alika0321

My overall playing experience of Zelda only supported my belief that I am no good at video games. It was still entertaining and fun to try. It did, however, become tedious after dying so many times and having to start from the beginning. Is this how Lola and Lenny felt when it happened to them? Not a life I'd like to lead. I kept trying to advance but I had a hard enough time getting as far as I did. I even had to have my friend tell me the names of certain things I acquired, or what to do in a certain castle. I am disappointed that I have not found the graveyard yet like the wizard told me. I also still don't have the other two parts of the tri-force, so i don't know what to use it for. And while I do have the bow staff, I don't have arrows, which I think is the only way it will let me use it because I have not been able to yet.

I do want to try and continue playing the game to see if I can advance. Right now I feel stuck, but I'm going to get my friend to help me because it's exciting when I acquire something new. Overall, I see how this emmersed us as students into the diegetic world directly and gave us each our own unique experience with it. It is a unique thing to study and really interesting to see how experiences differ among students. It's funny how such an old and simply designed game can still be so difficult and interesting while there are such new advances in game technology, especially graphically. Sometimes, graphics is not what makes the experience, it is just a good game design with skillful challenges.

Wolf's piece entitled "Space in the video Game" is a great way to analyze the programming behind Zelda. Off-screen space in Zelda does not exist until the player actively investigates or explores that space. This gives me the ability to choose what space appears on screen. I used this to my advantage in the beginning of my game-playing experience so that I would not have to face the monsters in the space until I felt comfortable and ready. Furthermore, I would use the opportunity to rest and plan my future strategy or think about where I was and where I needed to go. It was not like Mario Bros. where the creatures walk into the space, they only move within the visible space, not offscreen as well. I'm assuming that the game was forced to be designed this way due to technical limitations in regards to graphics.

Zelda's game structure scrolls on two axes. Link can continue moving through the space in 4 directions (up, down, left, right) until eventually he reaches a boundary. The space is very large, however, so I frequently reaches the edges of the game space. This requires me to remember the spaces I pass on and off screen. The areas are the same when I return to them, probably because there are times that I need to return to the space to either buy something, visit the life fairy, or navigate to another area. The game only allows me to have a burds eye view of the terrain, and the objects in it are shown in side view, as Wolf describes.

The game uses adjacent spaces when Link enters a door or cave entrance. This provides more suspense because I cannot see the space until I have entered. Sometimes, in the castles, I was attacked by darting spiky sqaures upon immediate entry of a room. This is slightly similar to Wolf's description of the castle in 'Adventure.' Especially because Zelda also has bats that pass over the terrain and objects on-screen, in front of the scenery, evoking Burch's sixth type. These layers overloap and create an illusion of depth.

Zelda also provides the player with mapped spaces. When in the regular diegesis, there is a map in the top left corner representing the world I am in. It is not detailed at all, just an empty box with a sqaure cursor representing my location. Furthermore, in the castle worlds, there was often a map of the castle that would show the layout of the castle's rooms and where you stood.

Those are the main descriptions of space in Zelda and how they affect the player's gaming experience.

Zelda has several uncanny things about it. First of all, the whole deigesis is somewhat of a labyrinth, which I found uncanny considering our classes them "writing the labyrinth" and I am writing about Zelda. Other than that some uncanny things are the creatures that wander around and try to kill me. There are giant jumping spiders, which reminded me of Eight Legged Freaks for some reason. It is also uncanny that some caves are empty while others offer a clue or things to buy. Why would the creator of the game bother making a door that leads to nowhere? Maybe it's supposed to be like an oubliette or perhaps just a dead end. Either way it's kind of odd.

Another uncanny element in the game was the castle that has pitch black rooms. While I had the option of buying a lantern to illuminate the room, I was not aware of that at first. Therefore, it was like I was walking blindly in the room. This reminded me of House of Leaves, chapter XX. The whole introduction about darkness, no texture, and feeling blind directly relates because as a player controlling Link, I could not directly feel the walls of the room or see them. It was as if my eyes had been removed, as Frued discussed in the Sanman sotry.

