By Kieron Gillen on January 3rd, 2008 at 7:27 pm.
Trying to ease myself into the new year, I’ve cheerily wasted the day playing a game just about fighting, before turning to the internet. Bill Harris brings to me the attention of the rarest, most precious thing in games criticism. That is, a mea culpa. Writing for the Mercury News, Dean Takahashi slated Mass Effect only to eventually admit there was something he was missing.
“The dumb thing about the way I played the game, as many pointed out, is that I didn’t make use of my Talent Points. I started the game doing so, but while on Feros, I didn’t pay attention to all the Talent Points I was accumulating after every encounter. Those points just sat there. They were waiting for me to assign them to specific character trait improvements.”
Yes, he’d forgot to level up. And you wince, but it got me thinking – we’ve all done similar mistakes with some game at some point, fundamentally misunderstanding it, and carrying on regardless. And I thought it’d be a good thing for people to come clean about in the new year, in a spirit of admission of humanity. And, clearly, I ramble about some of mine beneath the cut.
Well, I’ll start with (I suspect) an apocryphal one – I think – Jim told me, about a German Gamer playing Monkey Island II. You’ll recall the section where you have to get six thousand pieces of eight. How the fuck are you meant to do that? Well, most of us worked out how to win the spitting contest. This gentleman, was more industrious. He recalled that you could get a single piece-of-eight if you polished the peg leg earlier in the game. Going back, he started repeating the process, over a series of years trying to amass the 6000 gold.
Yeah, SURELY apocryphal, but that’s the core of it. We look for systems and once we have an idea of how something works, it can be terribly difficult to requestion those assumptions. We’ve all ended up, polishing that peg-leg, metaphorically speaking.
(No, not a metaphor for that. Mucky pup.)
The one which I come back to was during my teenage years, when I was playing the Bard’s Tale. I wasn’t alone. Instead of working on our GCSE maths lessons, my comrades and I were busily copying each others maps of the Catacombs of the Mad God and similar. It was a case of a game perfectly matching our needs and environment. We wanted to play a fantasy game. It was a fantasy game whose square-based maps were perfectly suited for cartographic immortalisation on graph paper. Which was the one thing we had in surfeit in maths lessons. Hell, it’s not as if we were going to do any work.
So, for a good couple of weeks, we all went home, adventured, then returned the next day to collate our mapping exploits. And the maps sprawled. The Catacombs one was stretching over three double-page spreads torn from maths books, carefully assembled when Mr Roses’ attention was elsewhere. Which, admittedly, was about 95% of the time.
Three page spreads. This dungeon seemed endless, and we were quite lost until…
Well, there was a moment of realisation. That bit looked a bit like this bit and…
Bollocks. The actual map looped every 22 squares. We’d have noticed it earlier if it wasn’t for a mapping mistakes which meant the looping wasn’t perfect, and the whole thing was raising up by a couple of squares each time.
But, yeah, we’d spent the last couple of weeks trying to map a dungeon which looped. We may as well have tried to map the Asteroids screen.
Man!
Okay. That’s me proved my stupid credentials. What about you lot?
03/01/2008 at 19:37 Kast says:
I think I read about something: In H-L2, crossing the coast there’s a barrier you need to raise by finding batteries. Without raising the barrier, you cannot get the buggy any further. One player assembled a ramp and, after hours of trying, finally managed to jump the barrier. Another player didn’t even try that and, assuming it was impossible, carried on along the rest of the chapter on foot!
Can’t think of anything I personally have done off the top of me head. Besides the common Portal “rocket-portal-tube-cube” mistake of just using a chair to stand on.
03/01/2008 at 19:46 Alec Meer says:
Wounds… too… fresh…
03/01/2008 at 19:52 Hamer says:
Not a particularly interesting example, but I remember taking about *2 hours* to complete the final level of Red Faction – walking down endless, huge corridors fighting hordes of bad guys – because I hadn’t realised this was actually a vehicle section, and I had walked straight past the *bloody jet fighter* that would let you zip through it in 10 minutes..
03/01/2008 at 19:58 John P (Katsumoto) says:
Not exactly relevant, but this reminds of a really funny letter sent into PCG a few years back, which was like “Dear PCG, I have recently bought Half Life and am loving it, but whenever I get into the test chamber the experiment fails and there is a resonance cascade. Any hints or tips regarding the experiment would be helpful.”
03/01/2008 at 20:01 Pace says:
I missed what turned out to be one very important part of Half-life (1). I was a bit of a late comer to games, I played Half-life 2 first, and a few other more modern games before going back and playing Half-life 1. The version I bought didn’t come with any sort of manual, but I figured I knew what I was doing, especially for such an old game. A few times early on I got a little frustrated when it seemed like I should be able to get somewhere, but I just couldn’t get there. There was always a box or something in the way that was just a little bit too high to jump over. And just a little goddamned bit. It got really bad in that section where you’re using a train-car like thing for a long time to get around on underground tracks. At one point I couldn’t get into the room to hit some button to open the way for my rail-car, so I had to finish most of the level on foot! It was possible, but just barely. And a royal pain in the ass. At some later point in the game progress became impossible, right in the middle of a huge onslaught of enemy soldiers, again, because I couldn’t jump quite high enough. After doubling my lifetime amount of swearing, and coming up with some new swear words of my own, I did some research and discovered that for some inexplicable reason (yes, we all know what’s coming) if you crouch just before you jump, you go a little bit f*cking higher. Just a little goddamned bit.
03/01/2008 at 20:01 Schadenfreude says:
In my defence I was only ten, and it was my first point and clicker; but it took my over three months to find a shovel in Monkey Island 2′s opening chapter. :/
03/01/2008 at 20:06 Janek says:
When I first started Eve I was unaware of the autopilot function. I did every jump manually, working out the route manually.
It took me 12 days of my initial two week trial to discover it.
03/01/2008 at 20:08 Chris R says:
LOL @ John P’s post. That is just pure awesome.
The only thing that comes to mind is also the infamous Portal puzzle… but my chair fell over, and for the life of me I couldn’t get it back in the upright position….. so I went and collected every single chair out of the previous room, threw them all in a pile, and scaled my little chair mountain to victory. I felt so smart… until I saw what you were SUPPOSED to have done. Pah.
03/01/2008 at 20:08 I_still_love_Okami says:
I played Ultima6 on the C64 (yea, there was a version for it!) when I was 12 and barely able to read and write english. Ultima 6 was way over my capabilities.
The game started with a battle against a group of gargoyles in the throne romm of Lord British. I managed to win the battle and then tried to talk to Lord British, but couldn’t. There was some kind of message, but I didn’t really understand it. The whole game also seemed unwieldy and tiresome to me, since I had to move every character seperately, one tile at a time. What I didn’t knew was, that I was still in combat mode.
I don’t know how much time I spent, moving my character’s through Lord British’s castle in combat mode, trying to talk to anybody or pick somethin up or get the hell out the castle.
At some point I realized, that I had to press “C” to exit combat mode (Ultima6 on the C64 had no mouse support, you moved your characters with the joystick and used different keys to execute different actions), allowing me to smoothly move through the world and, joy of joys, talk to people.
Of course, talking to people didn’t really help things along, since there still was this isssue about my really rather basic english skills and Ultima’s fake medieval language (I needed some time to understand, that ‘thou’ means ‘you’).
I’d also like to point out, that I learned most of my early english by reading fantasy books and playing video games. Which resulted in me knowing words like “disembowel” “dismember” and “decapitate” but beeing unable to name a single tree or flower in english…
03/01/2008 at 20:43 Fat Zombie says:
I’d like to say that not only did I fail to do the proper solution to the “ventilation shaft/tube puzzle” in Portal the first time around, instead stacking chairs to the vent…
…After reading online that the proper solution was to portal a rocket into the tube, I went back in-game, and due to a simple mistake in words, spent ages attempting to break the opening to the ventilation shaft with a rocket, frustrated by the fact that the opening just wouldn’t break (There’s no space to get a portal in!) and completely ignoring the large, glass tube up in the ceiling.
*twat*
03/01/2008 at 20:49 dartt says:
Today I was playing Open Transport Tycoon, I built a huge train network with a hub connecting a bunch of farms, I set up a complex signalling system and spent millions on tunnels to cut out sections of trecherous terrains, I ordered up the trains and gave them their orders. Then I set about thinking where I should send the goods produced by the factory that was receiving all this stuff from the farms.
The factory that…
The factory…
hmmm…
03/01/2008 at 20:53 Arnulf says:
The tale about the looping dungeon in Bard’s Tale reminds me of my (futile!) endeavour to map the Underworld in Ultima V on graph paper. Tasks I’d wouldn’t even consider for one second today. But the lengths someone took to experience the wondrous world of Ultima…
@I_still_love_Okami
Yes, yes, I was also stumped by the curious expressions in Ultima IV and V! Years later I got into my hands the complete works of Shakespeare in a double language edition. On the left side was the original, on the right side the german translation. If I had only be more attentive before!
But I learned to read English by reading science fiction and fantasy novels. And by playing games of course.
By the way, that was the weirdest Youtube review of a game I’ve ever seen. Was that English or Scottish? (It can’t be Gaelic, I’ve heard that before… )
And I would like a transcript please! :D
03/01/2008 at 21:03 Meat Circus says:
1: I played all of Half Life 2 without ever realising the pulse rifle had an alt-fire.
2: In Ico, I once took a two-hour detour to because I didn’t realise that Yorda could be encouraged to jump across gaps.
3: In WoW, I was level 12 before I figured out how to repair armour and sell grey loot.
4: In Prince of Persia: Sands of Time I did that bloody lift section the hard way because I couldn’t figure out how to use the super-sand-power thing.
5: The list is endless, because I am a moron.
6: Two months into Eve and I’ve only just worked out that using autopilot takes five times as long as warping to stargates manually; that you can tell how hard a mission is going to be; and that my civilian shield booster is totally bloody useless.
03/01/2008 at 21:04 John P (Katsumoto) says:
English, in a lovely Scottish accent. I wouldn’t worry though, none of the Americans on youtube understand it at all. And they speak English as a first language! Supposedly!
03/01/2008 at 21:11 Meat Circus says:
@Pace:
at some later point in the game progress became impossible, right in the middle of a huge onslaught of enemy soldiers, again, because I couldn’t jump quite high enough.
I remember that: it’s some green crates in the middle of the mine cart ride section. You know, I never actually figured that out, I eventually assumed it was a bug in Half Life: Source, and opened the debug console and set gravity to 600 from 800. It worked…
03/01/2008 at 21:11 baf says:
I managed to get through the entirety of the original Doom without knowing you could move faster by holding down the shift key. I only learned this when I played some add-on level (one in the “Final Doom” package, I think) that was literally impossible to pass without it. I finally read a hint file to find out what I needed to do, and it said that you needed to run off a particular ledge in order to clear the lava below. Not knowing what it meant by “run”, I proceeded to repeatedly walk off that ledge and into the lava, wondering what I was doing wrong.
03/01/2008 at 21:13 Joel Esler says:
In HL2, I was struck by the no-jumping bug in the Citadel. Only I didn’t realise it was a bug and assumed there was some super gravity in effect. I spent an hour scavenging for scrap to build a ramp over what was meant to be a jumpable barrier.
