Tonight I’ve found myself absolutely fascinated by these two videos that I’ve been watching while I’m working.

The idea is – get this – to complete the original Legend of Zelda on the NES … without ever actually taking the sword!

😯

I actually started watching Mike Matei’s play through the other night, so I finished that first and then decided to watch another one by a speed runner who did it in about a quarter of the time. Without a sword! Both videos are fun to watch – Mike’s is a bit longer and more chatty along the way, whereas the speed run is obviously more intense because the guy literally gets to the end of the game in less than an hour!

One of these days I’m going to have to try something like this myself because it seems like once you’ve got a good starting path, it might not be so bad. Right off the bat, you would think that you’d just be helpless without a weapon … until you realize that there are a couple of caves where you can get free rupees, which you can then use to buy either the candle or bombs. In the speed run, the guys even talk about tricks for getting extra bombs like keeping track of the counter that triggers bomb drops (kill 10 enemies w/o getting hit, and kill the last one with a bomb), so it’s really neat to watch the different strategies play out, especially in the beginning when resources are few and far between.

It was also interesting to see that neither one of the players did the dungeons in order, something that I still do religiously even though I’ve played through them a thousand times! But it makes sense to snag the raft and the ladder to help beef up on heart containers earlier in the game when you’ve got such limited ways to fight back … I’ve got to think that you’ve gotta play pretty calculated until you get the wand or red candle to provide infinite firepower in each room.

I suppose if nothing else, you can always go grind with just the blue candle – slowly – but at least you’re not completely screwed.

Last trick that I picked up – clearly bombs are the way to go when you’re fighting darknuts, something I’ve never tried myself. Either that or just do that fancy thing to skip over the edge block to avoid fighting them altogether, but just between you and me that seems like it might be pushing it a bit! 😉