Ocarina of Time: A Deconstructivist Adventure (Pt 2.)

Here's a comparative of the Oot Hyrule Castle versus the Super Smash Bros. 64 stage. They actually look more or less the same with a few small changes.

Here’s a shot looking straight down through the ground. That ball down there is actually the sun shining up through a black plane while it drifts back to the horizon. I never thought about it until I saw this. I guess I just assumed that he sun appeared/loaded at the horizon and floated across the sky, disappearing at the other horizon where it was gone until it loaded again. But apparently it’s always there, continually rotating around the skybox in the same sense that the real sun appears to work.

There’s typically not much to see in the dungeons because you’re inside rooms with solid walls and a ceiling, so you can’t fly over the tops of the walls and look beyond. But the Forest Temple has some open air cloisters so I tried those areas out.

I found a duplicate elevator of the one on the first chamber of the temple, just floating there behind the walls. No clue about this. Could be beta. Could be a glitch but again, I’ve never seen glitches like this in this game. Stuff doesn’t seem to move around and appear in weird places. It just doesn’t appear at all if anything.  

There’s also this water texture that is only visible as the water surface in this well. Yet there’s a ton of extra extending beyond the wall and into oblivion. I can also stand, walk and climb on invisible surfaces all throughout this area. I even found an area that injures Link when he walks on it. It makes little flames appear on his feet which is what happens when he walks on lava. For being outside the playable realm, there’s sure a lot of constructs here. Was this supposed to be a playable area or was it just a dumping ground for unused code?

One thing I thought was interesting was all of the instances where some object has to be recreated in several different areas as to appear further away or closer. This might constitute creating a flat bitmap image for something that’s really far away. For closer things, they seem to make simplified mockups. When I fly up to investigate, I often find hilariously large size discrepancies between the backdrop mockup version and the actual version.

Here’s the windmill. True size on top. Mockup on bottom (as viewed from the graveyard.)

The Lon Lon Ranch silo. This one’s REALLY bad. Like the Stonehenge prop from This is Spinal Tap bad.

Looks like they got Death Mountain about right though. (That speck in the air just above the peak is Link.)

Here’s a nice pullback shot to show the entirety if Bongo Bongo. Seeing this actually makes him more creepy to me.

The interesting thing about this boss fight is that you don’t enter the main room and immediately get locked in. You enter through a hole in the floor of a smaller chamber high above. So at any point during the fight with the levitation cheat on, you can just fly back up through the hole and leave.

I found a gossip stone tucked behind the roots of the Deku Tree which means it’s not accessible by conventional means at any point, young or old. Could be beta. Whatever it is, it’s sloppy because it’s not hidden that well but neither is it simple to get to. There’s another gossip stone on the tree’s right which I’d think would make this one pointless but I don’t know.

I can’t even begin to describe what I did in order to get in this completely empty shop in frozen Zora’s Domain but let’s just say it was an accident that happened while trying to do something else. I wish I could make a gif of this because it’s bizarre. Link is falling sideways into the background. If I hold down the levitate button, he rises headfirst toward the camera. At some point when he gets close enough, he does a 180 and begins going back into the background. So basically he “falls” and “rises” along this invisible U-shaped track on its side.

The levitation cheat also works in dialogue and cutscenes which makes them more fun. It even works in flashbacks. What the hell? This is interesting because it shows that throughout the whole game, no matter what’s happening on screen, you are always seeing in game models. The Link you see almost get trampled by Zelda fleeing the castle is the very same Link model that you control. Today, (and even back then on the Playstation since it had video capabilities,) your cutscenes are basically like watching a movie that was created in a vacuum. There is no direct in game content in them typically. Everything is recreated and staged with better looking models and graphics. This is probably more of a testament to the limitations of the N64 than anything. Not to say that it detracts or looks bad…

If you fly over the wall in the graveyard as young Link, you can see the pit that leads to Dampe’s tomb (black strip on the left of the map) even though there’s no headstone there and the ground above it looks normal. If you fly in the hole from under the ground, you go to the tomb and you can race Dampe’s ghost for the hookshot like normal… just as young Link. So yeah, you can go in a tomb that 
hasn’t been built yet and race the ghost of a guy that’s not dead.