03/01/2008 at 21:29 cannon fodder says:
@ Kast:
You mean you can get a cube for that bit?
03/01/2008 at 21:30 baf says:
Also, I’ve met someone who slaughtered ever single monster in the dungeon under Lord British’s castle in Ultima Underworld II on his first visit to that area. It didn’t even occur to him to do otherwise. “What a tough game!” he said. It wasn’t supposed to be. That area is a hub that you return to throughout the game, and had optional high-level encounters sprinkled around in corners of the map to keep it interesting on return visits.
He wound up rendering the game unwinnable when he killed everything on the ground floor of the goblin tower, including the NPC who opens the door to the next floor.
03/01/2008 at 21:46 Dan F says:
In Twilight Princess, at the beginning of the game, you have to catch a fish or 2 so a cat would stop being annoying. I had the gamecube version, and for some reason, I could not catch a fish for my life. Almost 3 hours later, and after several friends tried to catch a fish (one said “wow it was so much easier on the, wii version, you should really get a wii!”), I finally threw the controller at a wall. Thinking I may have broken it, when I calmed down I plugged in another controller. Lo and behold, I caught a fish in 2 seconds. Turns out the C-stick wasn’t working. And I was about to proclaim the game the worst in the series.
03/01/2008 at 21:53 Sam says:
@baf: what, you can run in Doom? (I never played Final Doom, so clearly I never encountered any indication you could run until you mentioned it…)
@Meat Circus: Yeah, me too with the armour repairing in WoW (which made me more paranoid about dying than I think I was supposed to be, since my equipment looked like it was steadily going to vanish…)
And, like apparently everyone else, I did the Portal puzzle the “wrong way”; however, in my case, I actually tried it the “right way” first, failed to break the tube and decided that it must be unbreakable and…
03/01/2008 at 21:59 Darius K. says:
Hey, you can map Asteroids, you just need to understand toroidal geometry. Hell, you may have gotten extra credit for that in math class.
03/01/2008 at 22:03 Ben Hazell says:
Reading these comments I’ve only just realised how I was supposed to do that Portal puzzle.
I kinda felt it was a neat twist to remind you to think normally as well as with portals. I stacked PC boxes to climb up.
Afterwards I found there was supposed to be a better way, but I’ve never known what it was. Now I do :)
I also remember that it took a friend coming over to realise that the T Rex in Tomb Raider could be killed.
03/01/2008 at 22:05 Goose says:
On my first run through Ravenholm in Half-Life 2, I totally didn’t realize that I could mow down tons of zombies using the gravity gun and the saw blades that are lying around. Instead, I spent way too much time shooting every last one of them in the “face” with what little ammo I could find.
I can’t remember where I found out about the sawblades, but I remember smacking myself pretty hard in the skull once I did. My second run through the game was much less ammo-constrained and several times more fun.
03/01/2008 at 22:09 Solario says:
The running feature in Half Life 2 didn’t occure to me till I had finished that, every episode and half of Minerva.
I tend to surpress these things, but I’m sure there’s more.
Umm…
03/01/2008 at 22:17 DoomMunky says:
I created a custom civ in GalCiv2 based on the Terrans, who start on the homeworld Earth, with the habitable planet Mars right next door. Now it’s good strategy to colonize all the more remote planets first, before your opponents can get to them. So I churned out a bunch of colony ships and sent them out to the furthest reaches of space, colonizing what I could find. After I’d found all the habitable planets that I could, I discovered a ship from another civ heading toward my home system…yep, it’s a colony ship, and it’s on the way to Mars, which I’ve forgotton about.
Rushing production on a colony ship for it put me 1000bc in the red, halting all production and putting me in such a hole I had to restart or face an INCREDIBLY difficult climb out of debt. So hey, live and learn, right?
Except I didn’t learn, and did the exact same thing the very next game. I’ve been taking a break since, as every time I load it up I’m reminded of my own stupidity.
03/01/2008 at 22:35 Winston says:
My dad had a PC when I was 10 or so. It had little character mode platform games that you played with 2, 4, 6 and 8, for down, left, right and up.
It took me about 3 years to realise that they meant the keys on the keypad, not the ones along the top.
I had been wondering who thought that layout made sense…
03/01/2008 at 22:49 Pace says:
Ha ha, I think we have a winner!
Meat Circus; Glad I’m not the only one. If I knew how to cheat then I’d have done the same thing.
03/01/2008 at 23:14 grey_painter says:
I started to feel a little bit stupid when I found out I was more or less the only person to do that portal puzzle the way it was intended to be done…
Other than that nothing drastic springs to mind. I usually make poor choices for spreading out points in RPGs when leveling up, thats just baseline stupidity rather that completely misunderstanding the concept of the game.
03/01/2008 at 23:24 Coyote says:
X-Com: I finished the game “the hard way” because I didn’t realize you could save a game in mid-battle until I was almost done with the whole thing. One “bad enough” mistake in a battle, and I’d re-start the entire battle from the beginning. And I chalked up a lot of higher-level squaddie deaths to “acceptable losses.” So I had to assault Mars with a bunch of newbies.
03/01/2008 at 23:29 unclebulgaria says:
There’s a puzzle in Tomb Raider 2 where you have to jump over a series of spinning fans. Only when you jump straight at them you die. In my case, for around an hour at a time. There is no way around this, believe me. Turning sideways or backwards makes you jump around 1/10^9th of a pixel higher.
Hand/forehead moment!
03/01/2008 at 23:34 Janek says:
Coyote, nothing stupid about not save scumming. Hooray for you. (I also didn’t know about mid-mission save, with angry results when a particularly grueling alien base met a power cut).
I’ve just thought of another one. When I first played Dwarf Fortress, it took me a week or so to figure out you could designate more than one tile at a time. And that was only because I accidently moved the cursor before hitting enter.
03/01/2008 at 23:42 Raff says:
I finished Deus Ex with no knowledge of the Walk key.
03/01/2008 at 23:58 StolenName says:
@ Schadenfreude
Ahh dear man, I got screwed in Le Chuck’s Revenge when searching for a docket to get a coat, or something. It was on the first island and after literally days of scouring the place for it, all we had to do was shut a door and it was hanging on the back. WHAT THE HELL? Since when is it ever necessary to shut the door in Monkey Island? Ahh well.
I think my worst moment in gaming was in Final Fantasy VII when battling Ruby weapon (which is unbeatable with physical attacks, located in the desert surrounding Dio’s casino place, thing). Cid struck all lucky sevens (7777 health), which forces the character to continually use physical attacks until the enemy is dead. BUT THE BOSS IS IMMUNE TO PHYSICALS. After watching this for a few minutes, laughing my head off, I had to reset and start again. However, I got my own back when Cloud went 7777 on Emerald weapon, thus eliminating one of the most challenging battles in the game.
Oh, I saved in the middle of an elevator in Mass Effect and lost about three hours of gameplay. That was balls.
@ Raff
lol. So no sneaking missions for you then?
@ everyone mentioning HL2
errm, I’ve never completed any of them. Does that make me a bad person?
04/01/2008 at 00:21 Seth Tipps says:
Well, I think most of us will probably be guilty of playing stalker straight through without paying much attention to side quests. I did this, but because I couldn’t get the PDA to switch mission objectives. I never knew you you could kill the poltergeist, for the simple reason that when I tried and sprayed the room with bullets and a grenade, there was no blood (lucky %#&!). It also didn’t help that I had failed to discover that the creature you encounter in the first underground section that does the mind blast thing can be killed. I wound up discovering my mistake when I accidentally killed the one standing over Fang’s body in the second lab.
In half-life2 I didn’t notice the most important car trap until just after I had killed the last zombie at the section, thus using up way too much ammo for anyone’s good. And I definitely didn’t think to pick up the saw blades.
04/01/2008 at 00:22 Seth Tipps says:
Oh, and how many of you figured out what the “Scroll of Icarian flight” in Morrowind was for?
04/01/2008 at 00:24 Electric Dragon says:
In The Longest Journey, a) the up and down keys allow you to scroll through your inventory without having to go back to the inventory screen every time and b) the item in hand cursor helpfully flashes when it is above another object it can be successfully combined with. I discovered neither of these (and didn’t even notice that sometimes the object flashed) until about halfway through, making the game suddenly a whole lot less laborious.
04/01/2008 at 01:06 drunkymonkey says:
The biggest moment I can think of is a horrible yet hilarious little bug that was found on an old Premier Manager game for the Amiga. I attempted to give Paul Gasgoine a payrise, as I thought he had been doing quite well for the club. Unfortunately my club did not have enough money to support one, so clicking the option told me that I wouldn’t be able to. I then proceeded to come off this payrise menu only to be informed that Gasgoine was not prepared to come from this interview without a payrise. I was left stuck on a screen about giving a washed-up football player a payrise I couldn’t afford and he couldn’t live without.
For an eight year old, that’s quite a bewildering experience.
@John P: that is a masterful story.
04/01/2008 at 01:08 WCAYPAHWAT says:
It took me a year or so to realize there was a key that let you grab stuff and move it around in Oblivion. I’d once spent an hour trying to get a sword to sit the right way up in a display cabinet.
04/01/2008 at 01:20 Smee says:
I played through all of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time without realising that there were more sand dagger abilities other than “Rewind”. Meat Circus, I feel your pain over the lift section.
I also didn’t realise that all the weapons and psychic powers in Advent Rising had an alternate fire mode.
I played Worms 2 for about a year before I found out that you could make the worms jump up ledges by backflipping. If the worm I was controlling was ever below another worm on an incline, I used the Ninja Rope to get over him.
Right-Clicking to rotate your buildings as an Engineer in Team Fortress 2 is the most recent one, I think. After about, oooh, 13 hours as that class? It still makes me mad when I go through a teleporter only to come face-to-face against a wall.
Too many little things to do with Theme Hospital and Dungeon Keeper to remember.
04/01/2008 at 01:22 Nihohit says:
Me being one of the (seemingly) rampant non-native english speakers here, I was also stumped by playing computer games in my early years, but – I still remember the sheer joy of playing the tactical mode of Star Control 1, even though I had no idea what wirds like fortify and Mine meant. for me it was just random word choosing until ships collided and the battle begun – and still, it was amazingly fun!
04/01/2008 at 01:43 StolenName says:
@ Drunky Monkey
And that’s why Premiership Manager games are never any good for anyone! My little brother got hooked on the blasted games for years and effectively confiscated my bloody console … grrr.
@ main article
That incident with Mass Effect is an interesting one, which to be honest, highlights for me the necessity of reviewers to also read through the instruction manual of the game they’re reviewing. When I receive games, it’s always the same promo disc in a jewel case for PS3 or dodgy Xbox 360 case for 360 games but hardly ever a manual. It makes me wonder if this could be why some reviewers are claimed to “not get games” as they’re missing that key component of the game as a package.
In this case, the instruction manual for Mass Effect mentioned the importance of upgrading using the Talent Points.
However, I’m not sure how to upgrade weapons was mentioned as it was only four hours into my first play through when I discovered the install function. I was informed that I needed to make space in the inventory for new items so I cleared out all the old weapons but there still seemed to be an excess number of items I couldn’t account for.
That’s when, scouring the inventory screen, I noticed the hit X for upgrade thing. Gah, that gave me the shits and made the game a hell of a lot easier.
