If you’ve ever played a Zelda game before, you know that not every item feels like a meaningful addition to your toolkit. Rather, some items just spend most of the game collecting dust in your inventory. For every amazing item like the Hookshot, there’s another disappointing item like the Deku Nuts. What sets these items apart? What makes an item useless, and what makes an item worth using?
Read moreCadence of Hyrule II?: What I'd Want To See In A Sequel
Whenever you combine two games some of the original design elements aren’t going to work well together. As a result, some of these elements end up cut or scaled back. Cadence of Hyrule’s movement system is a pretty clear example of this. In classic Zelda games you can move fairly freely around the world, but in Crypt of the Necrodancer movement is locked to a grid and must be done in time with the music. Since these two movement systems are incompatible with each other, Cadence of Hyrule chose to ditch Zelda’s movement system in favour of Necrodancer’s.
But now that the core gameplay of Cadence of Hyrule has been created and tested (and we know that it’s excellent), I think that Brace Yourself Games should consider revisiting some of these design decisions.
Read moreEmotion Analysis: Wind Waker and Live Enjambment
I have coined a word to describe a particular type of dialogue delivery that's pretty much exclusive to videogames: "live enjambment"!
Live enjambment is a literary device that is, predictably, a variation on regular literary enjambment. This specifically concerns the affordance that only 'timed' media like lyric videos and videogames can take advantage of.