Why Nintendo made spike blocks passable with hookshot

I've been thinking about this for a while and I think I now know why they did this.

The spike blocks probably originally acted like solid block tiles, but then while test playing the game players probably hookshotted to these blocks and thus attached to them and then after attaching to them the player then got pulled into the spikes and got hurt.

An order to prevent this Nintendo just made the hookshot go through the spikes and since there isn't any real serious instance in the official game where the player can attach to something on the other side of the spikes, Nintendo just went with it.

This property wasn't meant to literally go through spikes by attaching to something on the other side of them, but to prevent the player from pulling themselves into spikes.

So basically the reason why spike blocks have this property is so that players don't accidentally use the hookshot to attach onto spikes and then get injured by them.

Interestingly because of this property in hacks you can do all kinds of very creative and interesting things by using these spike blocks including one way passages and all sorts of puzzles.

I haven't checked AST or the other satellite zelda 3 game to see if there is any spikes that you can hookshot through in a significant way.

Interesting but pure speculation.

This is like trying to explain why there's only one bed in Link's house or...why the switches under pots need to have a block on top of them to be activated...doesn't the pots already have enough weight?

Or...



Video game logic Erock! Doesn't makes sense most of the time!

Erockbrox wrote:I've been thinking about this for a while and I think I now know why they did this.

The spike blocks probably originally acted like solid block tiles, but then while test playing the game players probably hookshotted to these blocks and thus attached to them and then after attaching to them the player then got pulled into the spikes and got hurt.

An order to prevent this Nintendo just made the hookshot go through the spikes and since there isn't any real serious instance in the official game where the player can attach to something on the other side of the spikes, Nintendo just went with it.

This property wasn't meant to literally go through spikes by attaching to something on the other side of them, but to prevent the player from pulling themselves into spikes.

So basically the reason why spike blocks have this property is so that players don't accidentally use the hookshot to attach onto spikes and then get injured by them.

Interestingly because of this property in hacks you can do all kinds of very creative and interesting things by using these spike blocks including one way passages and all sorts of puzzles.

I haven't checked AST or the other satellite zelda 3 game to see if there is any spikes that you can hookshot through in a significant way.

That's not it, since you can easily make the spike property to simply not be hookshotable. To be able to hookshot through spikes is probably a leftover bug, which was never fix. The same for the "hookshot invincibility". Going through spikes with the hookshot is simply the way this item is programed. When hooked in, the main sprite needs to disregard everything it touches in the process of hookshoting from A to B to successfully come across pits, specially if the pit is on bg2. The side effect of this is that you should be able to hookshot-travel through any object, if indeed the hookshot-as-the-item has the ability to go through first. To debug this the object must be made solid and then either hookshotable or not.

For instance: you can also hookshot-travel through a small fence, however the small fence is solid and not hookshotable for the item itselft, so you can never hookshot-travel through it. I'm assuming Nintendo forgot to add the same feature to the spike.

I suspect it might be that the spike block shares the same property as any hookshottable barrier, but it is probably either a program limitation or an oversight.

From a game designers perspective, if I were making a game I would not want the player to be able to lock onto a spike block and then be impaled into it with the hookshot. So then to avoid this I would make the hookshot just not interact with spike blocks.

While this is just my guess, it makes sense from a game designers perspective.

It is possible that it was an oversight. Unfortunately editing the properties might require asm to get the "ding" sound to appear instead. what i find hilarious is that you can kill the moving spike blocks because they are sprites, not tiles and it can be easily done by changing the damage class (forgot which one so you will need to experiment, but it will take several hits and can potentially break the game), but I digress.