of Hyrule Field were stunningly detailed, and that it had overcome the technical foibles of earlier games.
One thing that I never liked that much about the 3D Zelda's that everyone else seems ot love is the "Z-targeting." (no idea why they call it that). I find it's auto-targetting system faulty and boring.
This game was made back in the early days of 3-D console games.. collision detection was not the greatest, so if you just left someone to thier own devices, battle would become more of a chore than they wanted to present. You can expect that a game so old would have modern day control schemes... it had to work with what it was given. If Z targeting is such a bad idea, which was it obviously reused many,many times by gamemakers other than Nintendo? Z targetting is STILL seen in many other games as well...It's a rather simple and elegant solution to a very difficult control problem.
Z-targetting-- One pushes the "Z" button on the N-64 controller to lock on to an enemy (There are other reasons, but that is the simple explanation )
If you don't resort to auto-targetting you're a sitting duck, but if you use it the combat is too easy, and you need only hold down the R button to avoid all attacks.
Considering that this was the first application of the engine, it is possible it could result in balance issues... but it still seems that you're unfairly comparing the modern control schemes born from the Z targetting system
to make your comparisons
Fighting the wolfos really tried my patience. This coupled with the games poor camera made combat a lot less fun than it should have been.
Poor camera? Compared to what? You need a metric to compare these things to, and I have a feeling that yours includes more modern graphical engines.
Often I'd be in a room with a flying enemy, like a bat, and I would know they were in the room, but be unable to move the camera and lock onto them from a distance. The combat isn't that awful, I enjoyed fencing with the lizards, but it really is overrated.
You are saying that ten years after the fact. This game wasn't released yesterday, and thus enjoys the latitude of being judged against other games that were created at the same time... using modern metrics as a basis for a review is just foolish.
Considering that the overwhelming bulk of your complains are based on graphical and control issues, your review really isn't fair to the game at all, as you seem to have no idea of the gating factors that existed when the game was released, or be able to use a fair metric to judge the game.
You can't judge an old piece of media based on the technological standards of modern media.. the comparison is never apt.[/quote]
Alright, I don't know how to do that nifty conversation style psting you do, so I'll just respond to everything below:
One of the biggest complaints I had that you tried to counter was the Hurule Filed/Link walking too slow thing. The fact of the matter is that in confined spaces such as dungeons, he doesn't walk to slow. He walks at an average pace and it works out fine. But Hyrule Field was so unnecessarily huge that by comparison it took him forever to get across (I had a similar complaint with the sailing in the wind waker which was created several years later). You say that Hyrule Field was impressive way back then, and maybe graphically it was, but form a gameplay point of view it really slowed things down and was just poorly designed.
The jumping thing is a personal pet peeve. I realize I'm in hte minority on this one, but I'm not alone. I understand that more emphasis was put on the puzzle solving, but considering it's so easy to fall off a ledge it should be just as easy to jump back up.
My complaints with the camera were mainly just revelant to fighting bats and other flying enemies who would sneak up behind you and in the sky, which is not good since your sword is such short range.
And Z-targetting isn't bad or anything, but I don't really like hte impact it's had on games since. My main problem with it in Ocarina though is that two enemies hardly ever attack you at once. The blocking/ attacking routine got old pretty fast.
I know the game is old, so I was never bothered by Link's lack of motion, or the choppy first person framerates, but everything I didn't like was designed that way on purpose.