Ocarina of Time: A Deconstructivist Adventure (Pt. 1)

A long time ago back when I could play video games whenever I wanted, I bought a Gameshark for the N64. I was starry eyed over being able to do whatever I wanted in any game, essentially making every game into a brand new sandbox game featuring the previous content. It would be great. In retrospect it kind of sucked. The only game I had that I could actually load cheats in with any amount of success was Super Mario 64 which for some reason is labeled “Super Mario Land 64” in the Gameshark game list.

Back then, there was more or less just one cheat that I really wanted: “press L to levitate” for the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I like glitches and unused beta content and discovering how stuff works and breaking games. I wanted to be able to fly around and go beyond the boundaries that the game sets and peek behind the curtain to see the inner workings and other stuff that you’re otherwise not supposed to see. Ocarina of Time is like the perfect game for this. It’s made in the 32 bit era which is interesting in that it was new territory in gameplay with many hurdles and limitations that had to be circumvented somehow. It’s got a decent sized world full of secrets and places that are supposed to be off limits for one reason or another. It’s also the video game that I’ve beaten the most and am quite familiar with.

I recently got my N64 and Gameshark Pro 3.0 out of their box to try and revisit this aspiration of yore. After several trials of fiddling around with the Gameshark and OoT, I found that even as an intelligent adult, I still can't make it work. It either won't load or just fucking freezes the game every time, just like every other game in my N64 library that isn’t SM64. The closest I got to a working trial was successfully loading the game with one cheat, (not the levitation one,) and starting in my house. But the second I walk out the door, The game crashes. What a crock of shit. Gameshark is a con. How does anyone do anything with these?

Then It occurred to me: why don’t I just try it on an emulator? Emulators didn’t exist the last time I thought about trying this, at least not for the N64 they didn’t. So, long story short, I tried it and got exactly what I’ve wanted for over a decade. And now since I was playing on a PC, I could take screenshots of all the weird shit I see and do. Despite wanting to see this stuff for a long time, I’ve avoided looking at any beta or glitch videos for this game because I wanted to have my own self-guided adventure like in all video games I play. So this is a pictorial documentation of my flying adventure across Hyrule, breaking the game wide open.

The courtyard where you meet Princess Zelda for the first time is one of the most interesting and detailed parts of the game. You have these three windows that you can look in and see actual interiors of the castle as opposed to just a flat picture of a window or shutters. Of course the interiors are only modeled to the necessary degree. Only the parts that you can see through the window exist. If you fly straight up and go through the sky textured ceiling, you can go over the courtyard walls and get a closer look at the interiors

Here’s the room with the pictures of Mario characters on the wall. Why is Bowser’s portrait elongated? Did they forget to hold down shift when scaling it? Note the conical shape of all the floors.

This is the hallway that Zelda is looking into through a window. The first really weird thing, besides the hall being just an interior fragment floating over an abyss, is that you can actually stand on the floor in here and run around. The second really weird thing is that those two guards aren’t just motionless models of the NPC castle guards. The designers took just the front panels of the guard models’ polygons and set them there like a suit of armor on display or a cardboard cutout. But in terms of the actual game, they cut in half or ripped the face off of two guys and then mounted them there.

One of the areas that I really wondered about in the game was the small stealth section area and courtyard within Hyrule castle. Specifically, I wanted to get in there when it was night. As an adult, this area doesn’t exist so I don’t need to wonder about that. But as young Link, if you crawl in through the drain at night, the area is inaccessible because it is blocked by two posted guards who throw you out if they detect you. You can’t walk past them. You can’t even fly over them. If levitating wasn’t going to work, I’d need to try another cheat. I tried the time of day modifier but it didn’t do anything. Then I tried the “show up in strange places” cheat which typically takes you to a non playable area upon activating it as you enter a new area. I went outside the castle and made sure it was night before activating it on my way back in. I appeared past the guards and out in the abyss but I was able to float back on the stage.