04/01/2008 at 01:45 FP says:
Playing Portal the first time around I completely missed the idea of the double fling (dropping from floor to wall to floor to wall) on the first map that requires it.
I ended up putting a portal directly above me and one directly below me and then while I was endlessly falling through the two I tried to shoot an exit portal at the tiny section of non-metal wall, this took me about 20 minutes because it takes less than a second to fall between ceiling and floor which doesn’t give you much time to aim. :)
On the plus side I managed to do the rocket/pipe puzzle the “right” way.
04/01/2008 at 01:50 darkripper says:
I played Jagged Alliance 2 for almost a month, killing thousands of my mercs because of the poor shooting. Recently I re-bought the game on steam and found out the game is easier using stealth-based characters.
Also, I played most of the CoD4 singleplayer without grenades because I was too lazy to bind the 4 and g keys to mouse buttons.
04/01/2008 at 01:53 chronnus says:
I played through 3 quarters of Mafia, memorizing (and in some parts mapping on a piece of paper that I kept below my monitor) the city streets when I friend told me that I could press TAB to get the map to show up. D’oh!
04/01/2008 at 02:00 Therlun says:
The Monkey Island thing is a myth.
You can only polish the wooden leg a very limited number of times. Try it.
04/01/2008 at 02:06 malkav11 says:
I never used grenades at all in Call of Duty 4, but that was mostly because they didn’t seem to be much use. (That, and I could just shoot everyone dead without *too* much trouble.)
04/01/2008 at 02:18 paper says:
In the original Final Fantasy(NES) I didn’t know that you had to EQUIP equipment. I remember thinking, “wow, this game is really hard, I guess I have to level up a lot to get anywhere.” Now every time I see an NPC say “Don’t forget to equip your items” in a game I can understand the intent.
In Portal, the first missile gun stumped me. I spent about half an hour peeking into the room and setting up precise portals to make it shoot itself, and when I finally got it to work the missiles would just disintegrate. It was only then that I noticed that the far wall was just glass…
04/01/2008 at 02:22 Zoetrope says:
Here’s a very recent regret since I just learned about this highly useful World of Warcraft fact today.
Over the holidays, I got a 10-day-invite pass from one of my old guildmates to play WoW again, now improved with the Burning Crusade expansion and a faster leveling speed. I really wanted to check out the new BC content for higher levels, but I had stopped playing my main character at level 47.
I knew that to enter the Dark Portal (which takes you to the higher level content in BC), you need to be level 58. So I spent a good chunk of my holiday break furiously powerleveling to gain 11 levels before my 10 day preview was up so I could see some of the new content.
Today, I finally reached level 57 and was chatting with guildmates about how I’d be able to accomplish my goal with some time to spare. They did the obligatory round of “grats!”, but a mage also quickly remarked that they have a new portal spell that allows them to send anyone (even a level 1 character) directly to the capital city in the heart of the new BC content area.
Long story short, I managed to burn myself out on WoW again in record time and haven’t log on since…
04/01/2008 at 02:39 PleasingFungus says:
Paper: I spent a little bit trying to get the missile turret to shoot itself, too. Managed it, but the missile just clipped through the turret and kept going. So I moved on. (Got the “right” solution to the pipe puzzle, then was rather impressed when I heard of the people who used chairs. Guess it’s mutual?)
FP: I’m not certain, but I think that one of the advanced maps requires you to do that. Ridiculously hard.
04/01/2008 at 02:42 Homunculus says:
I still can’t figure out what you’re supposed to do to get past the bit in Minerva where you’re disarmed and there’s a force field that flicks up when you approach it with a power cable leading from it along the ceiling into the room you’re in that plugs into the wall above three ammo crates that don’t stack sufficiently high to put it within reach.
To my shame and discredit, I uninstalled it because of this impasse.
04/01/2008 at 02:44 Typhon says:
This was a while ago, when I was playing Eye of the Beholder on the Amiga. I got to the drow level, with all the pits – and somehow I missed or lost one of the keys, so I couldn’t open the next door. I spent *two weeks* mapping out the pits and what they led to. Eventually, I found a point that let me bypass the broken part, and went on to finally beat Xanathar. Of course, I’d missed the beholder wand as well, so I had to beat him to death with weapons.
A few years later I replayed it on the PC, and got everything right this time – found all the keys, assembled the wand. Naturally, I then got bitten by the ‘PC version has no ending’ problem. Sometimes, you just can’t win :D
Another one was in Stonekeep, where all your items were kept on a scroll that you can scroll up and down with the mouse. S l o w l y . It wasn’t until the end of the game that I discovered the page up and down keys would scroll it a ‘page’ at a time. Argh!
@baf: A nice thing about UW2 was that usually if you killed someone who was supposed to open something, they’d have a key that would let you do it. Unless you’re talking about the double door on the ground floor, which you could walk straight through as long as you followed ‘normal security procedure’. ie, Close the first door behind you before you open the second one :D It works too, I mean what kind of adventurer goes around *closing* doors?
04/01/2008 at 02:48 Andrew says:
Funnily enough I managed to do the portal puzzles all right. :)
But I failed at doing a Episode 2 puzzle. The one with the flipper, and the grenade box right nearby. I eventually did it by stacking several things up and using the gravity gun…
That took up a good half hour of time in a 6 hour game, wow, entertaining! :D
I usually check keymappings and commands before I start a game nowadays. Not knowing shortcuts is a big pain for some games, and I’ve learnt not to not learn them. :)
04/01/2008 at 03:16 Radiant says:
Without grens on Cod4???
Man I flashbanged every corner I couldn’t see around!
Uncle Price stops? Nephew Radiant flashbangs.
Lots of Zelda crap comes to mind but then I discovered gamefaqs.com.
I stop? Gamefaqs flashbangs.
Stupid reflex ‘quick’ saves in shooters.
[20 health + 2 clips] x 100 nme = Older Radiant becomes awesome at shooting and knifing pixels.
04/01/2008 at 04:07 Tim says:
… oooh too many to count, but two recent ones …
I finished Halo 3 without finding, discovering or even being aware of terminals or skulls.
In Mass Effect I dutifully worked my way across the skyway in the Mako, wheeling in and out behind cover and working down the enemies shields with the rapidly overheating machine gun and cursing Bioware for making me perform such a challenging task with inaccurate controls.
Eventually, on the return trip I faced multiple rocket launching enemies, and after trying everything from using the nearby closing doors to intercept slower moving enemy fire, to using the Mako for cover and taking pot shots with the sniper rifle, I started mashing all the buttons on the controller, and fired the rail gun for the first time.
04/01/2008 at 04:45 The_B says:
Don’t mention the witch…errr….war!
04/01/2008 at 06:10 Zeno, Internetographer says:
Played most of the first disc of Final Fantasy VIII without junctioning anything or using GFs. Not easy, let me tell you.
04/01/2008 at 06:59 Narvi says:
When I first played Crusader: No Regret, I couldn’t figure out how to fire the gun. :(
04/01/2008 at 07:13 Tr00jg says:
@Zeno:
I played through FF8 without junctioning too, but at least I used GF’s. :P
04/01/2008 at 07:25 Jeremy says:
In Portal, I woke, threw the radio in the toilet and stood in the room for about 5 minutes before I realized that there was a way out. It didn’t help that I played through the entire game with the bug where the sound for GlaDOS didn’t work. That meant 3 hours of silence. And no jokes or anything funny. Just running through a lab rat maze, nothing else.
I’m sure I’ve played several FPSs without using the ‘run’ mode where it would’ve been desperately necessary.
I’ve got a Japanese Wii, so everything I do means I have to read kanji. It’s workable if you know a bit, but trying to play Twilight Princess was nigh impossible. I had to check a walkthrough guide every 5 minutes.
And I feel Pace’s pain on the HL1 crouch-jump, that railcar bit took forever, had to finally go to a guide, which just said ‘jump over the green boxes.’ Big help.
For bad luck/stupidity, my roommate managed to hit a Halo 3 checkpoint as he was falling down a hole. There went 2 hours of gameplay.
Plus all the other ones I’ve repressed because they’re too embarrassing.
04/01/2008 at 08:41 Frans Coehoorn says:
I always thought the friendly EVA lady said “Silence needed” in the original Command & Conquer. I thought: what kind of cynical joke is that? Are the NOD soldiers screaming too loud when you kill them?!
Turned it she said “Silo’s needed”. It all made sense to me eventually…
04/01/2008 at 08:44 AbyssUK says:
Gears of war, I skipped the tutorial and did a big chunk of the game without using the duck behind cover button….
C+C generals, at a lan party spent ages building lots and lots of big ass tanks, didn’t realise I could upgrade them with mini guns.. sent them in against my friend who killed them all with just a few helicopters… great!
Duke Nukem 3D, didn’t know about the mirrors spent a good 5-10 minutes trying to shoot my reflection as i kept diving for cover when it shot back at me in the toilets of the cinema of the demo.. DOH!
04/01/2008 at 08:49 Piratepete says:
I can’t think of anything I have done like that. Does that mean I win :)
04/01/2008 at 09:06 Nick says:
I played Medal of Honour: Allied Assault till the second last mission before I realised I would have more fun watching it uninstall and that I could never get the wasted hours of crap back.
I suppose that doesn’t really count though, hmm.
I went to about level 100 or so of ADOM’s infinite dungeon before I realised that I had run out of food, my god hated me and I had very little chance of making it 100 levels up again to carry on with the game. I don’t even know why I kept going down the stairs.
04/01/2008 at 09:11 Saul says:
You guys do realise that the Half-Life tutorial level teaches you how to do the crouch-jumps? Not that that means they aren’t bad game design, but still.
For myself, I’m sure I’ve had plenty of these stuff-ups, though I can’t recall in which games. Mostly they would have been of the ‘didn’t know there was a key to do that’ or ‘miss the incredibly powerful super-weapon that you need to kill the last boss’ varieties. And saving when falling into holes– that’s always a blast.
04/01/2008 at 09:38 Phil says:
It’s not just in FPS, playing through the first Total War without the benefit of the ‘run’ command meant my Samauri, especially those precious, precious Warrior Monks, tended to get a little arrowry as they sloowwwy paced their way towards archers.
04/01/2008 at 09:58 Meat Circus says:
You guys do realise that the Half-Life tutorial level teaches you how to do the crouch-jumps? Not that that means they aren’t bad game design, but still.
There’s a tutorial level?
Anyway, I think you’ll find my “change gravity till it suits you” approach wins more points for creativity, but on the downside it’s only possible on Half Life: Source.
04/01/2008 at 10:03 Pace says:
Tutorial? Psshaw. I do acknowledge this is the ‘dumb things we did’ discussion. Still, it would’ve been nice if they made sure we knew how to do it sometime before the middle of the game while under fire. I still have just a little bit of hatred in my heart for Valve to this day for that.
04/01/2008 at 10:06 WCAYPAHWAT says:
I too went quite a ways into FF8 with GF’s equiped, but no magic junctioned. Tried it again with the magic, and found it too easy and boring.
04/01/2008 at 10:13 Lu-Tze says:
“Another player didn’t even try that and, assuming it was impossible, carried on along the rest of the chapter on foot!”
Um yeah. That was me. At the bit with the train bridge I ditched the Buggy and just did the rest of it on foot. Thankfully I was well aware of how to bunnyhop which means you can go ridiculously fast.
I still maintain I win the Portal air vent puzzle stupidity contest, by immediately breaking open the tube and getting my cube, then spending the next 20 minutes trying to work out how to break the fan, or else drag the cube in with me and use it to jump to freedom. I seriously had about 8 PCs in there with the cube trying to stack towards the endless white light of VICTORY (too much “Cube”). Then I realised I could fire portals through the fan.
I too never found the cannon of death on the Mako until well into Mass Effect. I’d become quite proficient at dodging bullets by that point.
Rotating stuff as an Engineer in TF2? I found that out yesterday when reading a strategy guide on some Wiki somewhere. I damn near cried.
Oblivion didn’t tell me how to drop items. I got halfway through the first bit before I rooted myself to the floor and was unable to move.
Phantomn Hourglass, the lever number puzzle in the Ghost Ship took me WAY too long. I had done a ridiculous number of combinations of reversing the order and so forth, without realising what it actually meant.
04/01/2008 at 10:16 Aquarion says:
I managed to go though the tube/rocket/cube bit of Portal fine, but the “The Management Regrets to inform you that this next test is impossible” level? Took. Me. Hours.
Why?
Okay, if you watch the Portal video, released a year before it, you’ll see a level where the player jumps with a cube and pushes it though a small hole so it falls down the other side. I saw this, thought “Ahh, I’m on this level. I know how to do this” and proceeded to grab cube, jump at small hole, push block. Miss. Go to portal, grab cube, jump at small hole, miss. Go to portal, grab cube, jump at small hole, miss.
It wasn’t until I saw the “Portal in 20 minutes” video I even guessed there was a better way.
04/01/2008 at 10:29 Richard says:
Pah. That’s MY Monkey Island 2 anecdote. And there’s nothing apocryphal about it – I saw the game running with my own eyes, and showed them how to gather the cash the ‘correct’ way. They were a mix of deeply relieved, and deeply angry.
04/01/2008 at 10:54 Sam says:
Aquarion: however, I believe that was, originally, the way you were supposed to do that puzzle in Portal. I seem to recall the commentary even mentioning it (in fact, I have a suspicion that it’s still supposed to be the way you solve the puzzle, according to the commentary… but I’m probably misremembering).
04/01/2008 at 10:58 malkav11 says:
There’s a boss in the Witcher that you have to defeat by running madly away and then crushing under tons of rock by knocking out conveniently placed supports – but since everything so far had been susceptible to dicing into little bits, when it first showed I ran up to it…and it put a claw right through my head and instakilled me. Whoops.
(Of course, the real solution turned out to be horrible as I kept getting stuck among zillions of enemies on the way out. But that’s not *my* fault.)
04/01/2008 at 11:02 Schadenfreude says:
Thief 3 in the Cradle. When I first came across the spooky electro-zombies (Or should I say when they first happened upon me) I used the tried and tested “Flash/Bang” on ‘em and was deeply horrified to see them get up again. I then assumed they were invincible and spent the rest if the level near widdling myself. Turns out you can kill ‘em if you hit ‘em with three flash grenades.
Still; probably wouldn’t remember that level so fondly if I hadn’t thought they were invincible.
04/01/2008 at 11:12 Mike says:
Is the lesson to be learnt here that we should probably spend 15 minutes on the bog reading the manual before we attack our games.
Also, I don’t feel the need to repeat my Portal shame, it has an RPS post all of its own.
04/01/2008 at 11:13 Mike says:
No, judging by my own post the lesson is in fact basic grammar.
04/01/2008 at 11:16 Meat Circus says:
@Mike:
Is the lesson to be learnt here that we should probably spend 15 minutes on the bog reading the manual before we attack our games.
No, the lesson is that game developers should have realized in about 1957 that gamers won’t read manuals, and therefore that hiding useful information in them is stupid and counterproductive.
Also ‘tutorial levels’? Flip them too, frankly.
04/01/2008 at 11:20 The Unsung Hero says:
Me too! Funny thing is, I think I actually managed it the first time I did that puzzle, and only realised the easy way to do it the second time around.
04/01/2008 at 11:26 Arnulf says:
Reading through the comments various things pop into my mind…
As a game player since 1985 one picks up various habits. Like the habit to collect everything in adventures that is not nailed to the floor. Opening all doors (but never closing them).. hey it’s a nice way to check if you’ve been there already!
And sometimes the game designer plays you with presenting a riddle where you as game player have to overcome your game-playing habits. Like the “close the door” to progress in UW2 or Monkey Island 2.
The crouch-jump in Half-Life. I hated this. For me (I’m very clumsy) it was way too hard to accomplish. I have played the tutorial. I knew how to do it. But I almost never used it.
I did the pipe puzzle the correct way. But I could not figure out how to get past the third platform in challenge map #18. Bless gamefaqs.
Designing user interfaces, or game environments for that matter, is hard. Hearing the comments in Portal about what lengths the designers had to go to point the player to certain things in the game is very revealing. And still with all the hints and signs installed there are people who miss all that and happily ignore it, but are playing on!
I think it’s great that a game still has left that much appeal that you want to play it further even if you missed an important point.
Thank god there is the internet now, where you just have to blurt out “man this game is fun! but so hard because of x” and some random guy answers “you did do y in the beginning, right? because y is the natural counter to x”
04/01/2008 at 11:43 Lu-Tze says:
Ah that reminds me. Assassin’s Creed. The level in the docks. I ran from the Bureau, dived down, dodged along the docks, flitted along the wooden stumps with nary a care and was just about to board the ship when I made an unfortunate jump into the water.
1 hour later, after finding out that jumping across the wooden logs as I had done before was IMPOSSIBLE and I had to realign myself for every jump and line up the camera perfectly, and getting really pissed off every time I went into the water and had to start from the bureau again… I finally got on the ship. And it was empty. Because I hadn’t triggered the cutscene at the OTHER entrance to the docks, which also handily does a little checkpoint for you so you don’t have to run halfway across the city before you can start the falling in water adventures. All the time the minimap had been telling me how to save myself the bother and i’d been ignoring it killing myself repeatedly.
04/01/2008 at 11:44 Mike says:
The thing is, games will always repurpose your controller in different ways from other games you’ve played (to varying degrees). Unless it’s a real slap-in-the-face genre piece, at some point there is a mechanical need to refer to something or experiment by mashing the controller to find out which button does what, and make a judgement about how frequently you’ll need to use it.
The debate is, I guess, what is the best way to deliver that information and any other salient stuff unobtrusively. Or, I suppose, whether heavy context sensitivity, a la Assassin’s Creed, is the answer.
Incidentally, Alec and I were discussing the large number of military training warehouses that blight the gaming landscape. I’d much rather read the manual than be forced wander through a hangar shooting bits of chipboard and being taught how to look up and down. For the record, I think Hitman: Blood Money is an example of how tutorial missions should be executed.
04/01/2008 at 11:46 Shanucore says:
I’ve just read all the comments and don’t think I can equal any of the finer tales on offer here. That said, the first PC game I really played was Civilization, on my Dad’s 286. For some reason we could only play it with the keyboard, I didn’t know any of the commands, and the manual was a bit heavyweight for a seven year-old. So lots of fun ensued with attempting to figure out the game by using what I knew (rather than trying different keys). Memorable examples including not being able to change city build orders, resulting in a single city civilization defended by countless militia units, and not knowing that there was a sentry or skip turn button, resulting in a hefty army of knights being moved into and out of my capital every turn to use up their move points. Bless. :)
It’s not really the same thing but, when playing Star Control 2, did *anyone* figure out the location of the ZEX Beast based on the cryptic clue? Apparently it made sense if you had the original colour starmap, but for anyone restricted to the “deluxe” map or, worse, the in-game starmap, it was totally impossible. I even wrote in to PC Gamer to ask where it was! (Of course I found it before the letter was published, though I was still glad to see the game mentioned in the mag.)
04/01/2008 at 11:49 akbar says:
Ah, that bloody battery puzzle in HL2. I looked it up on the internet, the solution pissed me off. It’s bad because to avoid the possibility of the player breaking the game, they make the batteries respawn if you lob them into the ocean, which sort of compromises the whole “real physics” nature of the puzzle.
I also did not realize the pulse rifle had an alt fire. But the worst bit in HL2 was the end of Black Mesa East, when you have to climb a ladder up a mine shaft into Ravenholm. Having just been given the gravity gun tutorial, I thought that the way to get past the metal cage covering the lower part of the ladder would be to build a stack of furniture that I could climb – there were loads of wardrobes and crates lying around. When I *finally* managed to clamber up there, I found that it wouldn’t let me climb the ladder after all. Much frustration later, I discovered that my “trusty crowbar” could break the padlock, whence the ladder became climbable.
NB: I loved HL2 really.
04/01/2008 at 12:03 stern says:
When I fought Psycho Mantis in Metal Gear Solid I didn’t get the hints to use the other controller, so I beat him the hard way. You could get in one or two hits every attack cycle, and it probably took a good two hours to finish him off (not counting all the retries!)
04/01/2008 at 12:15 zaptrack says:
@Zaptroe or whatever, you woulda gotten slaughtered if you went there before 58.
04/01/2008 at 12:33 Champagne O'Leary says:
A backwards break, or perhaps a flaw in the game:
In Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, the level of your enemies is based on the average level of your entire party – including any characters that aren’t in action. I had a couple of group members join around level 4 or 5 and I just kept them there. As I got further through the game, these guys dragged down my average level and my enemies got relatively weaker and weaker. It was only towards the end of the game I realised what was happening.
04/01/2008 at 12:34 drunkymonkey says:
Thinking about it, I spent a hell of a long time on Caesar 3 before finding out that building the houses near government buildings and parks increased their desirability and structure quality.
Normally, I just had towns full of people with shit all over them.
04/01/2008 at 12:37 Bob says:
About the Monkey Island 2 6000 coins thing – I can’t see it being anything else than a legend because IIRC the developers took care of enforcing winning the contest would be the only way to get that much money: the guy stops paying you for polishing the leg after a while.
04/01/2008 at 12:43 Richard says:
It’s not a legend – it’s one I saw with my own eyes. Although of course, that makes it anecdotal evidence and by nature unreliable, so I’d probably wave the bullshit flag if I heard it too.
They didn’t get all the way to 6000 coins (and I doubt it would have worked if they had). I don’t remember how many they’d gotten – this was several years ago now – but it was an eye-popping chunk of change, and the peg-leg guy was still paying out. Could have been a glitch in the port (ST, IIRC, although it might have been Amiga), could have been a very high-upper limit, but they’d been at it for aeons without ever thinking they were just missing the point.
Oddly, I never felt tempted to fire up my old copy and see how much you could get from the guy.
04/01/2008 at 13:06 terry says:
Interesting question, I have a few “duh” moments that have built up over the years.
