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I_smell

Misspent Youth

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I was just thinking about how dumb I used to be with Video games and thought other people've probably got some funny history aswel.

I grew up playing Sonic, Streets of Rage, Golden Axe, Shinobi and other MegaDrive games. Back when I was about 6, I leant Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time from a friend. I'd never played a Zelda game before, never played an RPG before, and never completed a game.

I got stuck on a part in The Great Deku Tree for about a month because I didn't know what to do. Every few days I'd come back to it and run around old areas tryina find stuff, but never got passed that point. After a couple months I gave it him back, thinking I'd got pretty near the end and that that dungeon was the whole game.

When I was about 15, I got this game on an emulator, realised you SWIM DOWNWARDS IF YOU HOLD A, and then played the rest of Ocarina of Time.

Similarly, my older brother's friend handed me down Final Fantasy 7, and I couldn't get passed the title screen because X isn't confirm in those games, O is.

After a while I figured it out, but DID NOT figure out that you run if you hold X. So I played about the first 30 minutes of FF7, walking, then switched it off saying "This is the slowest, most boring game I have ever seen."

Oh also I didn't know what a memory card was, so this game extra sucked.

I came back to it eventually and again found out that I was not near the end.

Bugs Bunny Lost In Time, however, I played about 30 hours of:

...so that was still fun.

What were the dumbest and worst mistakes you made with Video games back before we had the internet?

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Everyone got stuck in the level in Sonic 3 where you had to press up and down on that stupid drum, right?

I remember in Metal Gear Solid not realising what you were meant to do in the Psycho Mantis fight at all and beating him, very slowly, without switching my controller out and doing slivers of damage at a time. I just thought it was really hard until I loaned it to a friend who got all excited about "that boss fight where you switch controller ports" when I spoke to him the following day. I played it again a couple of months ago and it's so well telegraphed I'm pretty ashamed of myself, although I didn't work out the PAL key thing this time around and had to Google that so maybe I haven't improved as much as I'd like to think.

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It wasn't until The Lost and Damned that I learned how to shoot effectively in Grand Theft Auto IV. Locking in on a target, clicking to zoom, taking cover, leading my target, and then firing.

I was bored with the endless Mafia gunfights in the GTA IV endgame, but suddenly realizing I had all these combat options made it more exciting for me.

Complicated button schemes are universally considered a bad thing in games, but in this case I really did need to learn to press three Xbox controller buttons and two thumbsticks at once to play effectively.

(Uh, I guess this isn't a youth story because I was like 28 when I played that game.)

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Little Big Adventure, Principal Island, Lupin Burg. "go clobber a clone" was what she wanted. English not being my primary language it took me a while to figure out what clobbering meant.

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A friend and I spent an entire night rolling wizards in Baldur's Gate II to find out which alignments got what kind of familiar. The unskippable intro and travel time to the first rest area was well over thirty minutes. I still know Irenicus' opening speech by heart. "Ah, the Child of Bhaal has awoken. Time for more... experiments."

The information is clearly listed in the manual. I still refer to my sad child's script in the back instead, the only time I ever used a manual's "Notes" section.

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A friend and I spent an entire night rolling wizards in Baldur's Gate II to find out which alignments got what kind of familiar. The unskippable intro and travel time to the first rest area was well over thirty minutes. I still know Irenicus' opening speech by heart. "Ah, the Child of Bhaal has awoken. Time for more... experiments."

The information is clearly listed in the manual. I still refer to my sad child's script in the back instead, the only time I ever used a manual's "Notes" section.

To be fair, if you don't know Irenicus' opening spiel by heart you're a bad person. :P

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Man, I feel "old" all of a sudden. When I was around 15 I played Ocarina of Time as well, except that was the year it released in and it was the first Zelda game I had played since the NES original. I remember being stuck for hours after having gotten the slingshot and being locked in the room. The idea that I could use the slingshot to knock a ladder down took way too long, simply because my brain had decided that was not in the realm of possibilty. Same with lighting another brazier with a lit deku stick. It might seem silly now, but that was pretty mind blowing to me.

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This is not a childhood story, but I finished Max Payne 3 before I found out you could roll.

Also I'd played through Prince of Persia: Sands of Time about three times before I figured out how to mega-freeze (that move that kills everyone in the room).

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no specific examples, but in the days before internet accessible walkthroughs, I've gotten terminally stuck in various point & click adventure games. ("terminally" as in stuck for long enough that I'd end up not finishing the game & moving on to something else).

brings to mind a vague memory of a quote about game puzzle difficulty design, (hazily paraphrasing...) Feel like it may have been Ron Gilbert, but not sure at all:

"If you design a puzzle to be super easy so that 99% of people will be able to solve it without looking up the solution and you have n such puzzles to get to the end of the game, you can't assume that the 1% who wouldn't get past the first puzzle are the same as wouldn't get through the nth, so in the worst case even though you designed your puzzles to be super easy, if say 100,000 people play your game, x number of people still won't get to the end of the game without a walkthrough." (where n is a totally reasonable number of puzzles to have in a game and x is what struck me as a depressingly high number)

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In Police Quest 2, I think it was, there's a point early on where you have to >turn id card or something to find a code for a lock on the back. I remember just brute-forcing the code instead.