Well I did it. I got into the castle at night. Also the camera has broken out of the fixed camera for sneaking through the area and gone to the default in game camera.

Unfortunately this seems to be all there is. The rest of the place simply doesn’t need to exist when it’s night. What I really wanted to see was the Zelda courtyard at night but that area doesn’t have a dynamic skybox. In fact it doesn’t have a skybox at all. It has basically a ceiling colored with sky texture. Oh well...

Gerudo Fortress is one of the places you’re not supposed to be able to go when you’re young Link so I paid it a visit by flying straight over the assholes blocking the bridge. The place looks abandoned. There is literally no one in the town on the outside but if you go inside the buildings you’ll find that the carpenters that you’re supposed to rescue as adult Link are all already locked up there, (I guess this has been a habitual problem for them for years or maybe they just like being locked up in a village of exotic desert women.) They even beckon you over to their cells. There are also patrolling Gerudo guards inside. Everything is the same. It’s just the outside that’s different.

The funny thing is that if you get caught anywhere on Gerudo territory, you are not thrown in jail as you would be as an adult. You are instead promptly escorted off the premises and chucked into the frickin ravine to the water below. Damn.

On the top of the fortress is a chest with a heart piece in it. As an adult, you have to play the scarecrow song to get the scarecrow to appear on the roof and then use the hookshot on him to get up there. Since you’re not supposed to be able to get to any part of this area as young link, there’s no reason for this chest to exist but it does. If you look over to the left on the platform in the background, you’ll see a heartpiece sitting there. That’s not there when you’re an adult and it’s certainly not available as young Link so I can only assume it’s the heartpiece that’s supposed to go in the chest. But if it’s over there, then what’s in the chest now?

It’s an odd mushroom. A perishable trade quest item that you can only get as adult link and is never in a chest or even geographically anywhere near this area. This is just really weird. I went into a lot of places as young Link that I wasn’t supposed to be able go and everything still worked just the way it should which is why I’m suspicious of this instance. It looks more deliberate. It could be beta activity that the designers never even bothered to cover up because it’s in an area that’s already impossible to get to. This could have been an early idea and then they decided to put the heartpiece in the chest instead. Maybe you actually were supposed to get the mushroom here or maybe it was a placeholder for something. I guess it doesn’t really make much sense to get a perishable item from a chest.

Update: I went and looked up some beta and early concept stuff for OoT after my adventure and found evidence that young Link was originally supposed to be able to access Gerudo Fortress and the heartpiece there is apparently leftover from that idea. Likely the odd mushroom chest was too. So yay for me. I found and identified some beta content.

Manhunt

Manhunt on PlayStation 2 is a simple game where you take on the role of a convicted murderer who is supposedly executed for his crimes but awakens trapped in a twisted snuff game where he must sneak and kill his way through a gauntlet of homicidal gang members for a chance at freedom. It's like Hostel meets Hard Target. Kind of reminds me of The Suffering games. It also reminds me of the last book I wrote but that was based more on dangerous puzzles with the occasional fight rather than steamrolling your way through nameless waves of cannon fodder. I played it on a big HD TV so it looked like ass.

The game starts out pretty quick with little pomp and circumstance which is fine because it leaves you to wonder more, like who's the guy talking in my ear? Where the hell am I? Who's watching me? The first aggravating thing  you'll notice about the game is the fucked up camera. I’ve never seen anything like it. In pretty much any third-person game in existence, you move the camera with the right analogue stick and that’s just fine. In Manhunt, if you touch the right stick, it puts you in first-person view where you control the camera. You can not control the camera outside of first-person. The whole reason third-person exists at all is to see the surrounding environment, see around your character and around corners. First-person is like the antithesis of that. It’s totally counter intuitive. But at least the game gives you two different types of third-person corner peek techniques. I completely abandoned the right stick for the whole game. I never felt any reason to use first-person. I would have liked to have had some conventional third person camera controls though.