Bruce Lee (zx) – I was four. I had little to no coordination or reading ability. I played Bruce Lee. I played Bruce Lee a lot. I would beat up the green sumo over and over and over, gaining miraculous highscores (which I would ask my father to read out so I could write it down in biro on my highscore book – a necessity when games didn’t think to save such things). It was even better than Mr Wimpy. Bruce Lee had it all. Punches, kicks, some little shit with a big stick. 3 screens of heart-stopping lantern collecting action. Except – I never realised you were supposed to collect the lanterns- indeed I didn’t realise there were more than 3 screens. I must have played those 3 screens Donkey Kong-style for years before someone blew my mind by dropping through the floor, revealing the rest of the game that had eluded me. Doh.
Elite (zx) – If there was one thing you never wanted to do in Elite, it was dock manually – find space station, judge correct approach angle, match rotation of said space station and crawl forward slowlyyyyyyy just enough to smack into said space station. Now repeat this for every one of however squillion systems you found. Or you could buy a docking computer and it was automatic. You would know this if you had a manual. I did not, so my technique was to start to manually dock and then at the vital crashing-into- the-space-station moment, mash all the keys on the keyboard until I either miraculously docked or got a nice “(c) 1982 Sinclair Research Ltd.” message. Whoops. On the plus side it prepared me for X3 which has a similar “mash keyboard until something happens/you smack into space station” mechanic.
Ultima VI (pc) – If you’ve played this you will be aware of the handy feature that highlights topics you hear of in conversation so that you can discuss them further. This is a handy feature as Ultima games are huge and open and it is entirely possible to skip forward in the plot and have absolutely no bloody idea what you are supposed to do at any point. The problem was that this feature is disabled in CGA mode (yes, the original retina scorching 4 colour palette) and so you, er, have absolutely no bloody idea what you are supposed to do at any point. I played the game like this (with notebooks containing pretty much every keyword I had got a response for) for many years until eventually getting a VGA card and realising what a moron I’d been. To make me cry you can just walk up and whisper “name job bye” in my ear :(
04/01/2008 at 13:15 Mike says:
Must have been Amiga, Richard. The ST crowd were always bitter that Monkey II was never ported to their beloved system. I remember a letter in ST Format from a guy who was attempting to port the entire thing himself from the Amiga code.
04/01/2008 at 13:38 Richard says:
Must have been.
Oh. Not a personal example, but one I remember fondly – several people I knew back in the day thinking the whole of Leisure Suit Larry was set in Lefty’s Bar, due to not spotting that they could call a cab from the sidewalk outside and visit the rest of the city.
(Why no manual? Um… Look behind you! A three legged pira- Er. Monkey!)
04/01/2008 at 14:16 phuzz says:
I remember the original Monkey Island in the Amiga I didn’t know how to save the game (it was a pirate copy I got off my mate David Spanner, real name, hiya Dave!), so I spent 3 days playing the game and leaving the computer on overnight. After my mum unplugged it I gave up and never played the game again until the other year using SCUMM-VM.
Mind you, I went straight through, purely based on the days when I used to read Amiga Format and The One cover to cover, including the cheat pages for games I didn’t own, hence the complete walk through of Monkey Island that lives in my brain :)
Also, just last week I was stuck in Zelda: Twilight Princess on the bit where you have to protect a horse and cart (bloody escort missions).
After many runs through, never quite managing to keep the cart from burning and killing the birds that drop bombs (which makes the cart circle the area again and again) My flatmate got tired of my screaming at the TV and told me to give it a rest and come back tomorrow, stubbornly I went back for “one last try”. This time I finally bothered to read the hint text that comes up at the bottom of the screen rather than assuming I knew better.
Result? Pressing Z to target before firing the boomerang without having to aim got me through the whole bit in record time with no hassles.
Felt like a chump though.
04/01/2008 at 15:02 Richard says:
One I remember – a game called Les Manley in Search For The King (a game I still occasionally drag out of the archives just to kick in the balls for puzzles that annoyed me back in the Dark Ages). One puzzle early on has you getting a job in a circus, specifically, shovelling elephant crap. But it doesn’t tell you how long you’ve got to do it for.
The answer: it doesn’t matter. Quit after a second, go back to the boss, and he pays you. But I spent several days (in thankfully short play-sessions) either waiting for a message like “Phew, I’m done!” or to spot what puzzle needed to be solved to take a shortcut.
Grr.
(And years later, Super Paper Mario came along… And the hurt began again…)
04/01/2008 at 15:23 Iain says:
@terry re: Elite.
So you never found the docking exploit on the Speccy?
The way to do it was to leave the station, stop immediately, flip a 180 and then crawl up to the docking port of the station at the slowest speed. You didn’t even need to match the rotation of the station. As soon as the docking animation starts, you hit the hyperspace key, and… hey presto! You’re docked at the space station of the new star system! A great little early game exploit that one. Saved you time and unnecessary deaths until you could afford to buy a decent laser, an ECM unit and docking computers…
04/01/2008 at 15:42 Man Raised By Puffins says:
I did guffaw somewhat at the whole ‘forgetting to level up’ thing, but I’ve just remembered an old Amiga demo that I couldn’t make head nor tail of at the time. It was some manner of party based D&D-styled RPG, but for some reason the PCs wouldn’t budge after they’d moved a certain distance and I couldn’t even get them to reach the door to the next room. I now realise I was stuck on the first turn of a turn-based RPG.
04/01/2008 at 15:48 baf says:
@Typhon: Now that you mention it, I recall that the double “standard procedure” doors was in fact where he was stuck. So killing all the goblins didn’t actually make the game unwinnable, it just made it impossible for him to talk to the goblin that would have given him clues about what to do.
I’ve got another one for you: Wishbringer. I got all the way to the end without finding the Wishbringer stone. I just assumed that it would be obvious when I reached the part of the game where the stone becomes available, so I kept solving puzzles the hard way. Even when it was clear that I was nearing the end of the game, I figured that there would be a finale where you finally obtain the stone and have to use all of its powers in rapid succession or something. Only at the very end, when I had no leads remaining other than a stone-shaped hole in front of me, did I think that maybe I had gone about things wrong. (I probably would have wanted to solve all the puzzles without using the stone anyway, but I would have at least liked to have known that I had options.)
As for FF8, I played through it without doing any summoning (except once for each GF, just to see the summoning animation), but that was deliberate: I felt that summoning made the game too easy. At least I was junctioning.
04/01/2008 at 15:51 KingMob says:
Wizard’s Crown – remember that old game from ICE? I had it on a Compaq Portable II, anyway… so each time I played it I would get to the first major bit of story and get stuck. Not seeing how to get any further from there, I would restart the game and try again. Eventually – and this is after about a week of frustration – it occurred to me the little symbol on the lower right of the screen looked kind of like the symbol on the ‘Enter’ key, and what do you know, hitting ‘Enter’ advanced me to the next story screen…
I still haven’t finished that game.
Anyway, I too have a HL2 story – the area with the docks and the magnet crane, I figured out how to use the crane and get the buggy up top, but I couldn’t get through the glass window for the life of me. Eventually I figured out the only way was to crash the buggy through the window… I think this was supposed to be an action sequence, not a puzzle!
04/01/2008 at 16:01 Muzman says:
I pretty much “ghosted” Return To The Cathedral in Thief 1 on hard difficulty because I didn’t know the undead (and haunts in particular) could be killed. I didn’t find out until trying it on Expert difficulty and killing them is one of the objectives.
If you know the game and you think that’s bad enough, spare a thought for all the folks (many of them reviewers of the game!) who, back in the day, ground their way through catacomb levels beating every zombie and whatever else down with a sword because they didn’t know you can sneak just as effectively against non humans.
04/01/2008 at 16:07 Piratepete says:
Wizards Crown sounds like a euphamism from Rogers Profanasaurus
04/01/2008 at 17:33 Lucky says:
Oh, don’t get me started…
Twilight Princess, Kakariko village. It took me a while to realize that I can jump through the bomb shop’s window by sprinting at the same time. In addition I also got stuck right at the beginning since I couldn’t obtain the fishing pole or something, can’t remember.
04/01/2008 at 17:34 Martin says:
Well, I’ve been gaming since 1977 or so but my memory only goes a couple of days back (only joking a little bit) so I’ll have to use one minor screw-up I had yesterday while playing Bioshock. Spoiler free anecdote – I promise!
In the Prometheus Point level (I think it was) where you need to gather among other things Pheromone Samples I spent 30 minutes scrutinizing one or two rooms as I thought the hint text only pointed out to look for the items when I was in those two rooms.
I finally gave up and called my brother, who has completed the game, who pointed out to me that I had to look for the items all over the level – which of course consisted of a lot more than the two first rooms I happened to stumble into.
This happened despite me being very well aware of the fact that important plot items glow like they’re coated with Plutonium.
Not all that embarrasing but still not very clever.
(On a side note, the preview function is *reallly* slow in a huge thread like this. My system isn’t top-notch but the CPU shouldn’t peak as soon as I start typing in the comment box. :))
04/01/2008 at 17:39 Lu-Tze says:
Civilisation reminds me, that wonderfully glorious moment when I realised that YOU COULD MOVE DIAGONALLY. Oh Christ I felt stupid.
04/01/2008 at 18:16 Kim says:
I uh…. went through most of Dirge of Cerebus without leveling up any of my items and weapons… until my brother pointed out I could….
Opps.
04/01/2008 at 22:00 Brummbar says:
The Atari 800 port of Ultima 2 (by Chuck Bueche) had a fatal bug which omitted Blue Tassels and thus made ship acquisition – and finishing the game – impossible.
I had an Atari 800 and didn’t know this… so I soldiered on. I actually made it to Minax’ fortress in the Time of Legends and fought my way to her only to be killed every time after the force fields wiped my health out.
Later on I played the game on my new Apple ][e. I got Blue Tassels – first time I had seen them – which got me to the Russian rocket base, which got me into space, which got me to Father Antos on Planet X, which got me his ring, which got me… immunity to the force fields. At last!
04/01/2008 at 23:47 matte_k says:
Three examples spring to mind. The first was my first playthrough of Enter The Matrix on the PC, and a shoddy keyboard connection resulted in my character incessantly running forward. No matter what i tried, he wouldn’t stop,all i could do was steer him. I completed the whole of the first level (which is very hard to fight four dudes with guns at once when you can’t stop to fight them) before restarting my pc and fixing the bug. Idiot.
The second was playing Shadowman on the N64, and at one point in the game because i couldn’t quite see through a metal fence to find the exit, I physically stood up to try and see over the character’s shoulder for a better view. The two other people in the room with me were particularly amused when i explained why i’d stood up…which is when I realised what i’d done.
The third? My fear of spiders making me do a U-turn and running away in the sewer section of Resident Evil 2.
05/01/2008 at 13:05 Morningoil says:
“I still can’t figure out what you’re supposed to do to get past the bit in Minerva where you’re disarmed and there’s a force field that flicks up when you approach it with a power cable leading from it along the ceiling into the room you’re in that plugs into the wall above three ammo crates that don’t stack sufficiently high to put it within reach.
To my shame and discredit, I uninstalled it because of this impasse.” ….. Oh, I’m so stuck here too. Help!
——————————————
Two that come to mind are:
Resi 4 – got through about 80% of it (at least) before I realised you could run. There was one section in particular in the bowels of the castle with blades that come slicing up from the floor that was rendered really very tricky indeed by this failure on my part.
WoW – my first char got to at least 10 before I realised you could freelook using the mousebuttons. I remember thinking that Thunder Bluff looked incredible, but I could only see it if I was standing far enough away (and I mean, like, in Bloodhoof) that it would appear right at the top of my screen.
05/01/2008 at 17:02 Sum0 says:
I know I’ve done plenty of stupid things in games, but the only one I can think of is not realising that you can pick up manhacks in HL2 with the gravity gun. I was just running around crowbar-ing them all.
05/01/2008 at 19:45 Pace says:
The supply crates do stack high enough to reach the plug. Actually one is all you really need, you can jump and unplug it (press ‘use’) in midair, but that’s a bit more tricky. With 2 crates stacked up you should be able to reach the plug without jumping. Maybe try repositioning the crates directly under the plug if you’re having trouble.
Sum0: Yeah, that was a fabulous revelation once I discovered that too.
05/01/2008 at 20:06 Arnulf says:
Picking manhacks from the air. I consider this an advanced technique. There should be at least some neat things a player can discover on his/her own… it’s not essential to beat the game though.
05/01/2008 at 21:49 MedO says:
Playing “Vampire The Masquerade:Bloodlines” with mouselook turned off. I had wondered why I couldn’t look up/down with my mouse and searched for the option, but somehow overlooked it, and thought that the game was just meant to be played like this. I actually managed to complete a quest before I became too frustrated to go on, and talked to a friend who told me that it wasn’t supposed to be like this…
05/01/2008 at 22:01 Lunaran says:
You know, I spent that whole game the first time through knocking down manhacks with the crowbar, arguably the hardest way possible, because the first time you encounter them in the tunnels, the guy you’re with grabs a pipe to deal with them. I figured if they were easily shootable he’d have shot them too.
The lesson for developers that this thread should represent is “Take nothing for granted.” It doesn’t matter how obvious you think it is, it might not be to someone who didn’t put it there. From the Barwood-Falstein Rules List:
05/01/2008 at 22:51 Matt says:
This is not necessarily about me doing something the wrong way in a game but I want to come clean. And also before I go any further, it’s about the FMV X-Files game from 1998, now I know a lot of people hate this type of game, but it’s quite literally the best game ever.
I asked for this game for Christmas that year, my mother said on Christmas Eve that we could open one present. I chose this one. I got stuck about half an hour into the game, it was then I remembered that there was a full walkthrough in a magazine I’d recently bought. I impatiently turned to this after another few minutes of not having a clue what to do. About 2 hours later, I’d just put disk seven of seven into the disk drive and found myself on the final level. I’d gone through the whole damn game looking at the walkthrough.
I was quite lucky at this point, I managed to save the game literally a quarter of a second before I died, and had no back up saves. So had to start from the beginning again. Unfortunately I knew exactly what to do in every part of the game.
06/01/2008 at 00:13 Dinger says:
Okay, in the spirit of the season and all:
I’ve done tons of stupid things in my time, many of them unintentionally. But my glory days of gaming stupidity happened many years ago, when I was very young. I had a job, if you could call it that, at an independent software testing house, back when such things existed. Basically, this was before the internet and minions of unpaid volunteers and all that nonsense. So it usually worked that the game mills would dump on us the crap that their in-house team was sick of. Sometimes, we’d get SimCity, but for every Maxis port, DataEast had 30.
Again,this is before the internet, so once the thing was sent to the duplicators, that was it. And some companies found it made sense to master the disk that we had tested from in-house, and this would occasionally happen without us on the floor being made aware of it (so if you collectors find a 68k port of OutRun with a high score list that is rather vulgar and homoerotic/homophobic, I can certify that it is a first pressing).
One company that didn’t master the test disk was developing a jet fighter game for the PC (actually a port of their Jet Fighter game for the Amiga released through EA, as far as I could tell, but nobody seemed to care), and I was the tester assigned to it. These guys wre ‘fiscfally aggressive’, demanding that we only spend so many hours on each build. Long story short, each mission began with this zoom that the first time it happened, it looked really cool. You started out in space, and the camera zoomed all the way until you were sitting on a carrier or a runway, ready to go.Well, they started getting really worried about hours at the end of testing. So, what that emant was that, with each build, I’d go in and verify existing bugs before searching for new ones. And the existing bugs took most of the time to confirm. In all this, I was helped by a shortcut: hitting ESC would skip by that zoom sequence.So, sure enough, they shipped and at some point, a crash bug had gotten into the zoom. So unless you knew the shortcut -which nobody did, having not played the game -, the game would lock up the PC every time, before you even got to start the engines.It’s the opposite stupidity of what you’re looking for I suppose: how knowing a shortcut ruined the game for many.
06/01/2008 at 03:35 Pal says:
Monke Island 2
Every single person I know who played the game tried to polish the leg enough times, and he stops paying you fairly quickly. That anecdote is truly a myth.
06/01/2008 at 11:03 Jachap says:
This comment thread is incredibly reassuring, as this sort of mental gaming block happens to me all the time.
Zelda Twilight Princess… and that stupid cat. The thing is, it follows you when you have the fishing rod equipped but catching the first fish does nothing. In games, if something doesn’t work the first time, I’ll generally discount it.
I spent ages trying to get the cat to follow me into the shop. Its doubly frustrating to be stuck on a game that early on.
The game irritated me at a variety of points later on, too. There’s that section where you go to Doom Mountain and, at one point, the way is blocked by one of the big Mountain tribesmen. I spent ages trying to get past him, using the heavy metal boots so he wouldn’t shove me off the ledge. Again, I’m always wrong footed in games where you are meant to lose.
Yesterday, on Company of Heroes, I was reminded of a problem I literally encounter all the time. I start a multi player game and simply don’t know what the team chat button is.
The best one I’ve ever encountered was my friend whose only experience of games was limited to the original Playstation and Grand Theft Auto 3. This being so, when I lent him Jedi Knight II, he was stuck on the first level for three weeks.
Why?
He didn’t know you could save whenever you wanted.
06/01/2008 at 11:37 Joe says:
This is the best thread ever.
Also, you all suck.
06/01/2008 at 13:18 Lady Thief Of Pearls says:
I didn’t level up in Baldur’s Gate until my character had enough exp to be about Level 4. Admittedly, it was the first ‘proper’ game I’d ever played, and was borrowed without a manual, but still.
In Portal, I also spent an embarrassingly long time attempting to drop items into a furnace by placing a portal above it. I couldn’t *quite* place it right, and after several attempts my brother pointed out that it just might be easier to put the portal on the wall beside it…
A friend played through Thief 2 without knowing that the robots could be disabled with a simple water arrow to the boiler.
06/01/2008 at 16:58 terry says:
@ Iain: Thanks for making me feel twice as stupid as I did :(
I just remembered that I had problems with the end of Portal too – instead of, um, using portals like the entire game trained you to use, I instead had a brainfart and decided to balance each AI eyeball sprocket on the lid of the incinerator and then run to press the button. The only problem was the eyeballs would rarely stay in position so I would run back to dutifully prop them up and try pressing the button again, only to run out of time.
I did eventually finish the game this way, but damn did I feel dumb when I saw how you were supposed to do it. For a game that is designed to make you feel clever, I felt entirely the opposite :(
06/01/2008 at 17:41 Kast says:
“In Twilight Princess, at the beginning of the game, you have to catch a fish or 2 so a cat would stop being annoying. ”
My girlfriend was stuck at this for ages. Yesterday I watch her trying to catch a fish again and realise she hasn’t got the hang of giving the line some slack and waiting till the bobber dips. I ask to give it a shot and, naturally, get it in one. My mistake is in smirking quite so much – she takes out her frustrations on my head. -.-
““I still can’t figure out what you’re supposed to do to get past the bit in Minerva where you’re disarmed and there’s a force field that flicks up when you approach it with a power cable leading from it along the ceiling into the room you’re in that plugs into the wall above three ammo crates that don’t stack sufficiently high to put it within reach.”
An unfortunate amount of people made mistakes like this, alongside crying because they can’t get into the first armoury they see. I must admit to being stuck on my way back up the shaft, not realising I needed to shoot out a support struct to create a ramp upwards. Foster likes to alternate subtlty and ‘blow shit up’, causing some confusion.
06/01/2008 at 21:40 PoweredByBacon says:
I went through HL2 without knowing about the Alt Fire on the Shotgun.
i played a bunch of missions in IL-2 without knowing about the fastfoward function.
06/01/2008 at 22:03 PetitPrince says:
Super Ghouls’n'Ghost: I never got past the first screen. And what’s that “double jump” I keep hearing about ?
06/01/2008 at 22:31 roryok says:
I played ef2000 for about 6 months without realising i could fast forward to get to the mission objective. each mission took about 20 minutes of flying after which I quickly died. God only knows why i stuck at it so long
07/01/2008 at 07:57 Mike says:
The first complicated game I ever played was FFIII – so much pain and funnily enough so much enjoyment…
07/01/2008 at 09:05 Lucky says:
“I went through HL2 without knowing about the Alt Fire on the Shotgun.”
… Now that you mention it, me too. Would’ve it helped me?
07/01/2008 at 10:33 Aquarion says:
…there’s an alt-fire on the shotgun?
07/01/2008 at 11:13 Iain says:
@Terry
All part of the service! ;-)
If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think that particular exploit was well known. My brother and I discovered it ourselves, rather from reading it in the tips section of Crash or Your Sinclair. I sunk five years into that game to get the Elite rating and there was absolutely no fanfare at all. Just a “Right on, Commander!” and suddenly it says you’re Elite on the stats page.
All that time for that… It was worth every second, though.
07/01/2008 at 11:17 sigma83 says:
Yes there is! It is mighty handy for dispatching zombies and making sure that soldier does down instantly. (for those of you just joining us, it fires two shells at once)
It’s pretty much my most used firing mode, after the SMG primary.
Hm I suppose I should add my own little gaming blunder. Let’s see… I get horribly stuck on adventure games despite my love of the genre. I even got stuck on Nelly Cootalot ferchrissakes. Actual ‘zomg you can DO that?!?’ moments are few and far between because I am one of those boring people who plays the tutorials and reads the manuals.
My most recent adventure was on Lost Coast which I finally thought I should probably play. I got to the part with the church and promptly got totally stuck. I could not figure out of the life of me how to get inside the damn thing, the scaffolding on the side was too high to climb, the windows too narrow and no other doors presented themselves.
I was certain the main door had something to do with it, but it wouldn’t respond to anything I tried. I whacked it silly with the crowbar, used grenades, the gravity gun, even complicated little strafejumps. I looked up the walkthrough online and it said ‘go through the door to the church’ which was not at all helpful. I was about to give up when my brother asked
‘Have you tried opening the door?’
‘Well of course I have!’ I said, indignant.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Damn straight!’ go back to door, press E.
Door swings open. Brother proceeds to ridicule me throughout the rest of the level.
07/01/2008 at 11:42 Nallen says:
You jest, of course! the Alt-Fire has been in since HL1…blam blam! the best of the HL weapons :)
I played Oblivion for about 2 months without ‘getting’ the leveling system (and hence only reaching level 4 or something). Lucky Oblivion doesn’t really need you to level.
Ah, yes! I played Rome Total War without realising you could manually set the build queues on towns without governers. Hence half my places produced utter crap a lot of the time.
07/01/2008 at 13:26 mrkstphnsn says:
In WoW I managed to get my Hunter to something like level 50 without realising that I could learn skills off other animals and then train them to my pet. My pet that had absolutely no skills whatsoever and had been with me since level 10.
I then became quite, quite obsessed with getting Bite 8.
07/01/2008 at 14:51 crotchy says:
I completed System Shock 1 before I realising that the Cyborg Conversion chambers could be used to resurrect you if you were killed. Sigh.
08/01/2008 at 00:39 Leeks! says:
I’m a little late to the party, but what the hey–
When I was in that 6-8 range, my dad got me Mechwarrior 2 for christmas, because it was one of the only games that had a release that would run on my Mom’s PowerMac 7500. I started playing it one night when she was out with friends, and, as 6-8 year olds often do, I got tired of it and decided to go off and do something else. When you tried to quit that game, though, a prompt would come up saying “Admit cowardice?” with “yes” and “no” options appearing underneath. Even with my impressive 6-8 year old vocabulary (mostly due to compulsive reading of The Hobbit), I didn’t really know what “cowardice” meant. And, being somewhat obsessive-compulsive/paranoid, I quickly began worrying that clicking “yes” would cause my mother’s computer to burst into a fireball, for some reason that made perfect sense to me then. And I knew that she had to use it for school, and she would be upset at me if I made her computer explode.
So I sat there, tears in my eyes, playing Mechwarrior 2 for three more hours, because I was afraid it would get mad at me and destroy my mom’s work if I quit. When she came home, she asked me why I was crying while playing a videogame about blowing things up, she thought I loved blowing things up. I explained the computer’s dire threats to her, and she laughed so hard I think she spit on me a little bit. She explained to me that “cowardice” derived from the word “coward,” and then I understood.
So that was the first (but by no means the last) time I cried while playing a videogame, and also how I learned about suffix use.
08/01/2008 at 01:08 WCAYPAHWAT says:
Few more coming back to haunt me…
Ocarina of Time- I spent four days trying to figure out how to stop the little Goron prince from rolling around. And yes, I had previously used the exact same solution in the past to stop the big Goron. Stupid elf-boy Link.
X2- I figured out how to play the game (sort of) with no documentation or outside help whatsoever. Probably would have helped to check out some sort of forum or playguide at least.
NWN2- I’m yet to craft my own items, if only because I’m too lazy to figure out how.
Street Rod (This is an old one. Buy a car! Buy parts! Sell them! Race for cash, or even pink slips!)- Back in my 486 days, I learned the match the colour to the manual page listed copy protection off by hard, by trial and error, because I didn’t have the manual. I was 6. Did similar for a few other games of this era as well.
Icewind Dale – from too much Baldurs gate, I rushed in, whacked together a character and started the game. Spent hours wondering why the game was so hard, and why I hadn’t found any NPC’s to join me.
Halflife- Honestly did not know the tau cannon could shoot through stuff. Nor that the rocket launcher laser could guide the rockets.
AvP – No health pickups for the alien? This is madness!!!
08/01/2008 at 01:15 Thomas says:
Wing Commander III: escort missions. I couldn’t autopilot, so i ended up just flying to the waypoints, took hours. Imagine my embarrassment when I accidentally flew close to the transports and they gave me a go-ahead to autopilot. Doh.
08/01/2008 at 01:22 Richard says:
That damned gnome in Episode 2. I went through the whole damn game and placed the gnome in the rocket and continued on right to the end of the game, waiting for the achievement reward … but never getting it.
It turns out I’d forgotten to close the damned rocket hatch and my closest savegame was from before that long-ass drive with the helicopter chasing me :(
08/01/2008 at 01:50 Richard says:
@Leeks! … that’s an awesome story!
08/01/2008 at 01:53 Kieron Gillen says:
Leeks: Man, that was great. Poor you. :(
KG
08/01/2008 at 01:54 wyrmsine says:
It took me about 4 or 5 hours to finish the first level of Deus Ex nonlethally. I finally managed to wound my way to the top of the Statue of Liberty and was rewarded with sweet success, all I had to do was head back to the bottom. That’s when I found the beer bottles strewn about. I figured it was deserved, after all that madness, that I should see what sort of drinking simulator this game was providing. The double-vision view of New York from atop a high ledge was very impressive, at the time. The same effect applied to the rapidly approaching ground below, less so…
08/01/2008 at 08:06 Jeremy says:
“Rotating stuff as an Engineer in TF2? I found that out yesterday when reading a strategy guide on some Wiki somewhere. I damn near cried.”
You can rotate stuff….? Thanks!
Btw, about Half-life and not crouch-jumping: in somewhat of my defense, I was replaying it on source after Episode2. I already knew everything I needed to know, so why bother with a tutorial? It’s all the same. Right? right..?
08/01/2008 at 10:31 Amy says:
In Team Fortress 2, I didn’t know that you need not have the sticky bomb gun drawn as a Demoman in order to set the bombs off.
ME (getting shot at): AUCH! Ye brigands! I’ll blow awl you sky high as soon as I get me gun oot–
(Then, I die.)
08/01/2008 at 11:18 Andrew says:
I might as well pitch in, as I just remembered one.
The first full game I got, as opposed to just endlessly playing demos off 3.5-inch floppy disks, was an Archimedes game called Cataclysm, quite a nice little platformer where you controlled some sort of jetpacky fellow and had to make your way around levels that gradually filled with liquid. The primitive water-physics pleased me greatly.
However, I never saw past level 3 of the game, as level 3 was the first to introduce enemies and I was far too scared of them to proceed.
In my defence, I was 5.
08/01/2008 at 11:52 Bongob says:
Dumb: admittedly the UI doesn’t make it enormously clear, but I grumbled for months that the only thing wrong with the otherwise peerless Company of Heroes is that you can’t scuttle/destroy/cash in your constructable units once you’ve built ‘em, thus forcing you to waste your construction points by investing them in stuff you advance out of the range of. Um. Oh. Yes you can. I’d been voluntarily playing the game on extra hard difficulty.
Dumber: I didn’t get the hang of leveling up in Morrowind until very late in the day, catapulting me a dozen levels up all at once, which left me to finish the previously white-knuckled game at a gentle stroll.
Dumbest:I actually finished Neverwinter Nights before I realised you could sleep to recharge mana. I’d been doing all my magicking with potions, resulting in the skintest, worst-equipped eventual RPG hero evah.
08/01/2008 at 13:07 Mongychops says:
Half-Life, first play through. I was furiously playing and these grenades kept flying out of nowhere and killing things. I was about three-quarters of the way through when I realised clicking the right mouse button was secondary fire.
08/01/2008 at 14:12 Stryc9 says:
My biggest “dumb mistake in gaming” was when I played Daikatana.
…umm… that’s it.
08/01/2008 at 15:41 C0nt1nu1ty says:
I did the cradle thing too, knew you could kill zombies but only with holy water and fire arrows, no idea that flash bangs were counted as “fire” by the game.
I do have a tendency to do the dumb thing in games as well, usually i will decide on a strategy that seemed logical at the time (like trying to jump that impossible gap) and continually hammer away at it until just by chance i would try something else.
One of my personal favorites was with x-com apocalypse, i had no idea how to load troops into vehicles so i just sent my agents off on foot, i lol every time i picture a bunch of heavily armed future troopers trying to catch the bus because there CO is too much of a muppet
08/01/2008 at 15:56 Phillip J. Birmingham says:
I’m not sure how silly it is, but I wasted days trying to get lucky in a frontal assault on the “Bagrada” level on Myth. That’s the icy level where you first encounter the trolls/giants/whatever that wipe out your guys with one kick.
I had to consult a walkthrough to learn to line up my archers facing off a cliff, and use a speedy Barbarian to train the biggies in front of your archers until they’re bleeding pincushions. It’s very fast then.
08/01/2008 at 16:18 bigfatboris says:
My most recent memory of monumentally misunderstanding a game dynamic would definitely be Dwarf Fortress. When I started the game, I kept trying different maps until I came across one with a wall to mine into, constructing my first dwarf “fortress” after several attempts on other maps. My problem with the other maps I had tried? There were no walls anywhere. After building up a reasonable dwarf fortress, or so I thought, I had a quick peek at the wiki, and promptly discovered that the game had a “z-axis”. Now that is misunderstanding to a high degree!
08/01/2008 at 17:54 Hitchhiker says:
In Half Life: Opposing Force I had no idea that the weapon that shoots those green orbs had an alternating fire that sends you to places where you could get all sorts of goodies. I played the entire game only to accidentally find out near the end :(
08/01/2008 at 17:54 Daniel says:
Pool of Radiance, on C64 — the original! Alas, still my favorite D&D-based RPG.
Anyway, you begin the game with two options of dungeons: the castle way and the island. Now, there was rumour of undeads on the island, so I assumed I could only successfully survive there later in the game.
So I proceeded with the castle way, and mini quests, etc, etc, etc, until I realized I was about to win the game. So, curious, I went to the island and proceeded to vanquish the very weak opposition, and earn a few items that would have really helped in the beginning…
08/01/2008 at 19:18 Toe_Tag says:
Mine was probably Mega Man for NES. I beat several of the bosses with my trusty shooter before I realised you could press the select key to use the boss weapons. In my defense I was like 9 or 10 and stupid. Beating some of those bosses was tough as hell with the blaster.
09/01/2008 at 02:23 WCAYPAHWAT says:
I only just realized theres a key that activates night vision goggles in Crysis. Had the darn thing since release.
09/01/2008 at 02:26 roBurky says:
Yeh, but those night vision goggles are useless as you can see perfectly well at night. Their only use is to see the alien in the intro when it prompts you to turn on your night vision.
09/01/2008 at 04:49 Lizard says:
@Phuzz: Oh god, that escort challenge in Twilight Princess made me insane. I was so paranoid about burning up the cart that I never took my eyes off it, and so I completely missed the part where the birds were dropping bombs in the road. I couldn’t figure out why the cart kept turning off the path! After about an hour of screaming at the imaginary driver, “WOMAN! You have ONE JOB! ONE! And that is to drive this cart in a STRAIGHT LINE! WHAT is the MATTER WITH YOU!” I finally figured it out. And then I felt like an idiot. But an idiot that had prevented people from horribly burning to death for the seventh time, so that’s something.
09/01/2008 at 05:29 Pod says:
Richard: In all versions of Monkey Island 2 there is a limit on the coins. Accept it!
09/01/2008 at 15:16 Nick R says:
I can’t believe this. 156 comments and no-one’s mentioned the up/down barrel puzzle in the Carnival Night Zone in Sonic 3! I, of course, did it first time… because I’d already read the solution in a games magazine. :-)
However, when I was 8 I got completely stuck in the Scrap Brain Zone Act 2 in the Master System version of Sonic 1. I actually had dreams about different ways of getting past it… and was always disappointed when I woke up and realised that they wouldn’t work.
I think the actual solution involved jumping directly down a big pit, because if you went the slow, safe way you’d alternately close and open certain doors and then end up with one closed in your face. Jumping straight down broke the sequence.
Also:
Phantasy Star Online ver. 2 (Dreamcast)
Soon after starting my first game, I sold my Mag, assuming it’d be put into the shop and I could buy it straight back. I couldn’t. I don’t think I got a replacement until I’d levelled up enough to get to the third level, the Mines, where you can find new ones.
