It's Funny What Expectations Can Do

It's been awhile since I've talked about video games, which is a bit funny considering how many I've been purchasing lately. I own the three consoles from the previous generation, and their games are getting somewhat scarce, I've been picking up any games that look interesting as I come across them, since I never know if I'll get another chance to pick them up. In some cases, I'm purchasing games I owned previously, but traded in for one reason or the other*. Some of them have wound up being disappointing (Curse: Eye of Isis), but they haven't been too expensive, so that's not the worst thing. I've fallen back on my old strategy of playing all of them in rotation, maybe a couple of hours at a time. So I'm not letting any of them sit unused, but I can't say I'm making considerable progress on any of them either. When you only play a game for maybe 4 hours total in a month, that'll happen.

One of the games I bought (or rebought) was Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker. I traded it in close to 3 years ago, probably because Nintendo finally released Twilight Princess for the Gamecube, and I thought that was the Zelda game I was waiting for, not this more cartoonish looking game. I received Twilight Princess eventually (birthday gift) played it for about a month, and well, it wasn't quite what I guess I was hoping for. I suppose I was hoping you'd be able to switch between playing as a human or wolf at will, so you could play through dungeons either way, and that wasn't the case, at least not as far into the game as I got. Plus, the weird shadow kid that rides on you when you're a wolf irritated me. Maybe it wasn't any of that; maybe I just raised my expectations too high, with the great scores it was getting from reviewers and all**. That's a problem I have with things, a tendency to set the bar too high, forgetting that what I might think of as an ideal Zelda game probably wouldn't appeal to many other people***.

Windwaker doesn't seem to suffer from that issue, maybe because it's presentation is different, or maybe because it's more nautically based. I know when I played last week, I just let the sail out and went across the ocean wherever I wanted, not worrying about the quest I was supposed to be on, because hey, it'll still be there when I feel like dealing with it (and I did get around to clearing that temple eventually). It was pleasant, like when I spent 3 hours on Shadow of the Colossus riding around the edge of the Forbidden Land, ignoring the colossi in favor of exploring random paths. The downside to not having played the game in 3 years is that you forget things. How to do certain things, what little sidequests you were working on, where certain people or places of interest are. At least I hadn't deleted my old game, though given what I've forgotten, I might have been better off starting from scratch. I could have learned the game all over again. Of course, only playing every couple of weeks, I'd probably forget whatever I'd learned by the next time I played, but I imagine it would come back quickly enough. It usually does.

* It's odd, but with some games, once I beat them, the desire to play them vanishes, while with others it doesn't. But even with some of the games I don't feel like playing again, I'll hold on to them anyway, if I really enjoyed them. I don't know whether I think I'll want to play again someday, or if it's like they've earned a place of honor in my collection.

** For example, when a lot of people rave about how great a comic is, if I read it, for some reason I decide that the level of praise it's receiving means it should change my life somehow, and when the comic fails to do that (because the people praising it weren't exalting it that much), I fell let down. I think it's why I tend to say simply whether I was entertained by something, or whether it made me think, because I'm not sure what a "great" comic/movie/book/video game necessarily is, and I don't want to raise people's expectations too much.

*** Although my ideal is probably Ocarina of Time, and I think most people agreed that was some good stuff. Maybe that's the problem. That was the first Zelda game I played for more than maybe an hour, and it was awesome, and I was forcing Twilight Princess to match my memories of how much I enjoyed everything about that game, and either it couldn't, or I didn't have the patience to let it. I think Windwaker may have dodged that bullet because I originally thought of it as second place, the game I was "settling for" because Twilight Princess seemingly wouldn't ever come out. So Windwaker's judged on its own merits.