The Water Temple

Whilst I’ve been playing Ocarina of Time, one particular location has loomed at the forefront of my mind for every moment I’ve spent inside the game’s world. We all know what I’m talking about, but I’m going to say it anyway.

The Water Temple.

A fabled location of such infamy, that the mere mention of its name can strike terror into the heart of a certain type of person. And whose legendarily fiendish difficulty has given it a second life as something of a gaming folk legend. So it was with no small amount of trepidation simmering in the pit of my stomach that I crossed the threshold of the Water Temple to set about conquering it.

Now, after two hours of sub-aqua adventuring, I can let you in on a secret. The Water Temple isn’t really so bad. It’s not a cakewalk by any stretch of the imagination, but neither is it so impossible that the only way through it is with a guide. I did get stuck once, on a particularly cheeky puzzle that needed the water level raising to the correct level, so that I could blow away an otherwise inaccessible wall to get at a key. But even then it was nothing that five minutes of thought couldn’t solve.

So how did The Water Temple gain its fearsome reputation? At first I thought I’d found The Water Temple so unexpectedly easy because I’d spent so long playing Zelda games this year that I’d started to think like a Zelda level designer. I quickly realised how hubristic that train of thought was and started again. With the exception of Skyward Sword, all of the Zelda games I’ve played this year have been 2D. Then I had a small epiphany.

Let us posit that the average gamer is between mid-twenties and mid-thirties. Using myself as an example, I’m thirty, which puts me at fourteen or fifteen at the original release of Ocarina of time. One’s mind is not a fully formed thing at that age, not really. Think also about the time of the release of Ocarina of Time. We were in the very early age of polygons, and the previous generation of console games were almost exclusively two dimensional.

Like Khan in Star Trek II, we were two dimensional natives thrust into a new three dimensional world where we had had little time to adjust. We had little experience with three dimensional thought. Like Khan, that inexperience would prove to be our undoing.

Puzzles in The Water Temple are about as three dimensional as they could get for the time. They require you to not only think about the effects of your actions on the floor you are on, but also the floors above and below you. Add this to our, at the time, relative inexperience with three dimensional thought and we have the perfect ingredients for a major difficulty spike. We had trouble with The Water Temple because many of us had literally never seen anything like it, so we'd never really had to think this way before.

So, at the time, The Water Temple would have been genuinely difficult. Add this to the collective internet folk memory’s remarkable ability to exaggerate and that’s how I think The Water Temple came about its reputation.

Returning to The Water Temple today after nigh on two decades of experience of 3D gaming, The Water Temple presents less of a challenge. We’re all three dimensional natives now, and we’ve seen and solved hundreds of 3D puzzles in the time since Ocarina of Time was released. Experience is key here. Two decades of thinking in three dimensions, added to the fact that we’re all much older now means that we can arrive upon a solution to a puzzle much easier than we could in the late nineties. That kind of rams home just how innovative Nintendo were with Ocarina of Time. With The Water Temple, they gave us something many of us had never seen before and encouraged us to think in a whole new way to solve the puzzles they had set. There have been others in the time since, but Nintendo got there first, and they did it so well that they managed to spawn a gaming folk legend with their creation.

The neglect, oh dear lord the neglect.

Play it again, Samael...

It’s been a long time, and it’s been so because of the relative dearth of pretty much anything interesting enough to write about as far as gaming is concerned.

“But what about Destiny?” I hear you ask.

Destiny. A bajillion dollar combination of multiplayer FPS, Diablo and marketing blitz that has, unsurprisingly, not lived up to the hype. No thanks. If you love it, then that’s totally okay and I won’t look down upon you for it. But it’s not for me. I’ve been turned off multiplayer shooting for years now, and I’ve never been taken in by loot grabbing dungeon crawlers.

That said, whilst I wasn’t blogging, I did spend sixty-odd hours inside Dark Souls, which you might point out, is a loot grabbing dungeon crawler. And I’d be wrong to disagree with you. But it’s often so much more than that, and that’s what makes it so compelling. Most importantly for me, it’s not a ‘click on the monsters until they disappear’ dungeon crawler in the vein of Diablo.  The superb combat system, combined with the immense challenge, generally forlorn atmosphere and the fact that it’s often  genuinely beautiful means it all adds up to something so much greater than the sum of its parts. And that was what surprised me about it. I gave it a try because it was incredibly cheap and wound up finding one of my new favourite games.

So, I’ve still being gaming, but for the most part I’ve been delving into the collection rather than buying new games, and if I’ve not been gaming I’ve been spending hours with Rocksmith, and I don’t think it’s worth blogging about how bad at guitar I am.

