You don’t have to slog through dozens of taken an arrow to the knee generic dialog just to find the nugget you need.

Yes, that’s absolutely it! Each NPC adds their own flavor and nearly all of them point you towards something in game, all with just a scant few lines of text. Even the few that don’t (or at least, that I haven’t discovered the purpose of yet!) are still unique and don’t wear on you. It really contributes to that strong sense of place that I feel when playing Ocarina—the vibe of the different locales and all the people in them.

I don’t recall there being a trick [to the frog minigame], but I did only play it on Emulation or original hardware, not the Ship of Harkinian release. It’s entirely possible it’s a bug.

Man, I’m super curious…might actually dig into the code when the spirit moves me, although it’ll take a bit of effort to parse through it.

[Lens of Truth]

Noted! I won’t run around spamming it everywhere, then, although I have been using that quick toggle technique, and as far as potions go I just spring for the blue potion since my wallet’s always bursting at the seams. For minigames, I actually got super lucky the very first time I did the chest minigame and got the Heart Piece on my first try! I was actually planning to use savestates to cheat it, since trying over and over again and farming rupees isn’t my idea of fun, but I sailed straight through. I can’t remember how many doors it was, but I think it might have been 5, making it a 1/32 ≈ 3% chance. I actually thought I had accidentally enabled a cheat in Ship of Harkinian, so I went back in and failed on the second door, at which point I also found out that the savestates break certain doors (and thought I had borked my game…wouldn’t be the first time).

I treat Zelda much like Mario; they are all kinda the same (yeah I said it!)

(fair though, even as a certified Mario Enjoyer)

so I (a) don’t feel bad about skipping one or two titles, and (b) I approach each entry curious about their unique gameplay mechanics. I never beat the original NES Zelda, it took me over a decade to play Wind Waker, I didn’t play Breath of the Wild until a couple of years ago, and I haven’t yet played Skyward Sword or Tears of the Kingdom at all! That said I got my Zelda start on Link to the Past and Link’s Awakening (OoT was my third), and both come with my strong recommendation.

Yeah, if I do go back and play NES Zelda, I may end up playing the PC port with some tweaks to make it easier, since I don’t think NES difficulty is generally for me (outside of the aforementioned SMB1+3). But some frustration aside, I did enjoy what I’ve played of it. I can’t remember if I mentioned it, but while I really enjoyed BotW I sorta bounced off of TotK…I just found the building mechanics too distracting, I guess. I wanna give it another shot eventually, but I’m more interested in playing the linear Zelda games first, which I think play more to my strengths.

Oh, and right around the time I made my last comment, v1.0 of a PC port based on the Twilight Princess was released which looks really promising. I’m not planning to tackle TP until after Majora’s Mask, (finishing up) Wind Waker, A Link to the Past, and Link’s Awakening, so by the time I get to it I’m sure it’ll be even more polished. These are very exciting times to be playing old Nintendo games!

The dynamic day/night cycle was genuinely a revolutionary feature at the time. Few contemporary game had it, and it would take years for the industry to mainstream it.

It really does make a huge difference in immersion, and while a real-time clock isn’t a good fit for a Zelda game it’s a huge part of why Pokémon Gold/Silver/Crystal and the original Animal Crossing enraptured me so. I wonder if anyone’s written a good article detailing the history of day/night and/or RTC systems in games.

Riffing on my gameplay curiosity, going back to old games is an interesting lesson in cultural archaeology to see how they adapted and converged on some mechanics and styles, and seeing what experimental ideas were tried that ultimately never made it out of the 90s.

A kindred spirit! It’s one of the reasons that I love reading old video game magazines—even for the eras that I remember, I really didn’t start thinking very critically about video games until well into adulthood, so there’s a lot that I’ve forgotten or didn’t pick up on. The Video Game History Foundation recently put out a video looking at the first FPS game to feature modern dual analog controls (which we now take for granted), and it’s fascinating to see the wide range of reactions people had at the time. Can’t remember if I brought them up before, but they have a free archive with fully searchable OCR’d magazines (as well as design docs and other developer materials), so it’s really great for doing deep dives or even just quick fact checks.

If anything, I have to waste money or else I will open a chest with a purple rupee and a full wallet. :all-my-apes-gone: but for rupees

Me when I opened the chest I found in my first Stone of Agony secret hole to find a yellow rupee with my wallet full

Honestly yes. Nice job! It shows that sometimes not knowing the ‘official’ answer means you don’t know it is hard.

Absolutely! Totally different scale, but I’m reading a book about the history of Blizzard Entertainment (Play Nice) and there’s a bit where they talk about seeing this sick demo for a game at E3 and realizing they need to up their game for Starcraft, and later on they found out that it was a completely phony pre-rendered demo that the presenters were miming along to so that it’d look like they were playing it.

For the first one, try the Scarecrow song…

I went back and tried it and was like, “oooOOOOOHHH that’s what it does!”. Well, now I know what I need to do if there’s a weird spot where it seems like I need a hookshot point! This is another mechanic which has me wondering if there’s an in-game hint or not, because even with you encouraging me to learn it I’m not sure when I would have thought to actually bust out the Scarecrow Song.

