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Sunday is Gaming Day; What Are You Playing Weekly Thread
(hexbear.net)
Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
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I beat Ocarina of Time for the first time, collecting all Pieces of Heart, Gold Skulltula Tokens, upgrades, and optional key items (...or so I thought—see below the horizontal rule)!
gameplay diary
Armed to the teeth, I headed into Ganondorf's Castle. Lifting the seals was pretty smooth sailing, although it was pretty embarrassing that I needed to reset the ice block puzzle a few times before I figured it out. And damn, even though it's only for that last section, tossing those giant stone obelisks with the Golden Gauntlets makes you feel pretty badass, and it finally solved the mystery of what the deal is with that thing with the "Grab" prompt in front of the Hyrule Castle Great Fairy Fountain—something I'd been wondering since mere minutes after becoming Adult Link. Getting that defense upgrade definitely made me feel like I kinda facerolled the tower through Ganondorf's first phase, but hey—what's wrong with feeling a bit powerful? And I have a feeling I'll be a lot more appreciative of that upgrade when I do a Master Quest run.Anyway, Ganondorf! I love that you walk up hearing this faint music growing louder and louder, and then you walk in to find him literally playing his own boss theme—now there's a villain! It took me like six cycles of light ping pong to realize I needed to shoot him with a Light Arrow after zapping him—what tipped me off was that, after the first however many times, it only took like two back-and-forths to stun him, which I think was the game telling me, "Hey, buddy, that's just the first part!" I got knocked off a bunch (and more often than that, just missed my jumps from the central platform to the outer rim), but I did manage to finish the first phase without using a potion. I made it through the escape phase without any serious trouble, although I did waste like 30 seconds at the bottom of the boss room wondering why nothing was happening before I realized that Zelda was just tapping her foot in a corner, and that ReDead at the very end is pretty cheeky.
Even though I knew he was gonna transform into Ganon, I still got chills from the transformation sequence, and the crackling blue lighting being reflected on Link's face was an especially cool cinematic effect. As for the fight itself, I played it very sloppily and probably not with the intended care, thanks to the defense upgrade, but I still needed to use a Blue Potion. My main strategy was just running through his legs when he prepared his attack (perhaps I've played too much Elden Ring) and flailing around with the Biggoron Sword, although that got me whacked a whole bunch of times. I had a bear of a time trying to lock back on to his tail when I did that, since I would disengage the Z-targeting to execute the roll more easily. Also, I didn't realize I could stun him with a Light Arrow to the face until well after I got the Master Sword back (it wasn't until later that I learned that every weapon besides the Master Sword does 1 damage to Ganon...explains why the second phase took me so long). Definitely not my finest gaming moment, and I'm sure there's a better way to do it. But in the end, with Zelda's help, I vanquished him.
I had said that I was a little spoiled for the ending, but I actually didn't know anything about the seal opening part, I only vaguely knew that there was a ping pong part with Ganondorf, and I knew that there was a tower collapse follower by the Ganon fight, but since they use the Deku Stick glitch in speedruns I didn't really know anything about either fight.
I also didn't know anything about the ending sequence! I teared up when Zelda played her lullaby and on that ending screen...really brought things full circle. And it was fun to see everyone partying on Lon Long Ranch and the sages looking on from atop Death Mountain.
This was a wonderful journey, and I'm so glad to have finally played and beaten Ocarina of Time. Even though I had no personal nostalgia for it, I still had tons of fun—it absolutely holds up. I can only imagine how mind-boggling of a game this would have been playing this back in 1998! Now that I've beaten it and don't have to worry about spoilers, I'm gonna have fun reading through all the contemporary coverage of the game after its release—both the professional reviews/features and the fan letters. I plan to play Majora's Mask next, but I'm still contemplating whether to take a brief break from Zelda to play something else from a bit so I don't get too burnt out on it, especially since it'll be in the same engine.
I'm definitely excited to play Majora's Mask because I've heard it's got a unique flavor and I know very little about it—I know there's masks that give you powers/let you transform, Tingle shows up (based that off of the stage in Super Smash Bros. Melee), there's some sort of time limit system with the Moon, and I know it's darker in tone. But genuinely, that's about it! After a bit of research, even though I played OoT via Ship of Harkinian, I think I'll play MM via the Recomp because apparently there are some graphical issues with 2Ship2Harkinian. The reality is that I barely enabled any of the tweaks available because I wanted a close-to-vanilla experience, so hopefully I won't be missing much on that front.
Big thanks to @ChaosMaterialist@hexbear.net (for being my patient guide and interlocutor for my playthrough) and @Demifriend@hexbear.net (for giving me the last few hints I needed to get those finicky remaining collectibles, saving me hours of fruitlessly running about Hyrule without robbing me of the fun of discovering things for myself). The experience wouldn't have been nearly as rewarding and memorable without you! I hope someday I can pay it forward and help out another Ocarina of Time newbie.
...okay, I looked at the end of the Nintendo Player's Guide and
obscure secrets
Holy crap, you can summon fairies at the Gossip Stones using the ocarina? And there are Big Fairies that restore health AND MP?? Even after scouring Hyrule, it seems like I still have a lot to learn!Okay, maybe not so obscure, but reading through the Versus Books guide, I realized I actually did miss a key item: Nayru's Love. Oops! I fought Ganon again with it just to give it a try, and damn, it really trivializes it. It lasts so long that you can easily use it for the whole fight. :
Also, looking through the September 1998 issue of Nintendo Power, apparently they were still planning to include the Beam Attack from the 2D games pretty late in the game's development:
Since I got terrible luck on my playthrough, I decided to dig into the code for Dampé's Heart-Pounding Gravedigging Tour; looking at the OoT decomp, we can see the five possible rewards:
and the logic which determines what reward you get, which I've annotated with explanations of how it works.
