Captain Falcon

Now we're talking. The DS had a cracking show but the GBA still beats it in my book for having its own brilliant original games plus a handy chunk of the best of the best SNES games too.

Out of interest, those of you who've already promoted Chrom, what chapter number were you on? I'm on chapter 9 right now but he's only ~level 14-15 right now as are Sully, Stahl, Lon qu, Virion, Avatar, Lyssa, Sumia and Gaius. Kellam is a little lower, as is Vaike, and Ricken a bit lower still. I tried taking Donnel into some Risen fights but he was just way to weak even when paired up to get much benefit out of it so I did the Champions of Yore I where the enemy is a bit more reasonable - plus they always go for the ally units first so you can use them as bait. He's a level 8 villager now but I'm not sure it's worth holding out for Underdog. +15 on hit/avoid is a nice little bonus but by the time he gets to level 15 for it, I'd imagine his stats will be good enough to not need the further boost anyway. I'm less bothered about the weapon xp as even though Lance goes to waste regardless of what you swap him to, a bronze sword doesn't do much less than an iron one and if his attack is good enough then it's not an issue early on.

I kinda took it as read that Lords either auto-promote or just have a higher level cap. I probably would have looked it up at some point but at least I know now what to do about it. Do you mean to re-class your avatar or just in general? Reclassing Donnel makes sense as explained above and below. He has great growths which get even better when he changes class and thus gets more level up opportunities anyway - it's whether you want to baby sit him through the first part. I understand you can reclass a promoted unit back to its own base type and effectively have unlimited growths but reclassing to other types allows you to get skills from other classes that a unit wouldn't otherwise get. It's certainly a powerful tool that every unit could make use of to some degree. I still need to do more research into the whole reclassing thing. I'd kind been avoiding most things to do with the game and now as I play it, I feel there are things I want/need to know and have to go looking for a little more information to help form an opinion. I guess if he's capped his meaningful stats anyway, there is zero point in keeping him tied to the villager class - that's the bit I was failing to grasp. 15 more level ups for the possibilty of a handful of magic points and resistance is a bad trade of xp in anyones book, especially for a none magic class.

That's good to know to you can Master Seal him. I'd likely have left him alone expecting him to auto-promote as part of the story and purposely held off using him as I end up doing with other main characters. There's a point - I could reclass Donnell and have him be my Axe user as an eventual Hero or on the Fighter promotion line. His growths are great with skill bonus but he's just a bit awkward to train with his low stats. Also, what level did you reclass him at? I read some suggestions to change him straight away and others say wait until he learns UnderDog skill but surely any level not used in the Villager class is a missed level up opportunity overall, right?

Whilst we may scoff at them now, I was genuinely excited by the prospect of the first NSMB - that and DSL revision were enough to get me onboard. In the end, there wasn't much new about it and they've since ran it into the ground, but had they left it as a one off, it would have been a quaint throwback to older games and probably hold greater appeal with people than it does now. The first game is retroactively seen as a lazy, cynical cash-in because that's what the rest felt like even though at the time, every asset in the game was brand new. Every model in this game is brand new, even if existing designs, and the music is at least remixed and not the same - so it's already beating a NSMB sequel on that alone.

I tend to get the impression that the dungeons they show off at these kind events tend to be fairly representative of their final appearance. Sometimes bosses get swapped in and out depending on their relevance to the location and the rooms might get slightly shuffled around but most of what you see ends up being left intact.

Fighters aren't noted for their defence and I accept that but they tend to be a bit quicker than him and between taking heavy hits and often being in danger of being double attacked, he's proving hardwork to make useful outside certain opportunities. It probably doesn't help that there has been a distinct lack of lance wielding enemies up until now though he is handy with a hammer when Knights are hanging around. I can't see him lasting long and I'll probably ditch him as soon as I have someone to reliably replace him with. I'm not using Panne and generally I avoid all transforming units such as Manaketes and the Laguz. I have three Master Seals and one Second Seal - I bought two of those Master Seals though from the travelling merhcant. I was wondering as to their availablity when I got a chance to buy one so early in game, seemed a strange thing to do, so I had a google search and I get the impression that enemies don't drop them as much as they do in other games so you will have to buy/find some yourself. At a certain point, a shop opens up though where you can buy them from for 2500G and later you can buy Second Seals too if you have the funds.

Me? Nah. Been there and done that. I don't want to trade better graphics and 60fps for portabliity, none waggle, 8 new levels and £30. If I pick up LM soon, I might get it via the promotion thing but I certainly have no intention of actually buying it myself. I'd prefer to put that money to an all new experience.

To be fair, if it's a decent quality bag, it should last a while and arguably get more use than the keyring - something that chunky attached to your keys is bound to get annoying... though it could have some advantages - is that a banana in your pocket or are you just pleased to be playing DKCR without waggle? Just looking at the size of the handles though, that doesn't look like it will be very big and certainly not fit for grocery shopping.

I'm at the same point. In terms of partners, I have Chrom and Sumia are married and so are Sully and Stahl. The latter pair were wed by Chapter 5 and are unstopable when using pair up with a decent number of enemy units only dealing 1 or 2 points of damage per hit and some even less - put them on a fortress and they are invincible to all but magic users who have to be lucky to hit them in the first place. After a couple of deaths on early chapters, things seem to be settingly down now - I'm on hard/classic. Chapter 2 saw the most retrys (think it was 3) after some Dual Strikes kept breaking my defensive strategy and opening me up - I never intended to kill the enemy as I wanted them to block other units from attacking me. I also thought Side Story 1 was pretty rough. But chapters 4 through and 8 have been relatively plain sailing. SS2 was a bit tricky and felt like it came down to luck as to how successful you could be at it. SS3 was fairly straight forward once you knew what was going to happen which is something that might not be apparent within the first half a dozen turns which caused me a couple of restarts until I knew and could adapt my strategy for it which then worked first time.

Well I have two of those (CV and FE) but I'm not sure if there are another two I want. I mean, I wouldn't mind LM2 but the rest are real take it or leave games for me right now - with a heavy slant towards the leave it part. If only it went on for another month to include M&L...

According to a recent Nintendomination video, at the recent 3DS event, this game was running at 30fps in both 2D and 3D. He said it was locked steady though. Also, just noticed GAME have a pre-order offer on the go... A banana keyring and shopping bag.

Not necessarily. I said it would have to be stunningly brilliant to live up to and surpass ALTTP but it could still be good in its own right despite not living up to its heritage... it's certainly been good enough for most Zeldas post ALTTP anyway though some haven't even been good enough to call them that. After watching that video clip, I was pleasantly pleased. The dungeon seemed pretty old school in terms of design and whilst it might not seem new and daring, it gave my nostalgia strings a good plucking and the new take on the Lightworld dungeon theme was playing a full blown symphony with them. I'm not expecting it to do much new or anything better, Zelda rarely offers one or the other lately (both is out of the question), but as long as they stick to what worked before, it can't go too far wrong in terms of delivering a classic top down Zelda experience providing the dungeons design holds up.

Thank you. Sometimes I talk crap when my passion gets the better of me but I'd struggle to name a single game I know better than ALTTP. My neighbour bought the game back for his SNES and I remember going round to his and playing it and being intrigued. He loaned it to me and I was just completely in love with it that I knew I had to get a copy for myself which I eventually did. I actually lost his instruction manual but then found it - it was underneath my TV the entire time - so I was able to get it back to him without feeling guilty anymore than I already had done. And because I wanted more, I had to get Link's Awakening too, so I saved up my money and bought it. Didn't own a GB mind but I figured I could solve that issue later :p And when they bought it back for the GBA, there was no chance I was waiting until March for the EU release so I got myself the American version in the December the year before which has the classic boxart instead of the slightly different one we got. ALTTP is total comfort gaming for me. It's as much a part of my childhood, and adulthood, as anything else I've ever owned. It's just there and it's not going away and nor would I want it to. Which is why I'm so apprehensive about this because it's stepping into dangerous territory. Anything less than perfection just isn't good enough because that's what it's going to take in order to live up ALTTP and given Nintendo's current track record with Zelda, I'm somewhat nervous.

Going back further than H-o-T went, both Pokemon Stadium games were purposely delayed. The first was delayed in the US from November/December '99 to March 2000 because they didn't want it to steal thunder from DK64 and they had a bit of a baren lineup early in the new year - consquently, we got it only a month later despite having the GB game for much less time. Pokémon Stadium 2 was held back in Europe because of the extra time it took Gold and Silver to reach here - the game was ready to go but they wanted sales of Gold and Silver to come in first and to allow people to get familar with the new rules and techniques before using them in a Stadium game.

Whilst developed by Platinum, Nintendo own the rights to the IP as the funder and publisher even if they didn't come up with the original concept which comes under that sticky area of classifing published items as first party IP created inhouse as was being touched on above. Nintendo own it and could make make but they didn't come up with it.

True. I guess the difference here is that a) we know they wanted to remake ALTTP anyway, b) they've said it takes place in the same world at the same time as ALTTP, and c) it looks the same too. So it has slightly more going for it than Oracles because despite them having some hangovers to the original remake, it was decided they should totally break free of it whereas here they are making it well known they are not. The Oracle games feature a few of the classic bosses like Aquamentus, Gohma and Dodongo but it's difficult to say whether they decided to use because they had already made them or because they were trying to generate three games worth of bosses at once and thought simply about bringing them back. Oracle went from remake to original game whereas this appears to have gone from remake to remix and when positioned as taking place alonside it's inspiration (so no alternate timeline/dimension BS), it's not strange to think that it wouldn't feature the same world for the most part.

Mine arrived today including the book and whilst I'm sure it's no match for Ike's masterpiece, it's very nice for a freebie and the glossy hardback cover helps to give it a premium feel - certainly glad I swapped my order over. Also, according to Reggie, US sales are now at 240k with 1/3 being the digital version - hopefully this will help secure FE as a series worth releasing outside Japan and actually giving a bit of effort/marketing to whilst not taking forever to do it.

All I can say to the bolded is that it's a good job you like Fire Emblem son or things would be getting rather heated right now Oracles didn't actually start out as a remake. Yes the original plan was to do a remake but they had plans for half a dozen Zelda games at the time which included the remake and the Oracle games and scrapped ideas. In the end, the remake was also ditched in favour of something brand new. As can be seen from the trailer, the bit they've shown was exactly the same and I don't have an issue with it personally as long as they bulk it out in other areas. Clearly they wanted to do something with ALTTP, as they dropped enough hints in interviews, but they didn't want to be doing a straight remake - remaking MM seemed to be coming more from fans than from Nintendo. So this half-way house between new and old should tick enough boxes to entice all but now it just has to be good, as in really god damn amazing, if it's to live up to ALTTP. It was my understanding that Parallax Scrolling was when different layers are moved at different speeds to create the illusion of depth in an otherwise 2D composed image. And in that regard, ALTTP uses incredibly little PS - it's relagated to rain, fog, and for giving notice to which holes can be dropped through. It's never used for created depth within a multi-tier room itself. Now if you are just referring to having multiple background layers that can be interacted with then sure it does that, but not as often as it appears. The vast majority of dungeon rooms take place on one tier within any given room and even those with multiple tiers are often drawn on a single background layer - some of the dungeons don't have any multi-tiered rooms full stop. The overworld has multiple height levels but that too is just one single layer with nothing else to either scroll against to create depth. It uses multilayers to help with designing the levels from an pure design perspective so they can see where paths go but they always scroll at the same speed and Link in general is unable to interact with the other tier. You can't stand on one tier and affect anything on the other as you would in a 3D game and so the depth becomes a substitue for inpassable walls and one way doors - something perferectly replicatable on much simpler hardware and if drawn right, also capable of creating depth. ALTTP design for creating depth doesn't make sense when you break it down, it just happens to look right and is easy to understand as a player but it's all a giant fudge. Link's Awakening managed to replicate a fair chunk of ALTTPs depth techniques because in both cases it could mostly be done on a single plane with one set of collision boundaries that worked regardless of what tier the player was on. By their own admission, ALTTP wasn't a technical showcase outside the map zoom. The floating triforce pieces were the only other thing of note in terms of "effects". It was just more of everything. Heck, even this remake uses the exact same trick because and can be seen when he walks past the narrow section near the entrance to Death Mountain. The terrain is supposed to be elevated here, and Link can "drop down" if he stands on the top part but his size never changes shape despite being further from/closer to the camera and nor do any other objects in the scene except for the crows who genuiely are closer to the camera when in the air. The dungeon, on the other hand, appears to be done in true 3D and not some hybrid. So yeah, I can't say I agree that that was the trick to being a better game than previous entries. For me, it was because the world had more identity, more purpose, and more coherent rules that permitted it. It simply comes down to smarter design and again, these ideas were perfectly capable of being transposed to lesser hardware such as the GB and GBC. There are plenty of reason why ALTTP was so good and whilst some of these could simply be labelled as doing it first, none of the other games have every managed to do it better despite the passage of time. It was the improvements in Link's control - he handles horribly in the original game. The fact he swing his sword in an arch meant you covered more range and it made fight enemies easier and less fussy - plus he had the spin attack too for hitting enemies on all sides instead of the awful maneuvering he does in the first (it's like a three point turn). Walls that could be bombed looked as though they could be bombed instead of being another piece of repetative background tiles with no defining characteristics - OoT is just as bad as without the Stone of Agony, you would have to bomb/hammer every piece of the floor. The overworld and dungeons were packed full of items that could be interacted with and it was always immediately obvious which parts were for show and which could actually be manipulated. And that manipulated items could affect the level futher nails that greater sense of world that can be lived in. Every area has distinguishing features that set it apart from other areas which made it difficult to get lost and there were signposts dotted around as well, plus your map. Deadends were filled with treasure and not just blocks to prevent you from passing any further. Villagers gave genuine hints that helped but only when they should know what it is your doing. Once you go to the darkworld, they can't help and why should they as they don't know what's there. In that world you are on your own except for the maidens, and two coversations with Sahasrahla though perhaps there are other around who might be willing to help if you can find them. Plus there is the fortune teller if you still need help. The game is happy to tell you where you need to go but it never tells you how to get there. Items had more uses and it allowed you to come up with more strategies for fighting the better and more varied enemies, and certainly the bosses. No longer were items seperated into Weapons or Equipment with just one purpose - they were multi functional allowing for attacking and navigation at once. Dungeons were better because they had more variety in puzzle types and could populate them with more interesting gimmicks but depth was only a part of those gimmicks overall but certainly not the main one and not hardware dependent either. Tranplanting ALTTP dungeon design, as in purely the multi-tiered layout, and keeping every element of of the original as was (wonky controls, bland graphics, unmarked passages, lack of direction), would still result in an awkward game that felt incredibly dated by todays standards (dated in terms of execution, not concept) but adding ALTTPs gameplay improvements to the originals overworld/dungeons would make for a much nicer experience which would still hold up today. It was refinements in ideas all around and almost every facet was not in anyway dependant on the host machine. At least, that's my opinion.

To be honest, I'd probably find it easier to accept this claim than for you to say you preferred TWW to it.

We don't need your kind in here - go sit in the WW remake thread until you can show some respect

It all takes place in almost the same area - he never covers more than two seperate in game screens from the original. He starts at the Woodcutter brother house which is East of the Woods and he then moves down one screen which is where the entrace to the passage to Death Mountain is. You can see the three stones on the floor and the entrance on the wall. The floor slightly lowers and the have seveal trees in a U shape with the crows sitting in them as those are the only two areas shown. They just keep moving the camera around to confuse you. Ok, perhaps I was a little strong with "identical" but for all intents and purposes it is. There are stones where there should be stones and trees where there should be trees and naturally the building and fence were in the right place as were the contours of the land and everything you saw of the overworld was taken from those two areas. Oh, and agreed, it is heresay to claim any Zelda to be better than ALTTP, especially TWW.

I too thought it was going to be a shot for shot remake when I saw it as when he was on the platform and threw his egg at the cloud, it looked just like the very start of "Make Eggs, Throw Eggs" from the original. The super giant Egg, the original already has giant eggs, looked a bit naff and wasn't quite what I was expecting to see when he mentioned about using the 3DS features to deliver new experiences. The pre-render sprites reminded me a bit of Yoshi's Universal Gravitation... a game in which Yoshi also looks a bit wonky.

That makes more sense but I still can't imagine it being anything other than placeholder - I thought they might have used the English name on the title card that follows the presentation like how ours said "Legend of Zelda(TEMP)" or whatever it read. Aside from Zelda II, I can't think of a time when a number has been used as an iteration identifier. Shibata and Reggie said it took place at the same time in the same world anyway - I didn't realise we were entertaining possiblities of it being an alternate timeline given they seemed to want avoid suggesting that. The question remains though is it literally the same time or is it after the end - is this the restored Hyrule following Link acquiring the Triforce? The Mastersword was supposed to sleep forever so does that mean we don't get to use it this time? Is it generic Magical Sword time again? That's the only reason I could let them off for not using ALTTP spinning sword beam animation over that Magic Rod/Spell Book Hyrule Fantasy style thing in use in the trailer.

Well the original wasn't called A Link to the Past in Japan anyway so calling it that and slapping a 2 at the end isn't going to help matters over there.