Link Comes of Age

The outline of the story for Zelda 64 comes straight from EAD, the chief game development department at Nintendo Company Ltd. in Kyoto, Japan. Although EAD considers everything “tentative” until the final version of a game is completed, much of what you read here will be a part of Mr. Miyamoto’s greatest epic.

Long ago, before Gannon stole the Triforce and kidnapped Zelda, Link set out to his coming-of-age ceremony in the Maze Woods. It was the custom of his tribe, the Kokiri family, that a young man would receive a guardian spirit or fairy who would stay beside him and guide him throughout his life. But as Link walked through the woods, he discovered that a monster had captured one such fairy. Gallantly, Link came to the rescue and defeated the monster, but the fairy was mortally wounded. In her dying breath, she warned Link not to allow Gannondorf to possess the Triforce and to seek out a wise man and his spiritual stone.

At the same time, Gannondorf, the king of the thieves, was searching for the legendary Triforce so that he could steal its power. In time, Gannondorf stumbled into the Maze Woods and neared the secret place where the Triforce was kept. Link went to Hyrule Castle for help. Princess Zelda knew of the Triforce’s hiding place, but to reach it they would have to find three magical stones to unlock the secret. Thus begins the adventure.

Okay, since I ended up writing this waaaaay later it’s unfortunately going to be lacking in a lot of detail, but I’ll do my best:

After entering the water temple, I flailed around ineffectively for a good 20 minutes or so before even finding Ruto and changing the water level for the first time…I can definitely see how kids would have gotten completely lost in this place. I think I accomplished nothing on the first cycle of water level changes, but after that I started keeping careful notes, with a section for each level and four subsections for each cardinal direction, flagging things that I should return to once the water was at a certain level or once I received some new equipment (which I’d later discover was the longshot!). Once I got into a groove, I got through the temple fairly smoothly, I’d say. However, I think a major reason why I made smooth progress was the quality-of-life upgrade of being able to toggle the Iron Boots on the fly. Not only did that make the process much less painful, it also enabled techniques I’m sure the developers never intended such as feathering the boots on and off to travel in a straight line through the water, which definitely made light work of some obstacles (although no sequence breaks or anything like that).

With Dark Link, I realized what the fight was a moment before it actually happened—beyond the general vibe, I think the room also reminded me of the boss room for that same fight in Zelda II, which is one of the only parts of that game I’ve actually seen. After the requisite ineffectual flailing and taking a bunch of Peter Pan flip kicks off the Master Sword straight to the kisser, I eventually settled on blocking and then immediately attacking with a jump slash, which seemed fairly consistent and made pretty short work of him. But even then, he still took 11 hearts off of me! I didn’t end up needing a fairy, in the end, but it was a close shave.

The final boss had a really great and scary intro cinematic—felt like something out of Alien or something! It’s really amazing how games like Ocarina of Time and Metal Gear Solid (from what I’ve seen and heard) innovated on the use of cinematic language in video games. I was just reading earlier today in Super Nintendo (new book from Keza MacDonald that’s a cultural history of Nintendo’s biggest franchises—pretty good read so far!) that the use of in-game cinematics as opposed to pre-rendered cutscenes was not so much a conscious aesthetic choice as it was a necessity due to how much the game was changing right up until its release; I’m glad it ended up that way because pre-rendered cutscenes would not have aged nearly as gracefully, and even when well-executed I found they kind of took me out of things…glad we’ve generally moved past FMVs, as important as they were during the transition to full 3D games.

Anyway, as for the actual fight, I’m not entirely sure I approached it in the intended way since I basically never stepped on the central four pillars other than to start the fight, but I basically just stayed out of range and spammed the longshot so I could get in a few hits here and there. Did get flung about three times, though.

After finishing the temple, I immediately looked through my notes and hit the spots that I thought I could use the longshot. First, I hopped onto that roof in Kakariko to talk to the poor fella who’s been stuck on the roof for seven years (Heart Piece Get!!), and then I clambered up onto the upper floor of the windmill. I was a bit confused, though—I assumed the purpose was to stunt on the guy who’s on the watchtower and mentions that he can’t stand anyone being higher than him. I grabbed the Cucco and flew at him a few times, but his dialogue never changed…am I barking up the wrong tree? Is there some other way to get higher than him to trigger an event, or is his dialogue purely flavor to call back to him standing on the balcony in Hyrule Castle Town? I couldn’t really see a use for the Cucco (beyond fun) otherwise, since you can longshot directly to the aforementioned roof.

In a subsequent brief play session, after learning the Bolero of Fire (…definitely could have saved myself a lot of time if I’d done this earlier—was it really as simple as just talking to the kid again after getting the Goron Tunic? Or did I just miss/ignore that the first time I talked to him?), I headed over to Gerudo Valley and Longshot my way across the broken bridge. After immediately getting spotted by a guard and breaking out of prison, I started very clumsily exploring the fortress, getting spotted a whoooole bunch of times and cheesing some guards with Longshot spam. The Biggoron Sword made short work of the Gerudo warriors, but it was only after rescuing three of the four carpenters that I realized I could knock out the guards with arrows! On my next play session, I’ll hopefully find that elusive fourth prisoner and see where things go from there.