Reward code
It also means that the net earnings for 15 attempts will always be exactly the same:
(1(8) + 5(4) + 20(2)) - 10(15)
= 68 - 150
= -82 Rupees for the Piece of Heart case, or -32 Rupees for the Purple Rupee case.
It does seem a little mean to have it set up that way, but if you had the same odds with replacement, you'd have a positive expected value on each attempt, which would now be independent:
1(0.4) + 5(0.3) + 20(0.2) + 50(0.1) - 10
= 10.9 - 10
= +0.9 Rupees/dig
So I guess they just wanted to ensure that it tended towards being a money sink.
Incidentally, does anyone who's good with probability know how you'd model the actual expected value given the constraints? It's sort of like a really janky version of drawing without replacement—e.g., once you draw your 8th Green Rupee, if you haven't drawn four Blue Rupees yet, the probability of getting one of those will suddenly jump from .3 to .7, but it doesn't affect the probability of drawing the a Red Rupee or Purple Rupee/Piece of Heart at all. The easiest thing would be to just run the actual code for a million trials and derive it empirically (which I'll probably end up doing anyway), but I'm genuinely curious about the theoretical approach, since it's beyond the bounds of my own probability and statistics knowledge.
Fun fact, if Dampé digs up the Piece of Heart and you leave without collecting it, it's gone forever. They "fixed" this in OoT3D by making it so the Piece of Heart stays in the reward pool even after it's been dug up, meaning you can keep collecting it over and over again if you want. There's a joke speedrun called Dampé's Valentine where they get all 20 hearts just from that Piece of Heart.
Lmao, talk about phoning it in. I guess it's better than not fixing it at all, though—maybe one of those situations where it's like, "This might break even worse if we mess with it too much, so let's just comment out the line that marks it as collected and call it a day." I'll probably get around to playing OoT3D at some point just to see what they changed; from what I remember hearing, besides the obvious graphical makeover, it's mostly just small quality-of-life fixes rather than major changes?
Love me some joke speedruns. I just learned about a regular OoT speedrun today where you use the Reverse Bottle Adventure glitch to obtain the maximum number of Small Keys possible (37 keys in the Water Temple, apparently). Oh, and related: I was surprised that in the April 1999 Issue #119 of Nintendo Power they showcased a major glitch (as well as a minor exploit that is coincidentally similar to the one OoT3D introduced):
Image description
A cropped scan taken from the 'Classified Information' section of the April 1999 Issue #119 of Nintendo Power. It the Ocarina of Time logo at the top and is mostly text, with three screenshots illustrating each trick (described below after each containing section)Hyrulean Hyrulean
Hyrule is home to many things, and codes aren't one of them. Even so, Link has a few tricks up his sleeves, tunic or wherever else a Hero of Time could hide an extra Skulltula, rupee or bottle. If your inventory has got you down, get a boost from one of these item-amassing tricks.
100-plus Skulltulas
Play the Song of Storms at the tree in front of Hyrule Castle (near Malon) to enter the lair of a Skulltula. Retrieve its token with your boomerang, but before catching it, backflip onto the warp platform. If you return to the hole, the spider will still be there, but you'll get credit for its token.
[A screenshot of Young Link facing a wall with a Gold Skulltula, his back close to a warp platform.]
21 Bottles
To exceed the supposed four-bottle limit, swing a bottle at a fish, but before you capture it, pause the game, then replace your bottle with a new CButton item. Note: The item you chose will be gone, but another bottle will have taken its place.
[A screenshot of Link's inventory after multiple glitches have been performed. In the 3 x 3 section of items in the upper left, instead of the usual loadout (including such items as the Deku Stick, the Boomerang, and Bombs), it is filled with nine bottles containing fish.]
Raking in the Rupees
A bug captured in a bottle will become many bugs when you release it. To earn rupees, free a bottled bug, catch the numerous bugs that flee, then sell the mites to the bug buyer in the Market or in Kakariko Village. Keep one bug to bring back whenever you need to tap into this unlimited source of money.
[A screenshot of Young Link in Hyrule Castle Town showing the contents of his bottle to the Buyer NPC, with the text box showing the dialogue "Oh, it's a cute little Bug! I'll buy it for 50 Rupees! All sales final, OK?"]
They also printed instructions for the Safari Zone glitch in February 1999, which is barely a step removed from the legendary old man glitch that allows you to encounter glitch Pokémon like Missingno, so they're clearly more willing to publicize glitches in their own games than I expected!
Completely tangential, but I found this neat video that proposes an interesting theory about the location of the Ice Arrows and Iron Boots being swapped late in development (although information in the comments makes it seem a lot less plausible). Regardless, that video taught me that
spoiler
you can jump over the broke Gerudo Valley bridge with Epona instead of using the Longshot, which I had no idea was possible, and also that you can freeze the Blade Traps. And from a different video, I learned that you can jump over the back walls of Lon Lon Ranch to escape instead of jumping over the gate (and Ingo) which is what I did instinctively.I'm sure I'll discover many more little secrets of the game as I continue to learn about it via secondary sources and subsequent playthroughs!
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: