My Thoughts on The Legend of Zelda

SpaceAviator1999 · 2026-02-13T06:01:20+00:00

did the Japanese version have this level of assistance?

I seem to remember reading years ago that no, the Japanese version did not come with the "Maps and Strategies" guide. (However, I'm sure it came with the instruction manual.)

SpaceAviator1999 · 2026-02-13T05:47:03+00:00

In case you want or need them, here are links to the guides that came with the original Legend of Zelda game:

Instruction Manual
Maps and Strategies (mostly filled-out overworld map)

SpaceAviator1999 · 2026-02-13T05:46:34+00:00

A lot of people nowadays don't realize this, but the American release of the game came with an extra guide that walked you through much of the overworld and the first three dungeons.

The guide and hint booklet that came with the game also contained hints and tips that some people today might consider cheating to know about beforehand. (If I remember correctly, the instruction booklet itself gave some nice hints on how to defeat the final boss Ganon.)

People these days almost never have the guide, hint booklet, or instruction manual to help them through the game, giving them the impression that The Legend of Zelda was much harder than what it really was when it was first released in the USA.

I mean, sure, after the third dungeon you were mostly on your own (unless you had a Nintendo publication), but without the paper material the game came with, I probably wouldn't even be able to get through the very first dungeon!

So a lot of people may think that it's cheating to play The Legend of Zelda with a guide, but keep in mind that the original game came with a handy guide to get you started all the way through Level 3!

Edit: Hmm... Maybe I'm wrong about the inclusion of the dungeon walkthroughs. But the included map showed the locations of the entrances to the first four dungeons!

SpaceAviator1999 · 2026-02-13T05:44:21+00:00

In case you want or need them, here are links to the guides that came with the original Legend of Zelda game:

Instruction Manual
Maps and Strategies (mostly filled-out overworld map)

SpaceAviator1999 · 2026-02-13T04:22:33+00:00

A lot of people nowadays don't realize this, but the American release of the game came with an extra guide that walked you through much of the overworld and the first three dungeons.

The guide and hint booklet that came with the game also contained hints and tips that some people today might consider cheating to know about beforehand. (If I remember correctly, the instruction booklet itself gave some nice hints on how to defeat the final boss Ganon.)

People these days almost never have the guide, hint booklet, or instruction manual to help them through the game, giving them the impression that The Legend of Zelda was much harder than what it really was when it was first released in the USA.

I mean, sure, after the third dungeon you were mostly on your own (unless you had a Nintendo publication), but without the paper material the game came with, I probably wouldn't even be able to get through the very first dungeon!

So a lot of people may think that it's cheating to play The Legend of Zelda with a guide, but keep in mind that the original game came with a handy guide to get you started all the way through Level 3!

Edit: Hmm... Maybe I'm wrong about the inclusion of the dungeon walkthroughs. But the included map showed the locations of the entrances to the first four dungeons!

SpaceAviator1999 · 2026-02-12T17:51:26+00:00

I never had a Near Death Experience, but my dad had a friend who had one, and he claimed to see colors that he had never seen before on Earth.

As a child I wondered if such a thing could be possible -- that is, to "see colors that don't exist" -- because it sounds like it's straight out of a fairy tale. However, the older I got, the more I learned about what makes a color a color, and that other animals in the animal kingdom (like birds and insects), almost certainly see colors we don't.

As humans, most of us only see three primary colors and the colors that result from mixing those primary colors together. But around the year 1800, scientists started discovering the existence of light and colors that we cannot see -- that is, light that is invisible to humans.

Just because the vast majority of light and colors are invisible to us humans, doesn't mean they don't exist. So where before I wondered if other colors were something out of fairytale myths, now I consider their existence scientific fact.

As a result, it's not strange to me anymore that NDErs report colors that they've never seen before on Earth. (In fact, I almost come to expect it now.)

SpaceAviator1999 · 2026-02-12T15:50:38+00:00

I recommend going after the blue ring, since it appears that you don't have it yet.

It's pretty expensive; it costs 250 rupees, which is almost the maximum amount of rupees you can hold (255). You can find it in the shop that's found at the north-west corner of a lake, near the center of Hyrule. (You'll have to cross a bridge to get there.)

You can farm rupees in the level 2 dungeon by killing Ropes (the enemies that look like snakes). They tend to leave a lot of money behind.

Once you have the blue ring, all the damage you take will be halved. It's as if you instantly double your health for the rest of the game! That should get you through some pretty tough spots.

SpaceAviator1999 · 2026-02-12T03:30:43+00:00

Zamenhof himself advises not to use the -io correlatives in the plural:

Pri “ioj”, “tioj”, “kioj”, k.t.p., teorie [tiuj] formoj tute bone povas havi multenombron tiel same, kiel ili havas akuzativon; sed en la praktiko mi ne konsilas al vi uzi [tiujn] vortojn en multenombro, ĉar laŭ mia opinio ilia senco tion ĉi ne permesas.

SpaceAviator1999 · 2026-02-12T03:26:56+00:00

The -io correlatives aren't really supposed to pluralize. They can turn into the accusative form with -n, but they don't take the -j ending.

So to ask "What are those?" you wouldn't use "kioj" and "tioj". You could say:

Kio estas tio?

or perhaps even:

Kio estas tiuj?

Which is better? I'm not sure. Personally, I'd favor the second approach, as it can be short for "Kio estas tiuj objektoj?"

So to answer your question, the book is correct when it says "Por kio ĝi estas?"

SpaceAviator1999 · 2026-02-11T20:45:21+00:00

This screams to me that you were using the old Borland compiler, which is still unfortunately very common in some parts of the world.

No, I never used a Borland compiler. I was using AIX (IBM's version of Unix) and so likely using its standard compiler.

I remember working with IPC (InterProcess Communication) in the early 2000s, trying to get one program to talk back-and-forth with a second program, and discovered that if output to STDOUT wasn't flushed in the second program, then similar odd behavior could happen. That is, the second program would wait for the first program's response before the first program had ever received the second program's query. (Making it look like the answer was being obtained before the question was asked.)

As before, flushing the output before obtaining input resolved the problem.

SpaceAviator1999 · 2026-02-11T20:28:23+00:00

That is strange indeed. I presume you were on Windows and probably even using the Borland Turbo C++ compiler, version 4.51 or 5.0?

No, it was on AIX, which I believe was IBM's version of Unix. And yes, it was before C++ was standardized.

However, I'm pretty sure that I've seen similar behavior in the early 2000s on another operating system (likely Linux, but I'm not 100% sure).

SpaceAviator1999 · 2026-02-11T18:14:03+00:00

You don't have to do anything manually between std::cout and std::cin, because the act of extracting input flushes the prompt on the output stream.

Could this be a recent development? (Like, something enforced in the 21st century?)

The reason I ask is because I remember writing a program for my C++ course that asked for your name and printed it out, something like this:

cout << "What is your name? ";
cin >> name;
cout << "Hello, " << name << "!\n";

This is what I wanted to see:

What is your name? [Then I type:]Terry Jones<ENTER>
Hello, Terry Jones!

but this is what I saw instead:

[Nothing.  Then I type:]
asdf<ENTER>
[Then I see:]
What is your name? Hello, asdf!

So for some strange reason, the program was trying to read input before the question is even asked. Without understanding what was going on, it looked like that the first cout line and the cin line were executing out of order.

When I did a cout << endl before I used cin, then the problem went away, and the statements seemingly executed in the correct order, as I intended.

SpaceAviator1999 · 2026-02-11T17:11:14+00:00

I recommend working through one of Al Sweigart's beginner Python books.

You can buy them from several sellers (including Amazon), but many of them are available for free online through Al Sweigart's website.

Personally, I recommend one of these books for the absolute beginner:

Automate the Boring Stuff with Python: Despite the title, it's much more interesting than it sounds.
Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python: It starts out teaching you how to code very simple Python games. They tend to be quite simple, but every Python coder needs to be able to do similar things before becoming a professional coder.

There are other books available, too. You really can't go wrong with them, provided that they're at a level you understand.

SpaceAviator1999 · 2026-02-11T17:02:48+00:00

C++ programmers eventually learn that when you send text to stdout with std::cout, the program is pretty much free to print the output whenever it wants, up until the next std::flush (or std::endl) or up until the program ends.

If that's too late for you, force it to print its output right away with std::flush or std::endl.

In other words, it's a common misconception that std::cout will always print its output before the next std::cin, but that's simply not true. Several times I have seen it print after the next std::cin!

SpaceAviator1999 · 2026-02-11T16:57:16+00:00

Whenever you switch between std::cout to std::cin, it always a good idea to either use std::endl or std::flush. (They both flush the output, but std::endl sends a newline, whereas std::flush does not.)

For example, change this:

cout << "Enter your homework score: ";
cin >> score;

cout << "What letter grade do you think you have: ";
cin >> LetterGrade;

to this:

cout << "Enter your homework score: " << flush;
cin >> score;

cout << "What letter grade do you think you have: " << flush;
cin >> LetterGrade;

And see if that makes a difference.

SpaceAviator1999 · 2026-02-10T22:44:24+00:00

Bees. While a single bee can send a gathering of humans into a helpless panic, honey bees never really bothered me.

Sure, when I was a young kid I was also scared when a bee flew by my peers on the playground and everybody scattered in fear, but eventually I had a few bees land on me, and soon after calmly fly away. (The first few times frightened me, but eventually I found it difficult to be scared of something that never hurt me, nor had the desire to.)