Each level takes you to a different area of abandon and squalor like a zoo, prison, the subway, junkyard and the like. Each place is locked up, rigged and full of homicidal hunters in order to facilitate a good snuff film starring you. You need to find your way through the areas, kill anyone that stands in your way, sometimes finding items to open things or complete tasks like get a crowbar to break a chain to advance through a locked gate.

In the game you can lure enemies to a location by making noise. Either hit something with your weapon, kick something or throw an object. This is really a mixed bag. It's nice when it works but often times you'll make noise within an an enemy's audible threshold but they won't come. Sometimes I'll try to lure a guy that's standing still in one spot only to find that you can't because he’s programmed to just sit there and only respond to you when you run at him screaming with machete in hand.

The hunters are all cliques or gang members, (cholos, neo nazis, some guys that just wanted to spice up their paintball matches,) that I guess subscribe to this production to be able to murder people. They’re constantly muttering to themselves as they patrol. Why does this happen so often in video games? Is it normal for guards to just wander around spouting soliloquies about their issues and their fascist credo in the dark? I don't think they internalize a single thought. I'm sure a couple of them might realistically act this way but it happens so much, it just seems weird. It reminds me of the splicers from Bioshock… only that made sense because they were all batshit insane.

On the HUD is a minimap/radar where enemies show up as yellow arrows (orange for suspicious and red for aware.) It's very similar to the Deus ex HR display but instead of enemies staying on the map, they just sort of waver in and out at random for unprescribed amounts of time. I don't understand why and it's incredibly annoying. If I have two guys on the radar and I'm around the corner and one turns his back to me but the other disappears, I can't strike the prone guy because I have no idea what the other asshole is doing. Eventually I adopted the method of just finding a nice hiding spot in the dark and clanging something on the wall to see if anyone shows up. You WILL get a lasting ping on your radar when the enemy is suspicious (AKA anyone close enough to hear you.) They will investigate the area without disappearing from the map and then you can fine tune where you want them to go by chucking a brick or bottle into a dark corner. Pick them off and when the radar is clear again, go set up in a new place and repeat until you know the area is safe. It works exactly like sonar. You can’t fucking see anything so you send out sound waves which make little blips show up on your map.

Pretty much the last thing you want to do in this game is get in a fight with an enemy. Fights are a crap shoot. They can last for what seems like minutes depending on your weapon. You have your light attack that barely does any damage and your heavy attack that gets interrupted 90% of the time. Realistically how many whacks with a machete can a person take before they're on the ground? In Manhunt it's like a dozen. Sometimes you can kill an enemy with little damage at all or you can go in and get your ass kicked in two seconds without landing a blow. You can't block but your enemies can. Their grapples always work better than your grapples. If two get on you at once, your options are run away or die. Unless you have a gun, continue striking from the shadows.

Speaking of guns, let me take a moment to praise the shotgun in this game. I don’t think I’ve ever used a shotgun in a video game that actually made me feel like I was using a shotgun. It typically kills in one blast at medium range. At close range, it will obliterate an enemy’s head off of their torso. The shot doesn’t disappear and become useless at five paces from your target like every shotgun ever. It’s one of the most satisfying weapons I’ve ever used in a video game.

