Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

I was never so privileged as many of the kids I knew growing up, with regard to various material goods. On second thought, maybe privileged isn't the right word - maybe spoiled is a better one. Regardless, my parents didn't waste a whole hell of a lot of their money buying useless crap for me. Sure, they spent enough to keep me entertained, but I was usually near the end of the train when it came to buying new stuff. The big new video game system would come out and everyone would be talking about it and making me feel generally left out but indignant at the same time. And eventually I'd get to play it at someone's house, or wait the necessary amount of time for a newer, more advanced system to come out so that I could buy the old one at a get-this-out-of-my-store discount price. It all worked out in the end.

Well, during high school, my friend Kyle was heavy into video games, for any system you could think of. At one point he had Playstation, Nintendo 64, Sega Dreamcast AND its predecessor, the rarely-seen Sega CD, all hooked up to his TV at the same time. And with a little direction from my friend Kyle, I got my filthy mitts on a used N64 and a short stack of games.

Sure, I had played more than my share of Goldeneye. Weeks worth, in fact. I was even fairly adept with its spinoff game, Perfect Dark. I knew Slippy, Falco and the rest of the Star Fox gang. And I'd enjoyed long hours of Mario 64 and MarioKart 64 on more occasions than I could number.

But I'd never played the Ocarina before.

By the way, right around here is where I'd like to bitch for a second about blogger.com, the site that hosts Conshohocken Freedom. They've got a great, free service that I figured out pretty quickly. But just recently, all of my posts have this really annoying behavior when I put images in. The one at the very top lets the text wrap around it, but none of the subsequent ones do. They used to, all the time. It's a goddamn disgrace.

Anyway, this was and continues to be the game to trounce all games, one that designed by marvelously clever Japanese programmers to incorporate content suitable for practically any age, confounding puzzles and challenges (for even a moderately intelligent high schooler), fierce battles with various creatures and an endless array of irritatingly catchy tunes.

The game is based upon the classic Zelda theme of elf-boy must save princess. On the way, I spent more than a month twisting and toiling through this seemingly endless game, eventually giving way to the extremely helpful video game guide. I don't know if I would have made it without that guide, frankly. There are so many portions of the game, so many accessible areas, and so much stuff to do that if you can get it started, you're not going to stop until you beat it.

I thought of this because I brought it over to my girlfriend Bernadette's house the other day so I could play it when she's doing homework. In my mind, there is no topping this game, no matter how much money it costs or how new it is.

And don't try to convince me otherwise.