Damn you Mario. Why do your games have to be so wonderful? I don't understand why these levels of your's force my living being into having to find every nook and cranny in the Mushroom Kingdom. Hours upon hours of my time are poured into collecting that out of reach coin or locating the hidden exit to that level without the map bubble filled in. Today that completionist sort of disorder lead me to thinking.
Being a pretty big fan of the red overalled plumber and clamoring for the release of his 3DS outing, I turned on a recently purchased copy of Mario Land 2 to satiate my appetite for platforming bliss. Having already completed the game by foolishly rushing through, there wasn't much to do except for finding the short cut levels and/or the main levels that I bypassed on my outing. This led me to a level that had water, hippos, and flying fish. On the bottom of the level there was a passageway that required a fire flower to break the block. Lucky for me Mr. Mario was outfitted with just that. "Fire flower Sound!" The block was successfully broken, the passage was mine to traverse. Unfortunately for me, our hero was still large and wouldn't fit through the crevasse so my only choice was to get hit by an enemy. This is where that brain thinking started.
Try as I might I couldn't get hit by the flying fish. I needed to get small and couldn't. Every time the fish came back down into the water I swam up to get clipped and lose my powerup. Unfortunately this mundane task proved to be far more difficult than it should have been because I kept flying out of the water and bouncing on the fish. It wasn't bad gameplay or faulty controls, it was my fingers and brain working in unison to succeed despite my conscious knowing that I needed to fail first.
Having those gears upstairs turning I started to think of other times that I needed to fail and kept… well… not failing. Dragon Quest IX's alchemy came to mind. While trying to fill out the item list I kept getting alchemiracles in spite of my wishing for them to fail so I could get the item from the lower top tier. Then I started thinking of the GTA series and how when I needed the fuzz to show up they didn't. I mean c'mon LCPD, I just beat up an old lady and did a two minute brake stand on her corpse in front of the police department.
Curious if this problem was one unique to myself I text an old friend with an equal amount of gaming experience. He brought up an anecdote about when had rented Family Feud. Name something you ride? was the survey. His answer? I think you can figure it out. If you can't, your hint is that it's anatomical. To his surprise the board flipped an answer which read, "airplane." Needless to say I don't think anyone has ever called their 'his answer' their 'airplane'. At least not on a Family Feud survey.
Has anyone one else out there had similar experiences with a game or games? I don't think that this is a problem that only my friend and I face. It would be a pleasure to hear some similar tales.What a great way to pass the hours until I'm rocking a handheld Tanooki suit. In the meantime I suppose I should thank Mario for helping to clean the cobwebs out of my body attic instead of damning him.