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Cake day: August 30th, 2023

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  • I’m playing Oracle of Ages for the first time in a while, and it is not great! The level design is flawed. The eighth dungeon is a a dark room, some ghosts, and a hint owl that tells you to “attune your ears to the sound of sword on stone” which, right, standard Zelda fare, good of them to make explicit the reminder. But none of the walls clank! You need to push one of the non-pushable statues out of the way, in the dark, to even expose the bombable wall. I went over the whole place twice, and then thought “oh maybe they’re doing a cool metapuzzle thing and I’ve got to leave the dungeon and bomb a new entrance” so I went out and tested the whole area with my sword and then bombed everything in case I was just misinterpreting the clank sound.

    The underwater dungeon had the interesting raise/lower water level mechanic, but I explored in loops for an hour before looking up where to go next. I’m not saying it’s supposed to be easy, I like a challenge, but it felt like the layout was deliberately withholding information, which is bad design.

    The Long Hook is an upgrade for the Switch Hook. The improvment is marginal and the puzzles that require it feel confusing (I finally have the tool for this but it’s not working (before you know about the L2 version)), forced (this is the same puzzle but the anchor object is two tiles further away) or frustrating (oh of course I was supposed to know about the offscreen anchor).
    The Long Hook has an entire dungeon dedicated to it.

    It seems all my fond memories are actually from Oracle of Seasons. I wonder if they had parallel teams working on them.











  • You mean Gehenna, the literal place that was just a garbage dump around the corner? “Don’t go to that place, man, it sucks. Somebody lit a trash pile on fire two weeks ago and it’s still burning now. It’s gross.”

    Or did you mean Hades, the place John (no, not that John (probably)) wrote about many years after Jesus’s death? In the book of Revelation, the whole of which is full of obvious symbolic imagery? A) not Jesus and B) still not “hell”.

    Ohhhhh you were talking about Dante Alighieri, the guy born twelve hundred years later, who invented our modern concept of hell whole cloth.

    “Hell”, a translation of any of the three words Gehenna, Hades, and Tartarus, show up anywhere between 13 and 23 times in the entire new testament. That wide range is due to differences in translations and source texts.

    Nobody talks about Jesus talking about hell more than modern preachers who profit off of making people fearful. You know, the exact people Jesus would have thrashed out of the temple with a whip.