Game:

The Legend of Zelda (1986)

Duration: 6:20

1,304 views

4

I thought I'd try my hand at hacking the original Legend of Zelda...and here is the fruit of my labor.

Technical mumbo-jumbo follows:

My God, I don't believe I have -ever- seen anything so rigid to edit as this game. You'd think that altering each screen would be a tile-based affair, but you'd be wrong: they're composed of STRIPS. Yes, vertical strips that run clear from the top to the bottom of the screen. These strips are pre-constructed and sparse in number, so you have to really get creative to put them to good use...not to mention try to keep from going cross-eyed staring at all the possibilities looking for the ONE tile arrangement that you need because there's no rhyme or reason to their order...

This "strip" system is the reason the video only shows the edited level 1, as well: the world map is absolutely maddening to try to edit in this manner if you want any kind of diversity or allotment for creativity.

Enemies are pitifully easy to insert, thankfully...though this is to a fault. You tell the game which enemy(ies) you want on a screen and the engine handles everything else (like positioning and spawn points). As in any early video game, sprites are only graphically compatible with certain others, but Zelda takes this a step further (backward?) by having rigid predetermined enemy make-ups. This means that even though, say, Stalfos and the spiked traps are compatible sprites, they cannot appear in the same room together thanks to these absurd efforts to save space.

Now why did I go and blurb about all that stuff? It's because I actually was giving consideration to producing a full hack of this game, but thanks to the rigidity of both the screen format and enemy placements, it's pretty much impossible to create an experience that differs enough from the vanilla first and second quests to merit the effort. It's a shame, too, as I have a real like for this game (one of my higher-ranked Zeldas, for sure).

Ah well. At least that's one less project possibility on my list. xD

Other Statistics