The Zoonami website’s Zelda: Ocarina of Time design analysis

Hooray, the Zoonami website’s back after a temporary absence! Martin “GoldenEye And A Bit of Perfect Dark” Hollis’ company may never have released a game I was interested in (whatever happened to Funkydilla, their proposed post-Amplitude/pre-Guitar Hero rhythm action game?), but they had a website that was surprisingly useful in some unexpected ways.

The most informative thing on their site is definitely the transcript of Martin Hollis’ excellent speech The Making of GoldenEye (which is, as we all know, the greatest game ever made). There are also a couple of other GoldenEye Making Ofs online, one at NowGamer and one summarised by Rllmuk forumite Graham S.

But also, the Zoonami website is home to this analysis of the puzzle design in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It’s part of the website’s “Intelligence” section, but it’s not linked to in that section’s main page. Hopefully the fact I’m linking to it here will enable Google to index it again – it really is a very good article about game design! Ever wondered just how complicated the Water Temple is that led to you getting stuck on it for so long? Now you know.

IIRC, the website used to have another article about the design of one of the Super Mario games (64? World?), but Archive.org’s Wayback Machine seems to be down for me at the moment so I can’t go back in time and retrieve that page’s URL.

What a difference a frame makes

Interesting blog post from Jaime Griesemer on the difference between a three-frame Halo melee attack and a four-frame melee attack.

I have successfully rewired my brain

“Games that put select where you expect cancel or that offer 16 useless presets are shooting themselves in the foot. Or, more precisely, games that don’t give the choice of whether or not to invert are most likely shooting players in their own foot.”

- Edge‘s Ten Commandments, issue #128 (Oct 2003, their tenth anniversary issue)

I had a pretty roundabout path through console FPS control schemes. Excluding my early experiences with Zero Tolerance and Corporation on the Mega Drive (they don’t really count here), it went something like this: