dtgreene: Reminds me of one race in Zelda: Majora's Mask (which, I should point out, is not a racing game, so it's even less excusable here) where your time doesn't actually matter; when you get close to the goal, another racer will teleport right behind you and likely overtake you unless you are able to knock it away. I am quite sure that my personal best time (which I haven't kept track of) was a time I did not win the race, and my victories were actually significantly slower than most of my losses.
(Incidentally, I find that the reward for winning actually makes combat less interesting, and as a result less fun, but that's another story.)
vidsgame: That's quite a good example, thank you. I agree, it is indeed less excusable here. How did you figure out how to overcome that? I would have and have in other games just skipped that part or put the game on hiatus because that sort of thing.
At first, frustration trying to beat the race, and when I did, noticing that my time was considerably worse than my PB. Then, on one playthrough, I payed attention to the minimap and noticed that one of the gorons teleported when I was close to the finish line.
It really is one of the worst parts of that game's design, though I would say that insta-fail stealth sequences in Zelda games are worse (at least, in MM, the first one is easy and if you go at night you can see the guards' lines of vision, and you can get the Stone Mask before the second one in order to trivialize it; other Zelda games (like OOT) are not so nice with this).
