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.

An article on Martin Amis’ 1982 arcade games book “Invasion of the Space Invaders”

Ever heard of that book that Martin Amis wrote about early ’80s arcade games, Invasion of the Space Invaders, and wondered what it was like? Here’s an article giving a fascinating summary of it.

Perfect Dark XBLA – changes from the N64 version

November 2011 update: I eventually bought an Xbox 360 and the XBLA Perfect Dark a few months after first publishing this post. The game turned out to be superb; it was wonderful being able to play it at a decent framerate. Unfortunately analogue movement didn’t really suit time attacking the game: judging the narrow stick angle required to speed-strafe was much less consistent than simply pressing [C-Up]+[C-left] on the N64! I always intended to thoroughly update this post, using my own copy of the game to go into more detail confirming or debunking each claimed alteration, but unfortunately I never got round to doing it.

The Xbox Live Arcade version of Perfect Dark was released a few days ago. I thought someone ought to try and compile a list of everything that’s changed from the original. I decided I might as well do it myself!

Unfortunately, this process is complicated by the fact that, er, I don’t actually have the new XBLA game. (Or an Xbox 360, for that matter… is it sad that this new version of a ten year old game is one of the main reasons I want one?) So I’m basing this list on second-hand information: things discussed in forum threads on Rllmukforum, on the GE/PD speedrunning community at the-elite.net (in both this thread and this thread), and on GameFAQs (I asked numerous questions in this thread I started). Also, the Youtube channel of the Elite’s Takahiro Arai contains a complete set of slow, methodical Perfect Agent walkthroughs of every level in the XBLA version.

Please let me know if I’ve missed anything or there’s anything in this list that’s incorrect and I’ll change it.

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: