/vr/ - Retro Games

>>1109314
(1/3)
I love exploration, but a lot of people misuse the term IMO. Exploration, to me, isn't about finding random treasure chests filled with rupees or blowing up a random section of wall to find a missile tank placed there for no apparent reason. Exploration, for me, is about the scenery and atmosphere. It's about that feeling you get from entering the Shadow Temple for the first time and soaking in the sights and sounds and creepy music, wondering what horrors await you behind the next door as you hear whispers in your mind about the Hyrule's bloody past. It's about stepping outside the Temple of Time to be greeted by a ring of eldritch energy surrounding Death Mountain and a wasteland of undead. Exploration has no value to me if it doesn't include these moments, if it's just about collecting phat lewts.

This is why I have the (unpopular on /vr/) opinion of ranking the first Metroid relatively low on the list. Because for all the praise it gets for "exploration", what do you actually find when you explore a new room? The same black background, the same boring rock texture, the same enemies, and maybe a missile tank that has no logical in-universe reason to be there. Some rooms are literally cut-and-pasted. There's nothing interesting to look at or soak in, it's just nonlinearity purely for the sake of nonlinearity; the game doesn't actually *do* anything with that nonlinearity.

This is where Ocarina of Time succeeds where earlier Zeldas fail. The spike cave with the invincibility rod that >>1109404
mentioned: what is it? No seriously, what IS it? Why is any of that there? Who just sticks a priceless magical artifact at the end of a long tunnel of spikes blocked by blob things in the side of a random cliff at the top of a mountain? The dungeons in the original LoZ: what are they? Why were they built? What purpose do they serve other for a video game character to come in and kill all the enemies and loot the treasure so he can get a plot mcguffin?

>>1052160
>Just because something is "retro" doesn't automagically make it good.

On that note, I nominate Zelda 1 and Metroid 1 for overrated, at least around here and other retro gaming circles. They were good in their time I'm sure, but they really don't have the crucial elements that made the later games iconic (there's a reason OoT and SM are world famous and to this day still make many top-X-of-all-time lists). They've also aged poorly, by which I mean they have all the flaws that retro enthusiasts handwave away with "well it was made in '86 so you can't blame it for that"--bland backgrounds, copypasted rooms, bugs, limited save capability, etc.

The only argument I hear for why they're better than later games in the series is that they're "non-linear". But I don't think that's an automatic advantage or that linearity is an automatic negative. It all depends on what kind of game you're trying to build, as pic illustrates. Attempts to force non-linearity where it doesn't belong can lead to problems like the level-scaling enemies in Oblivion or worlds that end up being 90% empty space. With regards to Metroid, you often ended up tediously backtracking your way through boring samey copypasted rooms for 1 missile tank, which you never needed because killing Ridley or Kraid gave you plenty and they could be beaten with just the Wave Beam if you were decent.