LONG BLOG
When I got two friends to play Ocarina of Time
I got two of my friends to play The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on separate occasions. It was the only times I ever pushed friends to play a game for a significant length.
First some backstory. Like most Nintendo 64 owners I was excited to play Ocarina of Time way before it came out. I wanted to play it since I first saw the preview pics for the vastly different looking beta version in Nintendo Power. I bought the Nintendo Power strategy guide for that game and read it cover to cover multiple times, because Nintendo Power wrote strategy guides surprisingly well and I was a filthy cheating bastard back then. When I did finally get Ocarina of Time I played it nonstop and beat it in a weekend, again partly because I was a filthy cheating bastard.
Sometime later my friend Andrew’s birthday rolled around, and I got him a copy of Ocarina of Time as a present. This was a dick move in retrospect. Ocarina of Time was a present I would have wanted, not Andrew, and you should not buy a present because you would want it, you should consider your friend’s interests and buy them something they would want. Andrew had a Nintendo 64 but he was not into fantasy and huge single-player games, he preferred games like Mario Kart 64 and NFL Blitz. Plus he was less into video games overall than I was, though we use to play games a lot we had been playing less and less.
Not only did I get him a crappy gift, I insisted we play it right there and then in his home. I must have been terribly naïve because I thought we would play through the entire game together, over time, in segments. We got as far as the first boss in the Great Deku Tree, Queen Gohma, though we didn’t kill it before I had to go home. I instructed him the entire way instead of letting him figure it out on his own.
The next time I saw Andrew, which I was about two weeks later, I insisted we play Ocarina of Time some more because I was being an annoying fanboy. Since I had last seen him Andrew had killed Queen Gohma on his own. But he had not collected the heart container that dropped with every defeated boss. This is where I started to think that Andrew was not really enjoying this, because I couldn’t fathom how you could miss a heart container unless you were really not invested in the game.
Now this is where my memory of what happened gets fuzzy, because the next thing I remember was Andrew climbing up Death Mountain. That would be weird if he did not care about the game but got through all the parts in Hyrule Castle Town on his own. I remember the Death Mountain part because when Andrew first encountered a Goron he thought it was a monster and slashed frantically at the invincible thing as it stood there. I think we made it as far as finishing Dodongo’s Cavern.
I didn’t push to play Ocarina of Time anymore next time I saw Andrew. It was obvious he wasn’t into it, and I was getting tired of leading him through the entire thing when he was uninterested. I never asked if he played any more of the game on his own, and to this day I still feel guilty about the whole thing, sometimes I think I should apologize even though it has been so many years and he’s probably forgotten by now.
The second friend I got to play Ocarina of Time was my old babysitter Talia. We had already played several Nintendo 64 games together already, Super Smash Bros., Snowboard Kids 2, Mario Kart 64, and she was thoroughly sick of hearing the same lines over and over again when I played Starfox 64.
We had known each other for a couple of years and we were pretty good friends. Sadly everyone was starting to agree that I was getting too old for a babysitter and she was to be stop being my babysitter at the end of the school year. I do not remember if I had come up with the idea of having her play through Ocarina of Time before or after those discussions started, but her playing it at the end of the school year had extra significance as the final thing we were going to do together. I hope I wasn’t a brat when I suggested/requested that she play it, because there’s no way she had the idea.
Unlike when I played with Andrew I do not remember specific parts of the playthrough. We did get to the end, I remember Talia defeating Ganon. We did not do any sidequests besides getting Epona, we just played through the main game.
I think we had fun. I had fun and she appeared to have fun. I still worry though that Talia was just pretending to have fun, and I’m too afraid to ask her through Facebook.
LOOK WHO CAME:
