Video Games: The Legend of Zelda
The Legend of Zelda, a deeply beloved video game franchise from Nintendo. This video game series has been on-going since I was a child, and I was playing it since it's first iteration on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Throughout the years, I kept purchasing and playing each new installment, always eagerly anticipating what will come next in terms of dungeons, worlds, and items. While the story was overall interesting to me, and I did read and re-read the story in the manual for A Link to the Past over and over, the gameplay was always that kept me coming back for more. The Zelda formula as it was known, was perfect in my eyes. It was similar to metriodvania, except that it was a top-down, over-head perspective. I never really enjoyed side-scrolling adventure games all that much in my life. I tried playing a couple of them, but I prefer side-scrolling in the form of a platforming experience over a metroidvania experience. Navigating a huge vast interconnected world to me just makes more sense from an over-head perspective.
Twilight Princess
The Zelda game known to have the only T rating in the entire series, is also the Zelda game I tend to both enjoy the most, and replay the most. The story is much more mature, has some great character dialogue that I always enjoy reading through, and the story progression is top-notch.
Twilight Princess in a way was made out of spite from Nintendo. As the previous Zelda game Nintendo released was the The Wind Waker, which many hardcore fans were very upset at, despite all the amazing effort Nintendo and their dedicated team of developers put into it.
I recently replayed Twilight Princess again a couple months back, and you can view some of my favourite moments on my Instagram, if you are curious. During the last several days, I decided to do a replay of The Wind Waker, of which I did not post any memorable moments. This is due to a several reasons, firstly, this game is now more widely available on the Nintendo Switch 2 through the Nintendo Classics, and I'd prefer people just experience it on their own, as this game never really got the attention it deserves. Secondly, it doesn't have as many moments that really hit me, moments that I feel I want to share. There is a lot less mature emotions in The Wind Waker, as it does appeal more to a younger audience, and I can see that more now that I am replaying it. It plays more like a fun Disney adventure, than an emotional mature drama.
Tingle
As some hardcore dedicated fans know, Nintendo loves to troll their players in their games. I don't replay many games which feature this rather odd character, Tingle. Only a small handful of Zelda games actually feature this character, and most don't go too overboard with him. However, in The Wind Waker, if you take a deeper look at Tingle, you might even see an odd reflection of your younger self, or if you haven't grown up enough, perhaps your current self. Not many hardcore Zelda fans talk deeply about this character, and I think I finally know why. Let me explain.
Tingle is represented a literal man child, someone who is struggling to grow up. Many characters in the games that feature this character make note of this, and at times even poke fun at this. He is obsessed with staying young, because of the legends of the Boy with a Fairy, or rather the Kokiri from Ocarina of Time. Kokiri are the spirit children of the forest who literally never grow up in body, but instead grow in mind and wisdom. I believe Tingle is rather jealous of this, as he would like to never grow up, but doesn't actually understand the Koriki, as his mind is literally too immature to grasp such a concept. Tingle is also very obsessed with money, something everyone who hasn't grown up should be-able to relate to. When we are young, we all believe that money and riches will bring us happiness. In each of the Zelda games featuring Tingle, he always has an obsession with Rupees, even his only stand-alone game which never left Japan, Freshly Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland is all about rupees, the currency in the Zelda universe. In The Wind Waker, the player has to pay a huge sum to Tingle to even finish the game, as he is required to decipher some required charts.
As you mature and grow older in life, you begin to realize that there is much more to life than becoming rich, and that money does not, and can never buy happiness. It may buy a moment of fleeting happiness, with that new purchase, or that vacation, but it's not eternal happiness. You only learn this as you grow in life.
Nintendo Trolling
Nintendo knows that a part of their audience are man children, and fully understand their player bases. Someone who is obsessed with 100% completion isn't living life, and Nintendo has trolled this fact multiple times. This is also why Nintendo doesn't have a built-in Achievement System that all the man babies of the world desperately want Nintendo to do.
One very famous Nintendo troll for people who love to waste their time with video games is the Korok golden poop. If you manage to collect all the Korok Seeds in Breath of the Wild, guess what your amazing reward is? A literal piece of sh#t. I thought that was the funniest thing Nintendo ever did. As games aren't meant to be completed, they are meant to be enjoyed for a short amount of time, then you need to move on. This is my favourite Nintendo troll of all time.
Growing Up
The idea of growing up is to leave your childhood behind and to become an adult. Back in my 20s, was my very first attempt at this. There was a period in my early 20s when I decided to move on from video games, and gave away all of my video games to my current friends at the time in an effort to move forward into adulthood. For a time, this actually worked, as also at this time, I was beginning my journey into Linux and UNIX-like systems, a more mature operating system than Microsoft's Windows. My childhood was defined by Windows, and I still view Windows as a fragment of my Childhood, which could also be why I have so much negative emotions of not ever using Windows again.
However, since Microsoft has a monopoly, trying to move forward from Windows is more difficult than moving forward from Video Games, as this operating system is absolutely everywhere, it's difficult to avoid. I have always believed that Linux was my future, but this future never came until 2015 when I think I was the most adult I ever was in my entire life. The idea of having to use Windows at any potential future job feels like a regression, and not a step forward in my life at this point. I feel that I don't even want to work in I.T. because of the potential of having to use Windows. It has been very difficult to get my foot back in the door of a Linux profession, and so if I cannot move forward, I must exit entirely. I need to find something different to define my adulthood which differentiates it from my childhood. As a result, I am going to be exiting video games once again in my life, and will not be working any computer jobs that involve the Windows operating system. As I live in Canada, a Windows-centric country, I don't even think I'll be-able to have a job where the use of a computer is required, at least a computer that runs Windows. Oddly, macOS is actually perfectly fine, as macOS transitioned from it's previous operating system, and grew into a powerful UNIX operating system just as I became of age. Microsoft's Windows prefers to remain a child trapped in the past by not transitioning itself into a more mature UNIX-like operating system. There is no reason at this point for Windows not be to UNIX-like, if someone really needs to run a legacy Windows application, or even a game, virtualization, and translation layers like Wine, and Proton now fill that void. Microsoft, if you read this, please grow and move past your roots into maturity, this will make the world a much better place in the long run. Don't be afraid to make the same leap that Apple did at the turn of the century.