General Analysis - BooLAW/Zelda-Project GitHub Wiki
##Technical Profile
“The Legend of Zelda : A Link to the past” was first released for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, it was also released for the GameBoy Advance later but we will focus on the SNES version.
“The Legend of Zelda : A Link to the past” is an action-adventure game, the game was very successful, and until it was finally discounted sold 4.61 million of copies becoming the 6th best-selling SNES game. But it was not only acclaimed by users, the specialised press also loved the game, and got an average mark above 9/10 in nearly every.
Action-adventure is a very common genre, the first one was Adventure for the Atari 2600. However, while Adventure was a top-view game The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the past has a 3/4 top-view which allows to have a fake 3D capable of hiding some elements behind others. Although is fairly common to use top-view, or variants of it, action-adventure can also be in all type of views. That’s the case of Metroid games, which go from 2D lateral scrolls to 3D first person games.
The SNES CPU was a 16 bit Ricoh 5422 running at 1’79 , 2’78 or 3’58 MHz, it was variable.It had 128KB of RAM. As for the GPU it actually had 2 16 bit processors the S-PPU1 and the S-PPU2, that allowed the SNES to display 4096 colors in screen from a palette of 32768 at a resolution between 256x224 and 512x448. “The Legend of Zelda : A Link to the past” to the past ran at 256x244. It could only display 128 sprites in screen. The SNES had a refresh rate of 60 Hz.
##History of the game
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, that is also known as Zelda 3 or Zelda III, is an action-RPG game developed by Nintendo for the console Super Nintendo Entertainment System. This game is the third release on the saga and without any doubt one of the most popular games of it.
The game was released in 1991 in Japan and 1992 in North America and Europe. The project has been lead by Shigeru Miyamoto and his team. Ten years later the game was adapted to the Game Boy Advance by Capcom, in 2002. This new version of the game included new extra content. It was a multiplayer adventure named, The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords. As the name says, it was possible to play with other three friends. The plot of this new version gave the origin of the character known as Vaati to the saga. There was another version of the game for the Satellaview, is a satellite modem peripheral for Nintendo’s Super Famicom, in the days of the Super Nintendo. However, this version didn’t include any changes from the original. Because of that, the version was just released in Japan and it wasn’t available in any other country.
The name A Link to the Past is a play on words with the name of the main character Link. This also refers to the fact that the history happens before the first two games. This suggests that the Link from A Link to the Past is not the same Link from the old games. The name of the game can cause a bit of confusion because Link does not travel in time, what he really does is travel across two different dimensions, the Dark World and the Light World.