The Year of Zelda is still a thing. I managed to finish Spirit Tracks, even though it was so endearing I didn’t want it to end. The best part about the whole game was being able to blow the whistle on the train any time I wanted. I know that’s a really juvenile thing to say, but every time I pulled on that rope in the corner of the screen, my inner seven year old did a tiny muppet flail. What struck me about the DS Zelda games was that they are Proper Zelda Games, that haven’t been dumbed down just because they’re on a portable with a generally young userbase. The same level of love and attention has gone into them as a full sized console title. Case in point, in Spirit Tracks, the overworld music is tied to the beat of the train. So the faster you go, the quicker the beat of the song. Attention to a tiny detail like that can really anchor you to a game’s world. Other devs take note…

I went straight from Spirit Tracks to my newly returned copy of Minish Cap. There was a certain amount of surprise when I found that not only did my old GBA SP still work, but that my Minish Cap save was still there from the first time I attempted to finish it. I’d expected one or the other to be dead. I was a bit shocked to find that you need to use an adapter to use headphones with an SP though, which kind of put a dampener on things. Still, Minish Cap turned out to be excellent, with an old-school world map that looped and twisted upon itself, while gradually revealing its secrets with continued play. It put me in the mind of a top down Metroid. Add that to classic Zelda gameplay and some stunning 2D art and you have a game that is more than worthy of both your time and the Zelda name.

Ocarina of Time, the big kahuna, was supposed to be next. But I discovered that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing and found myself all Zelda-ed out. So, to tide me over til the release of Trials Fusion, I moved on to Jak and Daxter, generously given to me by a friend. We all know how good a game it is, so I won’t gush too much about it here, but I will say with the exception of a sometimes dodgy camera, Jak and Daxter has aged beautifully and I don’t understand why I’d never played it sooner.

Trials Fusion loomed on the horizon just as events in Jak and Daxter came to an end, and I downloaded it as soon as funds allowed. If you know me, you will know I’m an absolute sucker for anything with the Trials name attached to it. Sadly, Fusion turned out to be a little disappointing. More Trials is undeniably a Good Thing, and Fusion is a very good game, but it doesn’t reach the heights of Trials HD and Trials Evolution. And the reason for that is that basically, it’s just too easy. The barrier to entry has been lowered, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And if it means that more people will experience one of the most satisfying games out there then I’m all for that. The problem is the difficulty curve has been massaged to such an extent that it doesn’t offer any challenge to players with experience from the other games in the series.  It took me months to get all golds in Trials Evolution. I’d achieved the same in Fusion within two weeks, with the odd platinum thrown in for good measure. I won’t say that Ubi buying Redlynx has ruined the series, because it hasn’t, but the lowering of the difficulty has pretty much stymied its replay value.  I haven’t been back to Trials Fusion anywhere near as often as I have to Evolution. Bit of a shame really.

At a loss for what to play, I stood back and looked at the collection, going down and down until I found something that jumped out. Eventually my eyes fell upon Discworld Noir. A game that I have blogged about in the past about finding, and one that for some reason had never started. Still, no time like the present, right?  After digging out an RGB scart cable and hooking up my PS2, I found myself looking for the non-existent PS button on the controller to fire it up, which was a bit embarrassing. Still, once I’d worked out how to switch the thing on, I was greeted with what, despite its great age, might be one of the best written, and thanks mostly to the immense talents of Rob Brydon, best voiced games I’ve ever played. Sure, the game itself looks endearingly rubbish, is buggy and i so low-res that you could count the pixels, but it feels like playing a lost Discworld Novel. I loved every moment of it, and if you’re a Discworld Fan, you owe it to yourself to play Discworld Noir. I really can’t recommend it highly enough.

A stint with the utterly sublime Sly Cooper followed while I tried for some reason to put off going back to Zelda. The vintage Warner Brothers cartoon does Ocean’s Eleven styling still looks great and the game itself provided ample distraction from the fact that I should have really been playing Ocarina of Time. Thankfully, during that time, I finally got my GameCube back from my sister and with it, my proper copies of Wind Waker and Twilight Princess, none of that HD remake or waggly Wii port nonsense for me. With that, there was no excuse. I had to start Ocarina of time. I hooked up the N64 using my GameCube composite lead (yes I know I should have an RGB conversion, but anything is better than a co-ax cable) and dived in.

Now I’m dreading going to the Water Temple, but loving every minute of the time I’m spending in Hyrule. Yes, the save system is Mesolithic, but while I’m surrounded by chunky 90’s polygons, muddy N64 textures and sound so lo-fi its almost cute and I find myself thinking that sometimes, this is all I need. So what if new games aren’t interesting at the moment. I have a massive back catalogue that’s full of good stuff. I don’t need a new gen console yet, and as it turns out, there are plenty of interesting games. They’re just not new ones.