Splinter Cell 1 (PS2)
In one level, there’s a bit where there are two high walls, and a pipe running along the ceiling. I spent ages thinking the way to get past it was to jump up to grab the pipe (I could do that bit), then somehow swing and jump from there to grab onto the top of the wall and climb over (which was impossible).
I eventually realised that there was a small gap between the walls which you could fit through if you pressed Sam Fisher’s back against one of them and sidled along.
10/01/2008 at 15:45 Philip says:
[i]I can’t believe this. 156 comments and no-one’s mentioned the up/down barrel puzzle in the Carnival Night Zone in Sonic 3! I, of course, did it first time… because I’d already read the solution in a games magazine.[i]
Read my post in the follow-up to this post. :P
10/01/2008 at 16:28 Axel says:
Oh my, and I call myself a Kingdom Hearts fan… when I first beat the game in normal I must have beaten it by a fluke because I went and played through it again in Proud Mode and I couldn’t, for the life of me, defeat Xemnas’ final laser attack o’ doom. I kept pressing triangle as fast as I could, but Sora kept dying! What was wrong!? Since I have no internet at home and I work at a GameStop and knew we had a strategy guide for the game in the store room I drove to my workplace just to find out what I was doing wrong.
I was incredibly mortified at my retardation when I realised you’re supposed press triangle and cross at the same time in order to have both Sora and Riku reflecting the beams. Especially since the commands menu has it right there in plain site.
10/01/2008 at 20:51 Mark Stevens says:
@bigfatboris:
The z-axis thing is a relatively new addition to the game, so previously you did have to find a wall to mine through. It’s possible that various walkthroughs, guides and wikis still haven’t been updated to reflect this change, so don’t feel too bad for overlooking it.
11/01/2008 at 02:45 Waffles says:
When I first played Doom, I got stuck on the last level in Episode 1 (m8e1).
I just couldn’t figure out how to kill the two bosses. I shot at them for a bit, but got the impression that they weren’t taking any damage. Shot at them a bit more, then proceeded to spend the next couple of weeks trying all sorts of creative tricks (which mostly ended with interesting suicides), such as luring them into the fields of barrels, and shooting those. I only managed to finish it when I visited a friend and saw him do it… Just… by shooting the damn things. *sigh*
On a side note, another time I played Doom at a friend’s, whose computer was just weird. It had what must be the world’s first optical mouse, which sucked badly. Only worked on a special mouse pad, and the driver somehow disabled the keyboard about 3 seconds after you launched Doom.
So we had to finish the damn thing with mouse only. And this was before the mouse wheel, so no way to switch weapons. Obviously, it also meant we had no way to save. That was… interesting.
Oh yeah, I spent around an hour once in Red Orchestra trying to figure out how to fire your gun… Jeez..
I never actually figured it out. Ended up just playing some other mod instead… :D
11/01/2008 at 08:11 sigma83 says:
I have very fond memories of red orchestra, of course, like any mod with grenades it in, I inevitably ended up throwing 1 into my own face.
12/01/2008 at 10:33 Simon says:
LOL. I did the very same thing with the Bard’s Tale. I had about 8 pieces of graph paper stuck together with tape until I realised! Doh.
Looking back through the recent posts. I am still playing through Company of Heroes and I am shocked by Bongob telling us that you can cash in units if you want to change them. I have been sending rangers on suicide missions to free up the population cap for more tanks! Double doh!
12/01/2008 at 22:09 simbo says:
Probably my earliest example was playing The Hobbit on the Spectrum. On two counts. Firstly I never quite understood the concept of “save game” and thus replayed the game, every session, to reach my last point. Needless to say I knew every command by heart. The second was missing the whole Bard thing and killing the dragon myself, using the alternate commands “wear ring” and “kill dragon with sword” (this was, of course, before such things as copy and paste) with only a 50% success rate. My excuse? Well I was only nine at the time.
17/01/2008 at 16:43 Zirc says:
Like many of you, Twilight Princess got me a couple of times. I got stuck in the Sky Temple, unable to open a door. I tried all kinds of tricks with jumping and trying to hookshot targets I wasn’t meant to reach yet. Finally I found a switch that I somehow didn’t notice, which I simply had to shoot to open the door.
Later, I got stuck again because I didn’t notice a mesh ceiling. I had to go back through most of the temple to get back to it.
18/01/2008 at 18:03 Meaghann says:
Here’s an old game gaff for you all. Years ago I was playing Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders on the Amiga and it was going along great until I got to a section where I could head to Mars, but I had unfinished plotlines on Earth as well. I though, what the heck, check out Mars first and off I went. Turns out that one of the puzzles on Mars can’t be completed because of something unfinished on Earth and now I’m stuck and can’t back out and go back to Earth. Very frustrating, and I think I gave up then and didn’t start over. Still, it was a very funny game.
23/05/2008 at 05:55 Zagnut says:
In Super Mario RPG, I sold all those Flower Tabs, Jars, and Boxes; thinking they
were taking up inventory space as useless restorers of 1, 3, and 5 flower points (respectively).
I didn’t know they increased the maximum.
30/05/2008 at 06:33 Sarah says:
Once while I was playing WoW, and my party/group got killed. We were in a dungeon. When the enemy began chasing me, I decided to stupidly run deeper into the cave filled with even more frightening enemies only to die seconds later.
26/06/2008 at 20:35 LionsPhil says:
The first time I played the C&C demo, I couldn’t work out why my Harvesters wouldn’t attack the Obelisk of Light. Hey, it didn’t particularly guide you into the whole resource-gathering thing (the first demo mission being entirely Tiberium-free), and having missed Dune II this was my first cash-and-tanks RTS.
But, er, yeah. Not a winning strategy, that. Thankfully I spotted the pertinent info in the README before writing off C&C as a brokenly hard game.
26/08/2008 at 22:10 Badly Named says:
Eventually, I found a point that let me bypass the broken part, and went on to finally beat Xanathar. Of course, I’d missed the beholder wand as well, so I had to beat him to death with weapons.
What??! I spent the majority of my time playing that and trying again and again to win that battle and it was impossible, now it turns out that there’s some shortcut item that makes it easy? So much of my childhood was wasted then, as after I gave up I went on to play Arena, where one of the later floppys was corrupt! Gutted – that was a huuuge timewaster when I was about 6 or 7.
(yeah yeah, commenting on an ancient article, but still!)
01/12/2008 at 19:56 Iain "DDude" Dawson says:
Today, I started playing Area 51. After spending the quick tutorial making sure I could crouch with C, as should be law, and didn’t need to use ctrl, (double-ctrl opens google toolbar for some crappy reason, and if ctrl is melee, and you are being attacked by zombie-mutant-monsters,and you panic and bash ctrl, then the game crashes to desktop so you can use google – that is not good.), I found it to be a good game. It runs well, has a decent story, very cinematic. The teammate AI is a bit simplistic, and they insist on running in your line of fire, but that idiocy reminds me of TF2. I was having fun.
Then this bit pissed me off. You are told to go “SCAN THE COMPUTER” for intel on delta squad, who are missing as delta squads all around the world are want to do. So I go to the computer and use my scanner. YOUR CHARACTER IS THE SCANNER GUY. This is very important, you have a special scanner on your arm, much like Cortez in Timesplitters, but more important. Your role in the team is the scanner-guy. You have a whole tutorial on the scanner. This is not the first time I have been told to scan something. So I go and scan the computer. I doesn’t work, it just scans the air, (mostly hydrogen) so I try again. And again. And again. From different angles – I crouch below, jump on top, try from near, try from far, NOTHING WORKS! So I get pissed, and go to gamefaqs. This always makes me feel cheap, using the interne tof r answers when I am lost. They tell me to run back to the start of the level and explore a room that was on fire, search the body of a dead scientist for a keycard, return to where I was, achieve a crappy jumping puzzle for another keycard, open a double key carded room, get ambused by zombie-mutant-monsters, fend then off with limited ammo, and get the shotgun. Whoop. I have a shotgun. But that does not help me SCAN THE COMPUTER!
ARGGH!
Turns out, that in this game, USE is not E, it is Tab. Tab to use iten? Huh? And you are not supposed to “scan” the computer, even though this instruction is repeated every 30 seconds in those excact words, you are supposed to USE the computer to get the intel.
I just wasted 30mins on the second level where I was supposed to go over to a PC and press USE.
13/12/2008 at 07:02 Stevezie says:
@Phillip J. Birmingham- I did the frontal assault thing too in Myth: TFL. If you threw all your barbs at one trow while your dwarf threw bottles at it, they could win…barely.
I do these things all the time. I think we play so many bad/unfinished/buggy games that we get comfortable chalking up our oversights as being just “bad design”.
Recently I was cursing the combat system in Dragon Quest VIII for being so meticulous and dreading every random encounter until I was nearly done with the game. On my way to the final boss I noticed the ‘orders’ menu that enables your party to auto-attack. I had been digging through menus, selecting each character’s attack option for each enemy in each battle for 110 hours of gameplay. I have to wonder how much of my life I wasted…
26/05/2009 at 23:04 armless says:
I sat playing the 3d monkey island game for about 2 hours, on the bit where you have to roll the balls down into the holes into the ground in order to jam the system up. I made complex records of how long it took each ball to get down, and the result of what happened when I rolled them down at different intervals, on bits of paper. Then I realised you just had to roll them down when they passed the little twigs on the screen. ( i was about 14)
@Jeremy
How in the name of christ did you not see the big fucking glowing portal in the corner of the room!!!
p.s I also met someone in WoW who got to lvl 50 without realising the grey axe he had constantly equipped was rubbish, and someone who got to the endgame without realising you could change stances as warrior ( I admit i gotto lvl 30 odd b4 i realised that)
15/05/2011 at 05:34 PoC says:
I think the first RPG I devoted a disproportionate amount of time to was Final Fantasy Legend III, for the original GameBoy, in all its black and yellow glory. I remember getting about halfway through the game when I came across a village where all the inhabitants were turned into stone. I was supposed to get some catnip to put some cat-mummies to sleep. (Or something. It was a while ago.) The only part of the area I hadn’t searched was cordoned off by a fence. I saw a crack in the fence, so I tried to jump over it. No dice. I then proceeded to spend hours in the area, level grinding mindlessly, with sporadic attempts to jump over the fence again and again.
Finally, I gave up, and started the whole game over. I played through everything again–which was hours and hours at that point–and reached the exact same damn spot, only when I was about to start my futile jumping again, I missed the B button, and just hit “right.” And proceeded to go straight through. The unjumpable broken fence could apparently be walked through with ease. I’ve screwed up numerous times on games since then, but nothing has evoked quite the same shriek of triumphant horror.
11/04/2013 at 12:18 ZethJack says:
I remember playing the original Metal Gear Solid on old Playstation. It got to the point where Snake fights the Psycho Mantis – the “I can read your mind” guy. It took me 4 hours of fighting that bastard getting some lucky hits here and there as I was trying to keep changing my tactics and strategy until I finally kicked his ass. Few years later I read the walktrhough on some random website saying that the player needs to switch his controller to different port so that Mantis can’t “read” your mind allowing you to beat the boss easily. I felt stupid xD