“It’s not easy having a good time, even smiling makes my face ache”

Fun… Fun, you say? Yes, I think I remember fun. I’m sure that I used to have it once. Before all these years weighed me down. Before the dark times of “The Mortgage” and “The Bills” came to pass. Fun, yes, now I remember. There used to be time for fun. There was no pressure of time…

I can’t stand games with time limits. 

I will say it out loud right now: I have never played The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask and I was exasperated at Pikmin. Let the hate flow through you, it will only make me stronger.

I cannot quite put my finger on why, but for some inexplicable reason, I have never been able to fully engage with games that put pressure on you to finish the majority of actions within a predetermined time limit. Heck, I will even say that I do not enjoy missions in games where you have a few minutes/in game hours to complete a specific task. It’s why, despite being quite good at Mario Kart, I never play the time trials – even if it means unlocking extra karts/characters. I just flake. Can’t handle it. Perfect runs against computer-controlled opponents turn to crashing into barriers and long, drawn-out skids when faced with the job of completing a run in under a minute.

Now, Pikmin was a great game: really unusual for its time, it rightly holds a special place in the hearts of Nintendo gamers. Dismissed as “My First Strategy Game” by my boss at GAME, Pikmin had hidden depth to it that challenged players to think creatively and quickly about solving the puzzles in the best possible manner. The little blue, red and yellow Pikmin were hilarious, full of personality and really quite cute.

The only problem was that completing the game had to happen under a strict time limit of 30 in-game days, and that for me is a deal breaker. Putting a time limit on exploring a game world is the very antithesis of gaming for me: I want to lose myself in my surroundings, to envelop my character in the world they are supposed to inhabit and to poke my nose into every nook and cranny that the developer has come up with. When you’re under the watchful eye of Father Time, however, it’s just not possible to do that.

Because I panic at the thought of not having enough time to finish the game, let alone just have a five-minute explore, I will tend to rely on a guide to get me through to the end. And that again, is the opposite of fun. When you use a strategy guide for a little boost to help you get to that “Ah, I understand!” moment, it’s fine. When you feel compelled to use that guide to get you from title screen to end credits, then there’s either something wrong with the game or the player.

It’s clearly me, I’m a deeply strange person. Because again, Pikmin was a great game, but I had immense difficulty enjoying it. 

But this fear of not-having-enough-time is the primary reason I have never picked up Majora’s Mask. By the time the game released, I had regrettably sold my N64 (more about that in another article) and therefore missed the initial hype. My neighbour in university absolutely raved about the game, but the idea of having to finish the experience in a certain amount of in-game time then hit the virtual “reset” button seemed like a Herculean task of frustration and repetition. It seemed to me that completing the game without a lot of hand-holding would be near-impossible. My neighbour remarked, in fact, that he had been playing the game for a number of years without success, and this did not encourage.

To this very day, I regret not picking up Majora’s Mask and giving it a whirl – I even had the opportunity back when The Zelda Collector’s Edition came out.  Released with Ocarina of Time, the two NES Zelda games and Majora’s Mask. I played Ocarina almost to the very end, but every time I thought about starting Majora’s Mask, the same hesitation, fear and trepidation gripped me. A shame, because I used to spend every Saturday in my early teenage years randomly exploring the Hyrule of A Link to the Past without really actually doing anything and the same was true of Ocarina of Time. In both games, I found virtually every heart container without any kind of guide and all of the non-essential weapons and upgrades as well. Yet, I just couldn’t bring myself to enter the world of Termina.

Fear, I suppose is the answer. Fear of failure. Fear of missing the best parts of the game and not being able to see them once they are gone. Fear that I won’t make that deadline. Fear that I’m not fast enough to save the world.

Anyway, that wraps up the second of my Gaming Regrets. Once again I must state clearly that the opinion here is entirely my own and does not necessarily reflect your opinion, your experiences or in any way affect you. So there.