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:
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.
I only just realized theres a key that activates night vision goggles in Crysis. Had the darn thing since release.
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.
@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.
Richard: In all versions of Monkey Island 2 there is a limit on the coins. Accept it!
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.
[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
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.
@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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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.
@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…
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)