foxinthestars

My plan has been enacted and I have now finished the final fill of the 2016 book challenge! Now, I admit, the book I read was 120 pages long and written for a young audience, so temporally and intellectually I was going easy on myself, but trust me, in its own way this was a "book that intimidates you":

"Worlds of Power #3: Ninja Gaiden"

( Thoughts, Etc. )

So, I made it! The book challenge was fun and worth doing, and I would do it again --- but not immediately. So not in 2017, but 2018? We'll see.

The ones that are a quandary, and the ones that have been (sort of) satisfied.

( Investing in more game capabilities: GPU? Wii U? Wait for NX? )

( At long last, PoPoLoCrois. )

Anyway, with the deck cleared of one epic game project, I feel like I can start on another one, and I plan for it to be Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds.

Although I did go exploring what I can still get from the PlayStation web store for my PSP, just had to get the PS1 Classics version of Symphony of the Night, and in fiddling around with it I'm like "it has been way too long since I played this"...

Been too long since I posted. As usual.

I never did do a post-mortem on insert_coin; I both wrote and received stories for Zelda II: The Adventure of Link; I think both stories came out very well!

And I think I overdid it on the book challenge and burnt myself out a bit, so I've been taking a break lately, but hopefully I'll get back into it soon.

The matching video game challenge I invented... Well, I never have fully committed to it, although it's given me some nice thoughts. But that feeds into the actual topic of my ramble, because...

( I am in a really weird place when it comes to video games. )

Okay, so I still haven't finished Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap. Somehow I never got around to playing it while I was house-sitting last month and I picked a bad place to leave off, just having started the final dungeon (at this point I've practically run out of anything else to even do in the game). Basically, it's at a good point to really stress me out, and then I left it for long enough that I was worried about getting rusty and was even more incentivized to let it slide, but I don't want to just not finish it...

So tonight I finally fired it up. I just went in and got the next key, wasn't even that hard, but yeah, it stressed me out --- and it's completely irrational. The last thing I had to do was a puzzle where you have little clone images of yourself in a fixed formation and you have to maneuver them around an arrangement of blocks with one of those blade things going around it. I'd set up my formation so that my real self was as far from the blades as possible --- so not only was I in no real danger, Link was in no real danger. The worst possible outcome was screwing up the puzzle a bunch of times before getting it right (actual fail total: like 3 or 4). But my heart was pounding! What the hell?

It really doesn't help that I seem to have some kind of cardiac neurosis so that the "heart-pounding" sensation in itself scares the hell out of me. (I realize that "heart-pounding" is often used as a selling point, but for me, um, no, sorry.)

This is very frustrating because I like video games and I want to play them, and I especially want to play the kind that are most likely to stress me out --- adventures that have an action element and that I can emotionally invest myself in. But at the same time, sometimes I wonder, do I actually like video games, because I seem to hate what are supposed to be the best parts. Bosses (and in Minish Cap, dungeons more broadly) are not especially fun. Beating them doesn't really give me that rush of victory it's supposed to, at least not enough to even it all out. They're mostly just stressful ordeals I have to get through or the game won't let me continue.

Googling about video games and anxiety seemed to bring up approximately one reddit thread that was on point for the problem I have. The rest of the results were mostly praising either Depression Quest or the calming properties of Bejeweled (hidden objects seem to do that job for me lately).

I'm not sure what to do here. Take my xanax a half hour before playing? Exposure therapy via punishing old-school platformer? I dunno.