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Re: Zelda was hard...

Posted: Wed Apr 19, 2017 2:48 pm
by gauauu
tepples wrote:
First, reputation of relative difficulty of games for a particular platform began to build during the original commercial era of pre-Wii consoles, which was before the era of widespread broadband Internet access and video hosting services.
Absolutely. Much of the difficulty of these games came from figuring it out alone, or with just a few of your friends. Things are a lot easier now that you can look up optimal techniques.
Second, many people can't watch a lot of videos without exceeding a fairly strict monthly Internet data transfer quota imposed by the ISP. Some people live outside the service area of wired broadband and therefore must rely on satellite with its cap, or they can't afford both wired and mobile broadband and have consider mobile broadband more important than higher-volume wired broadband.

Third, even nowadays for people who subscribe to wired broadband, Castlevania is published by Konami, one of the more litigious video game publishers (source). If Konami wanted, every video of Castlevania could be taken down tomorrow. [/list]
Now you're just being pedantic and ridiculous. We can make up any number of non-relevant reasons that a person might not be able to follow Sumez's advice of learning from videos, but it's not useful to the conversation.

Re: Zelda was hard...

Posted: Thu Apr 20, 2017 6:39 am
by Sumez
tepples wrote: This option isn't available to everyone for three reasons.

(...snip...)
All of that is purely theoretical. We're living in 2017 and have access to all kinds of information. It doesn't matter to me if there's some hypethetical person in some backwater area with no internet connection and no entertainment aside from his NES and Castlevania - I'm talking about what tools most of us readily have available. Another "tool" that's less available today, but moreso back then, is visiting your nerdy friends who also have the game, talking about how they approach the game and learn new tactics for getting through challenging sections. Today we don't need friends because we have YouTube, but that's just one luxury :P
All I'm saying is that there are a lot of ways you can learn to improve your game, whether it's one or another, and if you are interested in playing challenging video games, you should embrace them, instead of just running your head against the wall trying the same thing over and over, AVGN-style.
Hell, if you're into emulators and stuff, I wouldn't frown upon you for using savestates to practice difficult sections. There is no cheating in learning a game. The only thing that matters is that bad-ass single section no-miss run you put out afterwards!

At the end of the day what I'm trying to say is: Castlevania rocks

Re: Zelda was hard...

Posted: Thu Apr 20, 2017 6:43 pm
by Rahsennor
gauauu wrote: Now you're just being pedantic and ridiculous. We can make up any number of non-relevant reasons that a person might not be able to follow Sumez's advice of learning from videos, but it's not useful to the conversation.
Sumez wrote: All of that is purely theoretical. We're living in 2017 and have access to all kinds of information. It doesn't matter to me if there's some hypethetical person in some backwater area with no internet connection and no entertainment aside from his NES and Castlevania - I'm talking about what tools most of us readily have available.
Hello from Down Under, where we pay $10/GB for the luxury of an internet connection that's slow as treacle and reliable as the weather, and the telcos are discontinuing fixed-line services to rural areas entirely to save a few bucks so they can give fiber to the big cities at no extra cost. And before anyone asks, no I do not live in the middle of nowhere - I'm 1 km from the biggest highway in the country, and the internet backbone runs right next to it.

So it is not pedantic, it is not hypothetical, and it most certainly is relevant to the conversation, even if I have kept my mouth shut so far. I play old games precisely because I don't have the bandwidth for the download-only, DRM-phone-home-requiring crap that makes up the entire modern software industry. If I could afford to move out of this shithole, I would, so I'll thank tepples for bringing the matter up to elitist oafs like you two whenever he has the opportunity.
Sumez wrote:At the end of the day what I'm trying to say is: Castlevania rocks
Now this I can agree with. :beer:

Re: Zelda was hard...

Posted: Fri Apr 21, 2017 1:15 am
by Sumez
I'm being an elitist oaf for assuming that someone with an internet connection has access to YouTube? I honestly don't think that's a big assumption to make, but I'm genuinely sorry if it offended you.

As I already pointed out though, picking at this particular thing is completely missing my point, which was that you should use whatever tools are available to you to improve your game instead of flailing aimlessly. Another tool could be discussing strategies on internet forums, which you appear to have access to. :)

Re: Zelda was hard...

Posted: Fri Apr 21, 2017 2:27 am
by Pokun
Well in Scandinavia even hermits living on desolate mountains probably have fiber, but in most of the world that simply isn't the case so let's not be ignorant when on the internet.
DementedPurple wrote:One thing that always bugged me though is that on the cartridge art, it shows Simon with a sword, even though in the actual game, he never uses a sword!
It's a dagger. The most useless sub-weapon, but it's in the game.



Anyway I agree with Sumez, Castlevania is a medium-difficult game and definitely not in the same league as Battletoads, Ghost and Goblins or Holy Diver! People saying it's one of the more difficult NES games, probably haven't played a lot of games for Famicom or NES. (And BTW Ghost and Goblins is a great but hard game!)
Bregalad wrote:
I consider all of the final stage, [...] and the last room before the final staircase, way harder than "death's corridor"
Perhaps, but most people never got past the Death's corridor without using save states anyway.
Most people never had save state functionality on our Famicoms and NES systems (Everdrive have it but I refuse to enable it).
I've never 1CC'd this game, but I do think the Death corridor is one of the hardest parts of the game (I don't watch AVGN by the way). The combination of Axe Armors and Medusa Heads is what makes it so hard. And it's easy to accidentally take the crucifix and loose the holy water. And even when dying you can't get back the holy water on that stage. I do believe I have beaten Death without holy water, but it's definitely much harder and it's probably not a good idea to try if you 1CC, just like with Frankenstein's and Igor.

