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?
Related Stories:
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.
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?
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. :)
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.
… 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.
Don’t mention the witch…errr….war!
Played most of the first disc of Final Fantasy VIII without junctioning anything or using GFs. Not easy, let me tell you.
When I first played Crusader: No Regret, I couldn’t figure out how to fire the gun. :(
@Zeno:
I played through FF8 without junctioning too, but at least I used GF’s. :P
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.
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…
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!
I can’t think of anything I have done like that. Does that mean I win :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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).
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.)
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.
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.
No, judging by my own post the lesson is in fact basic grammar.
@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.
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.
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”
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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!)
@Zaptroe or whatever, you woulda gotten slaughtered if you went there before 58.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :(
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.
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!)
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.
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…)
@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…
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.
@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.
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!
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.