You know what I hate in a game? Timing puzzles. It does not make a game entertaining for me at all to have to flip some switch or whatever, then run like hell, jumping across obstacles to reach an area before whatever I triggered goes back to its previous state. I just don’t care to be challenged in this way. Make me think about how to do something, or give me a monster to kill, but timing puzzles are just so useless to me. I’ve been playing Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for the past few days and I’ve been really impressed with it so far because of its attention to detail and neat little features. However, now I’m in the Goron Mines, which are filled with lava, and I’m stuck at a part where you have to hop across lava, pull a door open via a chain, then hop back around and go through the door before it shuts again. What adds difficulty to this is how the camera doesn’t follow my direction, so I keep having to readjust the POV to see where I’m going, and also little bursts of lava fly up between the rocks I’m hopping across. I’ve tried following various walkthroughs about this area to no avail: I’m just not quick enough.

Since it’s for the Wii, I can’t find any cheat codes to get around this annoying part, so I’m pretty much stuck until I can either time it right (and without flying into the lava, as I’ve done umpteen times already) or get someone else (namely Todd) to do it for me. This sort of thing just ruins a game for me for a while, because all I do is get frustrated and I don’t enjoy the experience at all.

It doesn’t help that, when you die in the game, it brings you back further away and with fewer hearts. Even though I save my game in particular locations, so that I don’t have to go back through tricky puzzles again, when I load a saved game, it starts at the beginning of an area. The save feature is almost useless because of that, except for saving the general idea of your progress. That was something I enjoyed with games like American McGee’s Alice on the PC: I could do a Quick Save and a Quick Load again for when I had to hop around lava (why is that such a popular theme in games?!) and would often miscalculate and fall in, or some lava monster (another popular yet annoying theme) would spit at me and I’d burn to death, yadda yadda. With Alice’s saving style, I would be brought back to exactly the same location and could continue from there. Zelda’s style punishes me for, say, having to go to class or actually have a life outside the game by making me redo parts I had already solved. I’ve taken to just leaving my Wii on constantly so that I don’t lose progress. Nintendo’s causing me to waste electricity because of their stupid saving model. :P

Edit: I got through it. :P Letting the chain go about halfway through the lava geyser’s duration was the key, since that gave me time to hop across the little rock islands. Then I had to somersault once near the door because that’s faster than Link’s run.