Doh!: Mixed Emotions and The Gamer Extraordinaire (10-25 hrs.))

So I've finally made some progress on the water temple. my emotions are not complicated there is just a great many of them.

1) I am finally able to see the official hours-played tally increase. it's been stuck at 20 for a long time now. I've actually been sitting in front of this game for 25-30 hours but have had a number of mishaps. At one point I had played for a few hours and had just made it to the water temple when my mom's cat Chloe turned off the power strip that my Wii was connected to. . . doh! I was able to redo everything in a decent amount of time. but by the time that I had saved the baby fish people (called Zoras), gotten the armor that allows me to swim, traveled to a distant village to purchase underwater bombs, and made my way back down to the bottom of the lake where the water temple is, I was not in the mood to continue on. 

After having set the game down for a few days I returned again to face the water temple. I was just a little discouraged that after an hour of playing I had made little progress. The water temple is a puzzle comprised of one main room that branches off to many other smaller rooms. The main room is made up of three floors. to get from the main room to any of the other rooms Link must rotate a stair case in the center of the main room. the stair case is not a free moving object, however. it can only move to certain positions based on where you, Link, are in the room. This is a very fun puzzle to figure out. I assumed that it could be figured out systematically by moving the stair case from as many of the possible positions as I could. I found the Occoo and the map and one open door. But this didn't help me at all. The room seemed to be a dead end. So I went back to the main room to try and find a different room to enter. no luck.

I saw video clip online of Link making his way through the water temple using an item (something that looked like grappling hook) i didn't have. this was discouraging. the last item i needed was a bigger wallet and i seemed to obtain one by accident. I just so happened to walk into a building in castle town where a girl wanted an item that i had. "Perhaps," i thought, "I am just as likely to get this new item by walking around and talking to people and walking into buildings." This strategy present a plethora of new side quests for me to embark on e.g. fixing the bridge to get spring water, giving spring water to a guard to gain passage to a new part of the map, and more. If this was the way that i could get that grappling hook then i was really sunk. i have no idea how to fix the bridge, and the last time i needed to fix a bridge in this game i spent too many hours dissecting the semantics of my guide, Midna trying to find hints that didn't exist.

2) So i finally bit the bullet, and it hurt. I looked up a walk-through online. As it turns out, that grappling hook (called a claw shot) is reward for defeating a mini-boss in the water temple. and that room I thought was a dead end actually was not a dead end at all. If I had looked to the ceiling I would have seen some rock that could be shot down using my bomb-arrows to create a pathway over the wall . . . doh!

3) I hate using walkthroughs! I feel like the game beat me not the other way around. Gee writes in his final chapter about how he used a cheat just to get him to a point in Half-Life where his own ineptitude at jumping in the game would no longer hinder him. After this he stopped using the cheat and continued the game as normal. This is not what happened to me. The game stumped me. Rather than continue to play for endless hours looking for items in all the wrong places and running the risk of not finishing the game at all, I "cheated?". At least it felt like cheating. I didn't want to cheat. 

My thinking goes something like this. The game is consistent and complete isn't it? I shouldn't need any outside help to solve these puzzles. The game should provide me with all the necessary and sufficient information I need to progress. I don't think that me being stumped by the game is an example of the game not providing that information. But if not, why was I unable to solve the water temple?

4) I am so stoked to be past the water temple! Even though I used the walk-through beat that giant boss! I feel like gamer extraordinaire!