Зелданың Отызыс Саяхаты: Толемак Аңызы

1995 video game

Zelda's Adventure is an action adventure fantasy video game developed by Viridis Corporation and released on the CD i format, based on The Legend of Zelda franchise. Set in the land of Tolemac ("Camelot" spelled backwards), the game follows a non traditional storyline, in which Link has been captured by the evil lord Ganon, and Zelda must collect the seven celestial signs in order to rescue him. Released nearly eight months after the first two Zelda CD i games, Zelda's Adventure uses a different game engine from Faces of Evil and Wand of Gamelon. Whereas the first two CD i games were patterned on the side scrolling Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, Zelda's Adventure took the top down The Legend of Zelda, A Link to the Past, and Link's Awakening as its models. Zelda's Adventure is the only Legend of Zelda game to feature live action cutscenes. Reception for the game was negative, and whereas some critics have given more nuanced reviews of the first two games, Zelda's Adventure is regarded as one of the worst video games ever made.

Unlike the previous two CD i Zelda games, which take the side scrolling view from Zelda II, Zelda's Adventure is played with the overhead view found in The Legend of Zelda. Playing as Princess Zelda, the aim is to fight through the Seven Shrines of the Underworld to collect the celestial signs, and bring the land of Tolemac to an Age of Lightness. Unlike the other two games, Zelda's Adventure was created by Viridis, an entirely different company, with a change in style and gameplay. The FMV sequences that present the plot are live action instead of animated. Princess Zelda (Diane Burns, Annie Ward) is recruited by the court astrologer Gaspra (Mark Andrade) to collect the signs to defeat Ganon and save Link. Guided by the words of Shurmak, Zelda must first travel through the forest to the Shrine of Rock, where she encounters Llort, a greedy minion of Ganon who protects the first celestial sign. Gaspra appears to congratulate Zelda and direct her to the Shrine of Illusion where she faces Pasquinade to earn the second celestial sign. Guided by the inhabitants of Tolemac, Zelda then makes her way to the mountains to conquer the Shrines of Air and Destiny before crossing the great south sea to challenge Agwanda at the Shrine of Water for the fifth sign. Gaspra directs Zelda once more to the Shrine of Power in the southeast where her strength is tested, before traveling to the Shrine of Fire where she will face Warbane. As Zelda reaches to collect the final celestial sign Ganon's claw stops her, and she is drawn into his lair for the final battle. In the game's final scenes, peace returns to Tolemac. Link is revealed to be safe, holding hands with Zelda where the entrance to Ganon's lair once stood, the land now thriving with new growth.

In 1989, Nintendo signed a deal with Sony to begin development of a CD ROM based system known as the "Nintendo PlayStation" or the SNES CD to be an add on to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System that would allow for FMV and larger games. However, Nintendo broke the agreement and instead signed with Philips to make the add on, which caused Sony to spin off their add on into its own console called the PlayStation. Witnessing the poor reception of the Sega Mega CD, Nintendo scrapped the idea of making an add on entirely. Contracting out to independent studios, Philips subsequently used the characters to create three games for the CD i, with Nintendo taking no part in their development except to give input on the look of the characters based on the artwork from Nintendo's original two titles and that of their respective instruction booklets. Philips insisted that the development studios utilize all aspects of the CD i's capabilities including FMV, high resolution graphics, and CD quality music. The backgrounds for Zelda's Adventure were created from videos of scenery near Santa Monica Boulevard in West L. A., footage of Hawaii taken from a helicopter and the developers' vacation photos. This decision was responsible for much of the game's RAM usage, causing backgrounds to scroll slowly and causing extreme frustration to the game's developers. The CD i's technical abilities were so limited that the use of one or two kilobytes of system RAM caused arguments amongst the developers. The game's music composer, Mark Andrade also physically portrayed the part of Gaspra in the game's cutscenes, while his voice was dubbed by The Andy Griffith Show star, Hal Smith. Zelda in the game's opening cutscene was played by office receptionist Diane Burns, while in other cutscenes as well in game she was portrayed by Annie Ward. Developers have stated they were not influenced by the first two CD i Zelda games. These development figures were reduced in the final product which had only a handful of NPCs and whose playthrough time has been placed by one commentator at only 12 hours. The majority of the game's programming was done by one person—Randy Casey. Randy was responsible for programming all of the game and all associated tools. Additional programming for the inventory system and game progress tracking, dubbed "FRP engine", was done by Gavin James. There is conflicting information about the game's budget—one developer claims there was "no budget at all"

Zelda's Adventure was widely panned by critics. The graphics of Zelda's Adventure were called "blurry and digitized". Wired magazine said that the graphics were some of the worst ever encountered. Zelda's Adventure was released as the Philips CD i was being discontinued and has become very rare over time, as have the first two Philips Zelda games; Zelda's Adventure is regularly sold for over $100. Despite giving positive reviews for Faces of Evil and Wand of Gamelon, neither Danny Cowan of 1UP. com nor RetroGamer John Szczepaniak would extend them to Zelda's Adventure, which Szczepaniak described as demonstrating arbitrary and illogical design, sloppy visuals, nearly non existent music, excruciatingly high difficulty and cumbersome loading and controlling. Gameplay for Zelda's Adventure has also been portrayed as a trial and error effort to guess which items can be used to defeat which enemy. Cowan called Zelda's Adventure "practically unplayable" due to the jerky frame rate, unresponsive controls, and long load times, summarizing his review with a warning to avoid the game at all costs. IGN writer Peer Schneider was excited that a new developer was chosen instead of the one behind Wand of Gamelon and Faces of Evil, though still felt it was not worth playing despite being an improvement over the other two games. He recommended it only for "die hard Zelda fan[s]".