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I imagine Fez would be like the absolute best game ever if it came out before you could look up any of the puzzles or ask people online about the giant clock or hidden rooms.

I got about 60 out of 64 cubes by myself! but stopped because that brown fox lazy dog part was bullshit.

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I don't have any specific memories of not understanding a game (I was just generally terrible and never completed any game until I got a PS2). Playing split screen by myself was a big thing for me. I would play Golden Eye two player by myself just to see all the death and weapon animations. I must have spent dozens of hours walking around the levels and shooting walls. I liked trying to trigger every sound effect as well.

When I got my PS1 I hardly had any games so most of my time was spent playing demo disks. The Mat Hoffman BMX demo was one level but I played it over and over again for more than a year. Even that silly T-Rex and Manta Ray thing, I would sit there making them animate for hours.

Colin McRae Rally was one of my favourite games and if I knew I was going to have a whole morning to play it I'd set up my racing wheel, wear my brother's motorbike helmet and set the camera to the cockpit view.

Kids are dumb.

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Colin McRae Rally was one of my favourite games and if I knew I was going to have a whole morning to play it I'd set up my racing wheel, wear my brother's motorbike helmet and set the camera to the cockpit view.

That's so adorable.

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I played through the first Lost Planet in its entirety before discovering that you could roll. You had to goddamned click in the left stick, hold towards a direction, and press A. The game never explained it anywhere, but it completely changes that game and i don't think anybody knew about it. The invincibility frames you get out of it are absolutely crucial against the bosses in that game though, the constant getting knocked down and slowly having to get back up that all the reviews complained about ceases to be a problem. What seemed like a clunky, shitty shooter suddenly becomes pretty awesome. (Capcom wasn't helping their case by making the second game even more inscrutable.)

For something from when i was young, back when i was playing Mechwarrior 2 as a kid, i never knew about the weapon grouping mechanic in that game, which is kind of an important thing to miss. (The thing is, it's not explained in the game, you have to manually do it at the start of each mission and the keybinds for it were insane. Being such a hacked in feature, I didn't feel particularly bad for not knowing about it once i knew about it.)

I don't know, i think i've always been pretty good about making sure i have an understanding of the systems in a game. I think it's kind of tragic when people have a terrible experience with something because they're missing a crucial detail.

Edit: Oh, how about this one? Link's Awakening. Over the course of several years, i restarted that game multiple times and kept dead-ending in the same place each playthrough. When i resorted to guides and faqs, they proved totally useless, i simply could not make progress.

Internet research years later gave me the possible explanation of early retail versions of Link's Awakening having game-breaking bugs that i must have been wedging myself into each and every time i played the game. (There's a weird history of quietly released retail revisions for that game.) I'm sure if i followed a faq step-by-step i could probably get through the game and complete it, but Link's Awakening is already ruined for me. A game that i have seen people cite as their favorite Zelda is a game that holds nothing but frustration for me.

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I've played a pretty good deal of FTL, but it took until about an hour ago to realize that I could sell things at the store. I managed to never notice the sell tab. Boy do I feel like a dunce.

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When i got FarCry2 originally on the 360 i couldnt get past the house where the Jackal saves you at the start without dying.

I tried for hours - accustomed to winning in games during the tutorial process - and traded it in when i was off work a week later.

Years later i found out it was a scripted sequence and theres no way to survive that <_<

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In Dark Souls, there's a bit in the first level where you have to run across a bridge before a dragon breathes fire upon the bridge and kills everyone on it. I died on that bridge 10 times in a row... trying different timings and guzzling health items till I was out. Was never quite able to get across.

It never occured to me that there was a sprint button...

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I'm playing Dark Souls right now and you're perfectly excused for not knowing how to play it. I'm like halfway through and this game is kind of a prick.

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I'm playing Dark Souls right now and you're perfectly excused for not knowing how to play it. I'm like halfway through and this game is kind of a prick.

When people talk about Dark Souls all I can think is, man I wish that game came out when I was twelve years old. I would have loved it.

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Everyone got stuck in the level in Sonic 3 where you had to press up and down on that stupid drum, right?

That was the worst to just introduce that mechanic like that. First time I gave up and quit, as I was playing it at my Daycare. Second time I remember I had done it by thinking jumping enough was the method as I must have accidentally hit up and down just enough to make it, so attempting to repeat the level the time after that caused me to give up and quit.

I think I finally understood once I actually got a Genesis and owned the damned game, which was years later (I was only allowed consoles at the $80 or less level for Christmas).

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I had played hours into Freelancer until it got too hard that I couldn't continue the story missions. When I revisited the game years later, I noticed in the keybinds "Boost". I played through hours and hours of the game, never realizing I could do that.

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Oh my god. Dark Souls is third person Ghouls 'n' Ghosts.

gil-head-explode-again.gif

Don't be silly, Ghouls & Ghosts is way harder.

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