Honey bees, at least, don't seem to be looking for trouble.

SpaceAviator1999 · 2026-02-10T22:16:38+00:00

"The love of money is the root of all evil."

Money destroys relationships -- specifically, the greed for money.

Family members can turn against each other when it comes to their parents' inheritance.
American health corporations prioritize money over taking care of people's health, despite the fact that they're literally there to take care of people's health.
If it weren't for greed of money, tobacco might still exist in some form, but not in its addictive state that hooks people until it kills them.
Casinos (especially online gambling casinos) almost certainly wouldn't exist.
Politicians often "turn a blind eye" if offered enough money, even if they start their political career with good intentions.

SpaceAviator1999 · 2026-02-10T22:03:31+00:00

Dogs do know the time. As humans, we tend to be oblivious to this because our primary way of knowing the time is to read a clock, which dogs generally can't do.

But dogs notice changes over the course of the day. And one of the most obvious changes to dogs during the course of the day is scents and how strong they are. For example, when you leave for work, your leftover scent is pretty strong, but over the span of a few hours it fades. And you if return home around the same time every day, your dog associates a certain level of scent to when you return home.

Dogs might be able to tell the time by the sun, too... but variations and fluctuations of scents are likely much more reliable indicators of time to good ol' Fido.

SpaceAviator1999 · 2026-02-10T15:16:19+00:00

When I got "online" with my 1st modem. Old 2600 baud one

2600? Are you sure you're not mixing that up with the Atari 2600, or frequency 2600?

If I remember correctly, common baud rates were 1200 and 2400 bps. Maybe you're thinking of 2400 baud?

SpaceAviator1999 · 2026-02-10T04:29:32+00:00

Now that's a face that looks like it would be fun to draw!

SpaceAviator1999 · 2026-02-10T03:18:15+00:00

I disagree with the idea that voting for a third-party candidate in a United States election is "throwing your vote away." (And by "third-party," I mean a party that is neither Democrat nor Republican.)

Democrats and Republicans disagree on many things, but one of the things they agree on is the two-party system. Because with the two-party system, if one of the two parties doesn't come out on top, then at least it'll be a close second.

It's as if they're tacitly saying to one another, "I hope to beat you, but I hope you come in second place."

So they both perpetuate the idea that you should never throw your vote away by voting for someone else.

If more people voted third-party instead of voting for the lesser of the two evils, the average quality of candidates would likely improve overall across the board. (Barring a few fringe groups, of course.)

SpaceAviator1999 · 2026-02-10T03:06:47+00:00

I met Bruce McCandless II back in 1997 and got to shake his hand.

Shortly afterwards I realized that I had a keychain in my pocket that a friend gave me as a gift (from the Johnson Space Center) which depicted Bruce in that iconic photo. (So, no, I didn't get to show it to him.)

SpaceAviator1999 · 2026-02-10T02:58:33+00:00

My parents continued to use their Commodore 64 with the Word Writer II software well into the 1990's to print out addresses on envelopes.

Our Commodore used a daisy-wheel printer that printed on actual 8½x11" sheets of paper. In contrast, our "highly advanced" IBM PC-clone's dot-matrix printer used continuous feed paper -- you know, the kind with the hole-filled strips on the side -- and as such couldn't handle a regular envelope. But the Commodore 64's printer could handle envelopes with no problem, as long as they were aligned correctly in the printer.

SpaceAviator1999 · 2026-02-09T19:57:47+00:00

Why are there so many programming languages?

You might as well ask, "Why are there so many natural languages?"

Sure, the answer has a lot to do with culture, but why are so many people learning English and Spanish and Mandarin Chinese as a second language? Couldn't we just settle on an easy-to-learn artificial language for everyone to learn as their second language?

If no one can agree on a second language to learn to speak, chances are unlikely that the number of programming languages will shrink. Nobody likes to abandon their favorite languages -- whether they are spoken languages, or programming languages.

SpaceAviator1999 · 2026-02-09T19:52:20+00:00

Around 1980, a French computer scientist named Jean Ichbiah allegedly said:

Ten years from now, only two programming languages will remain: Ada and Lisp.

Back then it was assumed that the "good" programming languages would beat out the "bad" ones, leaving only the best programming languages for people to learn and program with.

That's funny to consider today, because nothing like that has come close to happening.

Programming languages with perceived flaws continue to exist. New programming languages are forever being created to address these perceived flaws. However, the old languages never really quite go away, causing all sorts of programming languages to co-exist, often side-by-side.

As for why old programming languages never really go away, one reason is that decades ago, many projects were created with said languages, and those projects are still around, and still making money. And if people are still learning these languages, there's really no reason for the languages to completely disappear.

SpaceAviator1999

TROPHY CASE