It’s been a very quiet week for gaming, with time (and inclination) diminished due to work-related pressures best described as “panic”. All good fun, supposedly, but it’s a bit of a bitch when do-it-for-the-team commitment impacts my OCD.
A return to Ridge Racer 6 with my UK (and AU)-based chums revealed that the old girl has lost little of her charm. After some quality racing with a field of a dozen, we decided to crank the handicap up to give some of the younger players a chance at the win. And bugger me if the pack doesn’t immediate bunch up, with less than two seconds separating first from last – resulting in tons of swearing and laughs and more swearing. Fantastic stuff – I do love our little semi-yearly stoushes.
The only other game to get a look-in this week was Majora’s Mask. It’s an infuriating game; I plodded painfully along throughout the week, not knowing what exactly it was I was supposed to be doing, gleaning a mask here, a happy Townie there. Eventually, frustration overwhelmed me – I had to head to GamesFAQs where I (thankfully) found a spoiler-free walkthrough… and inching through it (to avoid any spoiler-free spoilers ;) revealed that my frustration stemmed from a very early mis-reading of the game. Well, not so much a mis-reading… more a case of Majora not living up to my Zelda expectations.
See, I’m struggling to remember a back-and-forth quest in any other Zelda game; so, when I’m asked for a potion, and I couldn’t previously buy one at the shop where I’m expected to buy one, I’m hardly likely to return there, am I?
:seethe:
So I’m a little disappointed, to be honest. I’ve finally got to the first dungeon, and cleared it out without too many problems, and that was as enjoyable as I was expecting the rest of the game to be… but then it was followed by an annoying race. Oh, and I managed to defeat that Temple Boss with no idea what I was doing (seriously – I didn’t even know I was hitting him). I’m still feeling unfairly oppressed by the pressure of the time limit, and I’m encountering issues where the game will hang – once after 50 minutes of play – which particularly annoys because of the limited ability to save the game in any meaningful way. But I can see some cleverness (and contradiction) in the structuring of the game in its Groundhog Day cycle, but hopefully I’ll be seeing more of the good stuff, and less of the frustrating bits.
Now all I hope for is an easing of the pressure at work – hey, I need at least a couple of hours gaming a night!