Post by SkyeWelse on Sept 27, 2006 19:32:28 GMT -5
While we are on the subject of neato games to play, here's another one that might have been missed:
The Legend of Zelda: The Ancient Stone Tablets (Kodai no Sekiban) or rather (Inishie no Sekiban).
For those that don't know what this game is, it was a modified version of Zelda 3 with new dungeons, puzzles, character npc and enemy sprties, and live streaming voice acting and narriation for several of the characters. This game was released several years back in Japan for the Satellaview system, which was an attachment peripheral for the Super Famicom (Super Nintendo). Basically, the game left off after the events of Zelda III: A Link to the Past (Or Triforce of the Gods - Japanese title) and was presented as an pyeudo-online adventure during a four week period. Each week Japanese gamers could plug-in to their Satellaview systems around 6:00 p.m. and play for aproximately one hour's time in order to accomplish the goals and secrets that could be found within that particular week's zone that was available to the player. As the player found items, completed dungeons and gained powerups, they would basically time-attack their way through each week trying to get as much done as possible to gain a score. After the first week ended, their progress would be saved and then transferred to the next week's zone and so forth allowing a larger and larger expansion of the moddified Zelda III world map for the player to explore. As the ulitmate goal was to collect 8 ancient stone tablets, (instead of pendants, or crystals), player's were encouraged to make the questing for these artifacts their number one priority in hopes that with all eight in hand, the player could open access to the final dungeon and ultimately fight the final battle and see the true ending to the game. But everything about the game was completely optional, and if you explored too much or chose to slack off during play and did not complete your quests for the stone tablets in time, then you would get the bad ending: The traditional "Thanks for Playing" ending.
Eventually after all four weeks ended, the player's with the highest scores would be sent prizes from Nintendo of Japan. The details of the prizes are unfortunately unknown.
This was just another one of Nintendo's projects that really was way ahead of it's time, but ultimately it didn't sell well enough and the Satellaview chapter came to a close.
Fortunately, parts of each of the weekly roms were eventually ripped and spread across the internet... but there-in lay the problem since most of just about everything in the game was broken in some manner of speaking since a great deal of the graphical content and sound was actually streamed over the connection the Satellaview server, St. Giga. So fixing this up to become playable was thought by many to be impossible. But one group didn't give up on it and spent around 2 years or so poking at it and fixing it up bit by bit. Eventually many of the textures and collision points were fixed, a translation was made, the maps were fixed along with other misc bugs and all that was left was to attempt to recreate the dungeon and inside room walls throughout the game using an Zelda III editor known as Hyrule Magic. This of course took an exceedingly long time and effort to complete, but the group over at the BS Zelda Homepage finally pulled it off and started releasing each of the weekly installments each week for everyone to play.
bszelda.zeldalegends.net/bszelda.shtml
Just yesterday the final week (week 4) was released to the public, making the first un-official complete set Zelda AST with just about everything fixed. Of course the music that plays for inside-rooms such as dunegons is still missing, but aside from that the roms are now fully playable and can only be played currently through emulation. The group is still going to attempt to fix it up even further, so that the sound works and perhaps allowing you a choice to play as either the Male or Female Satellaview mascot (since the main character is not Link this time around) and perhaps merge the weeks together as much as possible. Voice acting streaming is also a possibilty with some of the newer SNES emus out there, but since there does not seem to be recored record of actual play of the game in Japan, it would be near impossible to determine what was said, where in the game and when. So this is about as good as it is going to get and it makes me very happy to see a romhacking project like this get completed and produced by a group that never gave up the fight to get it fixed up.
As a favor to their continued support of the game, I secretly worked with the Admin of the project to release a fan-made artwork (a few versions of it anyway) that is composed of edited official Zelda (And Xak) artwork to be released alongside the game's release to the public since there was virtually no official artwork of the game that was originally released with it.
Anyhow, I encourage anyone who enjoy's Zelda or Zelda-like games to give it a spin sometime when they are feeling up to it. It's kinda of an interesting twist to Zelda III and I've enjoyed playing through it.
