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:
Wizards Crown sounds like a euphamism from Rogers Profanasaurus
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.
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. :))
Civilisation reminds me, that wonderfully glorious moment when I realised that YOU COULD MOVE DIAGONALLY. Oh Christ I felt stupid.
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.
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!
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is the best thread ever.
Also, you all suck.
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.
@ 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 :(
“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.
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.
Super Ghouls’n'Ghost: I never got past the first screen. And what’s that “double jump” I keep hearing about ?
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
The first complicated game I ever played was FFIII – so much pain and funnily enough so much enjoyment…
“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?
…there’s an alt-fire on the shotgun?
@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.
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.
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.
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.
I completed System Shock 1 before I realising that the Cyborg Conversion chambers could be used to resurrect you if you were killed. Sigh.
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.
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!!!
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.
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 :(
@Leeks! … that’s an awesome story!
Leeks: Man, that was great. Poor you. :(
KG
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…
“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..?
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.)
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.
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.
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.
My biggest “dumb mistake in gaming” was when I played Daikatana.
…umm… that’s it.
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
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.
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!
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 :(
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…