The inventory lets you hold two regular weapons like a gun or a bat, a one use execution weapon like piano wire or a plastic bag, and a throwable distraction item like a bottle or a… severed head? Yeah, you can cut off someone’s head and carry it around to chuck somewhere at your discretion. On one hand I’m like what the fuck? On the other, that’s kind of cool. I only wish that when people went to investigate a noise and found a head that they started screaming and pissed themselves. But they’re all sociopathic killers so I guess you can’t expect such a reaction. As for the inventory system itself, there’s something really wrong with the rules of what you can hold when. I can carry a crowbar and a shotgun at one time but not a crowbar and a handgun, (even though that takes up less space,) because someone arbitrarily decided that handguns and melee weapons should occupy the same slot, completely ignoring the possibility that you may still have a perfectly good empty hand waiting for whatever random object it’s allowed to hold. Just make it so you can hold any two of whatever regular weapons. That makes more sense and is easier to remember than random and unrealistic rules about slots and combinations.

At the end of each scene, you get a rating out of five stars (like a movie.) One star is based on time so obviously, I’m not getting that one. I never get time bonuses in games because I like exploring too much. Three of the stars are based on brutality and kills. I think you get higher ratings for assassination style kills versus in combat slug outs. You can perform more brutal kills by charging up while behind an enemy, waiting for the lock-on cursor to change colors to yellow to red. So you’re basically participating in a risk/reward game where you can tap execute as soon as you’re in range for a safe kill or hold it down and tail the guy for an inordinate amount of time, hoping that he doesn’t turn around or become aware of you before you strike. Each weapon has its own set of brutal kill animations. They’re supposed to be all different and scaled on the gore spectrum but some of them look pretty much the same to me. Machete kills always involve about the same amount of action and end with you hacking off the person’s head. So I don’t see why one would be more harcore than the other. As for the fifth star… hell if I know. There’s no indication on the score screen how you get it, just that you can. My guess is that if you get the time bonus and all three stars for the gore fetish, you automatically get the fifth star but that’s stupid because you could never get a four star rating.

The difficulty really ramps up in the later levels. You get pitted against the entire police force and the mercenary group which works for the snuff ring. They’re better equipped and smarter than the other rabble you’ve faced. In a lot of these scenarios, sneaking is pretty much dead, replaced with ridiculously grueling Die Hard shootouts because enemies are swarming all over everywhere and communicate with each other, ensuring that it’s impossible to pull any less than all of them in a two mile radius. It’s completely unfair which means that you have to think differently to beat it, namely use the environment to your advantage. Alert them and find a hall and hide around the corner at the end. Then as they all bottleneck in the hall, pop around the corner for a quarter second and blast them with a shotgun. Then pop back and do it again. Timing is key.

In the last scenario, you’re at the snuff filmmaker’s mansion. Getting in takes you through a hedge maze and sculpture garden and about five-hundred-fucking-million mercenaries. Seriously, where do they all come from? The second you think you’ve got them all, four more show up and come after you, automatically aware of your presence no matter where you are. I actually thought that they were spawning somewhere and I was just going to have to storm the mansion instead of trying to endure infinite waves of enemies. You know what this reminded me of? The last level in Red Dead Revolver. Fucking Rockstar and its mansions!

Two things I don’t understand are if I’ve proven against insurmountable odds that I’m an unstoppable killing machine who wants this guy dead, why in the hell did he have his mercs bring me to his house? Second; who or what is Pigsy? All I know is that he’s this naked maniac wearing a pig head who escaped his chains in the basement and is going on a killing spree through the mansion like me. My only guess is that he’s another snuff film star. Maybe he was recruited against his will to be in this program like me and survived for so long that he became a basement pet. Then he went insane. Maybe they keep him there and cart him out when they film movies. He’s what I would be in a few years.

As weird as it sounds, this game sort of has lore. You have the part of the game that you’re presented with but then you begin to wonder what’s outside of that. How does all of this come together and what’s going on behind the scenes? Someone had to scout these locations and set them up. Who makes them escape proof? How do they get candidates? It must be an inside job with the prison. Who’s in on this? Who gets to hunt? Is it invitation only? It’s the negative space that becomes really interesting when you start to think about it… like a haiku. Yes, I just compared Manhunt by Rockstar to haiku.

The Mansion Assault

Green tunnels- flitting

Red sprays and chunks with no end

More coming. Fuck you.