-SkyeWelse
The Legend of Zelda: The Ancient Stone Tablets (Kodai no Sekiban) or rather (Inishie no Sekiban).
For those that don't know what this game is, it was a modified version of Zelda 3 with new dungeons, puzzles, character npc and enemy sprties, and live streaming voice acting and narriation for several of the characters. This game was released several years back in Japan for the Satellaview system, which was an attachment peripheral for the Super Famicom (Super Nintendo). Basically, the game left off after the events of Zelda III: A Link to the Past (Or Triforce of the Gods - Japanese title) and was presented as an pyeudo-online adventure during a four week period. Each week Japanese gamers could plug-in to their Satellaview systems around 6:00 p.m. and play for aproximately one hour's time in order to accomplish the goals and secrets that could be found within that particular week's zone that was available to the player. As the player found items, completed dungeons and gained powerups, they would basically time-attack their way through each week trying to get as much done as possible to gain a score. After the first week ended, their progress would be saved and then transferred to the next week's zone and so forth allowing a larger and larger expansion of the moddified Zelda III world map for the player to explore. As the ulitmate goal was to collect 8 ancient stone tablets, (instead of pendants, or crystals), player's were encouraged to make the questing for these artifacts their number one priority in hopes that with all eight in hand, the player could open access to the final dungeon and ultimately fight the final battle and see the true ending to the game. But everything about the game was completely optional, and if you explored too much or chose to slack off during play and did not complete your quests for the stone tablets in time, then you would get the bad ending: The traditional "Thanks for Playing" ending.
Eventually after all four weeks ended, the player's with the highest scores would be sent prizes from Nintendo of Japan. The details of the prizes are unfortunately unknown.
This was just another one of Nintendo's projects that really was way ahead of it's time, but ultimately it didn't sell well enough and the Satellaview chapter came to a close.
Fortunately, parts of each of the weekly roms were eventually ripped and spread across the internet... but there-in lay the problem since most of just about everything in the game was broken in some manner of speaking since a great deal of the graphical content and sound was actually streamed over the connection the Satellaview server, St. Giga. So fixing this up to become playable was thought by many to be impossible. But one group didn't give up on it and spent around 2 years or so poking at it and fixing it up bit by bit. Eventually many of the textures and collision points were fixed, a translation was made, the maps were fixed along with other misc bugs and all that was left was to attempt to recreate the dungeon and inside room walls throughout the game using an Zelda III editor known as Hyrule Magic. This of course took an exceedingly long time and effort to complete, but the group over at the BS Zelda Homepage finally pulled it off and started releasing each of the weekly installments each week for everyone to play.
bszelda.zeldalegends.net/bszelda.shtml
Just yesterday the final week (week 4) was released to the public, making the first un-official complete set Zelda AST with just about everything fixed. Of course the music that plays for inside-rooms such as dunegons is still missing, but aside from that the roms are now fully playable and can only be played currently through emulation. The group is still going to attempt to fix it up even further, so that the sound works and perhaps allowing you a choice to play as either the Male or Female Satellaview mascot (since the main character is not Link this time around) and perhaps merge the weeks together as much as possible. Voice acting streaming is also a possibilty with some of the newer SNES emus out there, but since there does not seem to be recored record of actual play of the game in Japan, it would be near impossible to determine what was said, where in the game and when. So this is about as good as it is going to get and it makes me very happy to see a romhacking project like this get completed and produced by a group that never gave up the fight to get it fixed up.
As a favor to their continued support of the game, I secretly worked with the Admin of the project to release a fan-made artwork (a few versions of it anyway) that is composed of edited official Zelda (And Xak) artwork to be released alongside the game's release to the public since there was virtually no official artwork of the game that was originally released with it.
Anyhow, I encourage anyone who enjoy's Zelda or Zelda-like games to give it a spin sometime when they are feeling up to it. It's kinda of an interesting twist to Zelda III and I've enjoyed playing through it.
-SkyeWelse