Re: Zelda was hard...

Posted: Fri Apr 21, 2017 7:48 am
by tepples
Sumez wrote:I'm being an elitist oaf for assuming that someone with an internet connection has access to YouTube?
It's just a reminder to be aware of limits imposed by ISPs in particular regional markets.

One is caps. The way caps interact with YouTube is as follows: "I have an Internet connection, but my plan's quota is sized for text, small images, and small downloads, such as individual NES ROMs and their source code. I don't use it for video because if I did, I'd only get to watch a few videos per month. If I watched enough videos about how to beat one level of a particular vintage video game, I'd hit my quota and have to wait until next month to look for videos about how to beat the next level."

The other is state censorship. Last time I checked, all ISPs in the People's Republic of China blocked YouTube and other services provided by Google.

Re: Zelda was hard...

Posted: Fri Apr 21, 2017 3:08 pm
by gauauu
When I lived in China, they were blocking this and other similar game development forums as well. (When I was working on my GBA game, I'd have to use a VPN to connect to the gbadev forums to ask questions)

My point was that the tangent of "a few outliers might not have sufficient internet connection" might be true, but isn't worth arguing about.

Re: Zelda was hard...

Posted: Fri Apr 21, 2017 5:14 pm
by Rahsennor
Sumez wrote:I'm being an elitist oaf for assuming that someone with an internet connection has access to YouTube? I honestly don't think that's a big assumption to make, but I'm genuinely sorry if it offended you.
My wording was perhaps a bit strong, but yes, that is exactly the assumption I object to. Particularly from people trying peddle devices or software that flat-out won't function here, or "free downloads" of games that would, without hyperbole, end up costing me twice as much as if I walked into a store and bought them, but also from consumers who take such behaviour for granted, thus allowing the cycle to continue.

But you're both right that this isn't worth starting an argument over, especially since we could be actually discussing the games in question and solving the whole 'just watch Youtube' issue right here and now.

Re: Zelda was hard...

Posted: Fri Apr 21, 2017 6:10 pm
by Fisher
I remember that back in the day me and my friends judge the game's difficulty as to how many magazine editions it needed to show a full walkthrough.
I don't remember Zelda :-( but Battletoads took 2 or 2 and 1/2 if I remember correctly.
We used as reference the most popular magazines here: Ação Games, SuperGame and GamePower.
Unfortunatelly, none of them still exists today. :cry:

Re: Zelda was hard...

Posted: Fri Apr 21, 2017 7:38 pm
by DementedPurple
gauauu wrote:When I lived in China, they were blocking this and other similar game development forums as well. (When I was working on my GBA game, I'd have to use a VPN to connect to the gbadev forums to ask questions)

My point was that the tangent of "a few outliers might not have sufficient internet connection" might be true, but isn't worth arguing about.
Why would they block NES development websites? No wonder so many of the games on famiclones are only hacks of pre-existing games.

Re: Zelda was hard...

Posted: Fri Apr 21, 2017 10:12 pm
by gauauu
DementedPurple wrote: Why would they block NES development websites? No wonder so many of the games on famiclones are only hacks of pre-existing games.
I'm not sure, I think it was more about blocking forum sites and than about the topic. It's hard to control the flow of information if people can say anything they want.

Re: Zelda was hard...

Posted: Sat Apr 22, 2017 8:02 am
by tepples
"Why 15% of US consumers can't use Netflix, Dropbox, and other cloud services" by James Sanders mentions a few situations. Some "have had to cancel or suspend service due to financial constraints", as they can no longer afford to maintain two ISP subscriptions. So they give up high-volume wired Internet at home in favor of cellular Internet that can be used anywhere. Others are in Rahsennor's position, where "ISPs are extremely reluctant to provide wireline broadband services in rural areas". This article gives numbers: someone might end up buying a game on Steam for $24 and paying roughly ten times that much to the ISP in data transfer quota overages to download it.

Re: Zelda was hard...

Posted: Fri Apr 28, 2017 7:50 am
by DementedPurple
Let's get back to the main topic... I'd have to say that Castlevania is a bit overrated. Now wait! Don't get mad just yet! Just because I say a game is overrated doesn't mean that it's bad! No, it's far from it! But what I mean is that there where certainly better games out there. It took me 20 lives to get passed level 2, in other words, 4 continues. I find it annoying that hearts don't give you health. I mean, I guess that maybe hearts weren't yet the standard symbol for health, but I can't seem to figure out what they do. It's also annoying that food is so hard to find. You never get it from just killing an enemy like in Zelda. It's always hidden. It also kinda sucks that there are no 1-Ups in the entire game (Not that I would know because I only got to level three.)

Re: Zelda was hard...

Posted: Fri Apr 28, 2017 8:20 am
by tepples
DementedPurple wrote:I find it annoying that hearts don't give you health. I mean, I guess that maybe hearts weren't yet the standard symbol for health, but I can't seem to figure out what they do.
Nowadays in the "wiki for everything" era, Strategy Wiki's page for Castlevania II implies that they do the same thing rupees do in The Legend of Zelda: you buy some items with them, and some weapons consume them. I think hearts in Yoshi's Story work the same way.

tl;dr: ♥ is to CV2 as ₨ is to Zelda.

Re: Zelda was hard...

Posted: Fri Apr 28, 2017 8:28 am
by Fisher
DementedPurple wrote: I guess that maybe hearts weren't yet the standard symbol for health
If we count correctess, DecapAttack has one of the most correct symbols for health. :P