A final uncanny thing in Zelda are the wobbly droplets. They don't look scary or harmful, yet they can be if you touch them. Therefore, their appearance was deceiving. Another thing that was weird about them was that they actually seemed to move out of my way sometimes and not try to attack me like all the other evil creatures.

Zelda also reminds me of Memento. The movie has a lot to say about memory loss, trust, and instinct. Memory recall is done systematically between the two as well. For Leonard, he had to refer to his notes on a person, place, thing, or fact to get in the right frame of mind and act accordingly. In Zelda, I am forced to recall certain castles or areas of the diegesis to know what I am supposed to do or what I have done there in the past. Furthermore, drawing out a map of the Zelda world helps me to navigate, just as Leonard polaroids and notes helped him navigate on his journey to find and kill his wife's killer. Another interesting parallel, is one I aforementioned in my blog about Lola and memory loss. Every 15 minutes Leonard loses his memory and has to begin again. Therefore his mission is being carried out 15 minutes at a time. This related to my game playing experience because I would die at least once every 15 minutes and have to begin again.

As far as trust goes, I can only trust myself and those that I feel are on my side. In Zelda, I come across only a couple people who give my guidance. For example, I mentioned in an earlier blog about a wizard who told me to find the old man in the graveyard. He only gives me limited information, forcing me to put the pieces together to advance. Then there is the life fairy who I can count on to give me free lives. When I am faced with a new character or setting, I have to rely on my instinct to figure out what to do, much like Leonard had to do. Overall, I think a lot of the movies we saw this semester can relate to video games on many different levels.

In my personal playing experience of Zelda, I have noticed a similarity to Run Lola Run. Essentially, I am on a mission to save Zelda. Similarly, Lola was on a mission to help her boyfriend, Manny. Each time she runs into different obstacles or things that slow her down. She can take different paths to save time or change her outcome. In the end of the sequence either she or Manny dies, and the mission starts anew. She has her learned memory from previous tries to help her know what to do the next time around.

In Zelda, every time I die, I start from the beginning again. All of the objects and creatures are in the same place, but I can chose to change my path or interaction with them. Sometimes I may wish to kill them, other time I may run past them. Either way, I take with me what I learned from my previous game and create a different outcome. Sometimes I live longer than others, and sometimes I am more successfull than others.

The movie also relates to the video game genre in general through its format and cinematography. Lola is always running, like video game characters such as Link are. And certain characters in teh movie were there to help Lola, while others served as obstacles.

Something new I noticed this time around in the castles were the rare rooms that have these cubes in each corner of the room that dart at you and slice you between them. Recently, I saw this movie called The Cube. Basically it's these people stuck in a giant cube made up of thousands of smaller cube rooms. Each victim posesses a skill necessary to travel successfully through the rooms. The victims have to carefully make their way through the rooms to find their way out. Some rooms are booby trapped with motion and sound detectors and have razors or some other trap swoop down and slice right through your body to kill you. Pretty brutal, I know. But that's kind of the same booby trap in Zelda. I wonder if that's where the creator of the movie got his idea from?

Even more recent that's kind of related is Saw II. I'm going to see it this weekend, but I just saw a sneak peek of the entire first scene. It's pretty similar to the cube. These people stuck in a room and they have the clues to get out, but there are booby traps set in certain places they shouldn't go or look. Like this one guy is looking through a peephole while another is turning the key to open the door, and the turning pulls the trigger of a revolver on the other side of the door, right through the eye of the first guy.

Since these games don't show the deaths as being so graphic, it's not so shocking, but when you see a graphic version of what is technically happening to you in the game too, it's kind of creepy. We're so unphased by these video games, they are so ficticious to us. If I ever really were in that kind of situation, I'd die once every 3 minutes, like in Zelda, haha. Thank god for 'Continue' options.