スプーキーSpookyブーギーBoogie

Last week “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth insulted Americans by claiming that a 50 percent increase in the US military budget – from an incomprehensible one trillion dollars to an impossible one and a half trillion – was a “fiscally responsible investment.”

“Thanks to President Trump’s $1.5 trillion defense budget, this War Department has moved from bureaucracy to business,” he said last Thursday.

In a way he was right, though. The huge increase is much more about “business” than what is needed to protect the United States from potential invasion.

But it isn’t the kind of “business” that most supporters of free markets would applaud. On the contrary, this is the business of transferring massive amounts of wealth from the struggling middle and working classes to the well-connected Beltway elite based on lies and scare tactics.

The US mainstream media is crucial in manufacturing the fairy tale that if we don’t mortgage our children’s and grandchildren’s future to finance this obscene military budget, we will be attacked or invaded by some evil foreign power.

It’s not difficult to do a little research and see why the mainstream – and even some “independent” – media outlets push these scare tactics: they are owned or funded by giant corporations with close ties to military contractors.

This unhealthy relationship is known as “corporatism” – the intermingling of pseudo-private companies with the government. It is the precursor to actual fascism, where the government takes a stake in such companies. We’re getting there faster than most Americans understand.

The whole scam is not about protecting the citizens of the United States. It’s about protecting the US empire overseas, which actually harms the citizens of the United States.

Yes, they rob us to fund their empire and lie to us that it keeps us safe. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our constant military interventions on virtually every continent of the globe only build resentment among the rest of the world’s population. Anyone who thinks people overseas welcome US bombs has been watching too much Fox News or reading too much Washington Post.

And what do we get for the most expensive military on earth – larger than the combined militaries of the next dozen or so countries? Not much. Iran’s military budget is less than one percent of ours, yet Iran destroyed or disabled every US military base in the Middle East.

It turns out that Iran has destroyed dozens of multi-million dollar US spy drones – and several near-billion dollar spy radar stations – with their own drones costing mere thousands of dollars each.

The US surprise attack was supposed to make Iran cower and beg for mercy, but it did the opposite: it showed that despite the trillions extorted from Americans for the most expensive military on earth, the US military can no longer win the wars that US presidents illegally force them into fighting.

The US military continues to fight World War II – with massively expensive aircraft carriers that do not dare get close to combat – while warfighting has evolved into something entirely different.

The only good thing about the Iran war is that it demonstrates how much the special interests have lied to us about the need to continue our suicidal military spending increases.

It was never about protecting the United States. It is about protecting the ever-growing bank accounts of the special interests at the expense of the rest of us. It needs to stop. Now.

Li Hongzhi, an award-winning former head of GenAI at Microsoft Asia, has joined Tongji University, one of China’s leading universities.

Li started his first job at technology giant Microsoft immediately after obtaining his PhD from Columbia University.

For more than 10 years, he worked at Microsoft Research – the company’s subsidiary responsible for basic and applied research in computer science, software engineering and hardware design.

Li was the head of Microsoft AI Asia’s GenAI Group before joining Tongji.

According to the university, Li recently returned to China and is a distinguished tenured professor at its Institute of AI for Engineering.

The South China Morning Post has contacted Li for comment.

He earned his PhD in computer science in 2016. Before that, he received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from Zhejiang University in 2010 and Columbia in 2012.

While at Columbia, Li won the Grand Challenge at ACM Multimedia 2012, a global conference on multimedia research.

The ACM Multimedia Grand Challenge highlights practical, real-world multimedia problems posed by industry and academia, challenging researchers to benchmark their AI, streaming and vision algorithms on common data sets and platforms.

After obtaining his PhD, Li joined Microsoft Research headquarters in Washington state. Over the 10-plus years he worked there, he gradually rose through the ranks.

He previously held positions as principal researcher and principal architect, as well as principal applied science manager.

His research interests focused on machine intelligence, including multimodal content analysis and cloud computing.

Li co-authored the influential paper “Rethinking Classification and Localisation for Object Detection”, which has proved foundational in the field of computer vision and been cited more than 1,000 times.

Published in 2020, the paper proposed the “double-head method” to solve the distinct requirements of classification and localisation in artificial intelligence.

The method refers to a strategy of using two specialised “heads” or mechanisms to handle different parts of a complex task simultaneously.

At Tongji, Li’s boss is Hua Xiansheng, executive dean of the university’s Institute of AI for Engineering.

Hua worked at Microsoft Research as well for more than 14 years.

According to its official website, the Institute of AI for Engineering at Tongji is a newly established top AI research institution in Shanghai.

Its core concept focuses on “AI4E (AI for engineering)” and it aims to make breakthroughs in important technologies for foundational models and intelligent agents in engineering.