I just played Zelda again after a week or two haitus. It took me a few minutes to get my bearings and remember where I left off - where I had already been and what my next steps were. Since you begin at the same entrance to this world, I knew I had done the left side and explored some north and some east. I remember spending lots of time in the northern direction previosuly, so I returned. Rather quickly, I found a new castle I had not seen before. I entered it and made my way through the rooms. Then I got to a room with a visible staircase going underground, but it was surrounded by stone cubes. It didnt take me more than a minute to figure out which cube to shove and in what direction. Then I decended into a dark basement with another set of stairs going up to a lofted area. I climbed them and got a bow staff! Yay!

Being low on lives, I wanted to see if I could find my life fairy's spot in the outside world. Things became more and more familiar, and I found her quickly. Thinking that I had to defeat a bad guy back in the castle, I went back. But no big scary bad guy in any of the last rooms. I thought I might have to kill all the creatures inside for him or something else to appear, but I guess not, because that didn't work. I'm assuming the castle's purpose/prize was the bow.

I spent a lot more time practicing my fighting skills and gaining coins/jems so that I can buy more weapons/tools. I found the old wizard again who told me to find the old man in the graveyard. But I still have not found a graveyard.

After much wandering, I found a fairy who gives me full life. I can go back to her whenever I need to, as long as I remember where she is located. More exploring... at one point facing an endless loop of the same maze. Then I found a castle-like structure and entered. This castle was green. It was much harder than the first level because the monsters were harder to kill. Eventually, I got to the villian in the last room that looked like a 4-headed venus fly trap. Luckily I could use my bombs to kill him, so he wasn't that hard to kill. Beating him won me a raft. I remembered seeing a dock, so I knew what it was for.

I went to the dock and the raft took me to an island where there was another castle. I entered the yellow level 4. A few rooms into it, the rooms were pitch black, I had to feel my way around and had difficulty navigating and fighting. So I realized I needed to go back and find a merchant to buy a candle from. I did that and returned. Now I was able to light the rooms I needed to. This level got me stuck, though. Even after killing everybody in their rooms and navigating through to the second to tlast room, I entered a room with a map. But there was water surrounding me and the map was on the other side of the water. I could not use my raft for this, nor could I snatch it with my boomerang. There is a pathway that the map is on but I cannot find the door that gets me to it. So this is where I left off after much frustration.

The scenery in this labyrinth contantly changes - some areas are green hedges, some are brown, some are rocks, some are sand, and others are by water.

When you see a set of stairs in a hedge it also leads you to a hidden area that may help you. Link's main focus is to find the holes or castle-like structures that lead you into another level. The first one I found was a blue level. It took me forever to figure out that in some rooms of the castle, I needed to kill everyone in it before i could move on to the next room. Some rooms gave a key to oopen other doors. Many doors were locked, so there were a lot of game overs from fighting before I got the hang of getting to the last room. The last room of the castle had a dragon that I needed full life to try to beat. He shot fireballs at me that were easy to dodge from afar, but hard from up close. Eventually, I realized that what harmed him was to stab him in the head. So the strategy is to dodge the fire from afar, then run up and stab him in the head, then run back, dodge again, and repeat until he died. Once he dies I can enter the last room where I received the Tri-Force (or a part of it). Then I went back out the the normal world to look for the next level.

So I finally started playing Zelda this weekend and it sucked me in! I am playing the old school Nintendo version from about the year I was born. For some reason, it was one game that I never grew up playing. I've never been very good at video games, so it took me while to get the hang of it.

Zelda is big on navigation and exploring. The object of the game is to save Zelda. The main player, Link, has to pretty much cover every bit of land to beat the game. When Link walks around the game, every little area has monsters that you have to fight or they will hurt you. When you kill them, sometimes you are lucky enough to win a heart (life), a coin, or some other prize from them. Eventually, as you collect more coins, you can buy tools to help you along in the game.

The main world is a giant labyrinth that Link explores. Some hedges have holes that you can go into. Usually, these lead to a merchant selling tools that will help you. Some of these tools are a shield, a lamp/candle, and a bomb. Other times, the holes lead you to a wizard who gives you a hint on what to find or where to go. For example, the only one that told me something said, "Find the old man in the grave yard." I have no idea what this means because I have yet to come across a graveyard.