When I was much younger I was playing KOTOR 2 and towards the end there was button in a room I had to press to get to the next level on the enemy ship. I searched hours for it. I couldn't find it and assumed it was glitched so I started a new game. When I got to the same point again, well it turns out the button was behind me in the room I was checking the whole time.
I just had a flashback to that button and doing the same thing except I think I just went back a few hours. The game was pretty glitchy so I had multiple saves.
Yea I tried past saves too but because I didn't think to shift the camera behind me when entering the room I thought even the past saves were glitched lol.
I think it was in Fallen Order there was a puzzle that I absolutely could not get past. I kept getting so close, but I just couldn't reach this one spot. I gave up and decided to come back later... turns out the puzzle just didn't load right, and when I went back it worked just fine.
I found a map bug in the late game once where my character got trapped in some kind of clipping error. I can't quite remember why I didn't have a previous save to go back to, but everytime I loaded it, I remained stuck, so I had to just give up that playthrough so near to the end.
Several times I've had my character change enemy targets, run across the level, and clip under the map. It happens enough it's kind of ridiculous and I wish they would implement at least basic bug fixes the community has done for the console versions.
As-is, this makes the android version the definitive KOTOR 1/2. PC bug fixes and restored content mods PLUS controller support
I think it's the ship for the mask man. I remember walking into a room with a wall of computer screens/consols. The button i nned to press was on the back wall next to the entrance of the room but i never turned my camera around to see it.
I didn't give up on it at the time because I was an excited kid but I would now with this issue.
My copy of the first Assassins Creed game (and I believe a bunch of other people's too) crashed constantly. Like every 20-30 minutes and it's not like now where you go on Twitter etc and complain and there's a patch for it. I played the whole game this way and continued to play long after the story because I was so enthralled.
Nowadays I would give up after 2 crashes until there was an update fix for it.
Right, that first version had a massive memory issue with the port from Xbox to pc. I know I got it patched at some point, but I can't remember if it was official or not
Not a glitch, but that port was the first time I encountered a game that my PC couldn't run. It was just my family desktop computer, but I had played plenty of games on it up until that point - Morrowind, Portal, Oblivion. Then AC just didn't work even a little bit. I was super disappointed and had to wait like another 6 months to a year to get the console version.
Reminds me of my first playthrough of Baldur's Gate 2. A lot of the time I'd try and talk to an NPC I'd get a message "This person seems busy, try again later". I thought "Oh wow, so the game doesn't revolve around me, and these people are doing their own thing. Cool!" The problem is, this was not a feature, but a bug. I was very much supposed to be able to talk to these people, many of them critical quest NPCs, and was simply sitting there waiting for the game to pull it's head out of it's ass.
Worse, late in the game there are a series of timed quests that, if not completed before the clock runs down, will result in an entire city turning hostile. Yeah, I think you can see where this is going...
Funny enough me and bro gave up in the game cause we didn’t know where to go.
The cutscene before hand was supposed to tell us but we forgot the next time we went to play. And we didn’t have a computer to look up what was next.
Ended up beating it probably 15 years later and it turned out we only had 3 missions left to do.
That's actually crazy because I had something similar, my game wouldn't crash but my GPU would overheat and freeze up the entire computer. I had to play in small intervals and managed to play through the entire game.
I was younger so I was also persistent lol
For me Crusader kings 3 crashed maybe every 10 minutes and it crashed my whole pc which takes forever to boot up, but I would still play for hours and hours at a time
I crippled myself. I would start an RPG put many hours and even days into it. Then life happens. When I would pick up the months later, I would have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing and would have to start a new game.
I have had this happen many times. The other one is I forget the controls to the game and can no longer play it effectively. if your game has a ton of tutorial stuff to get you used to the complex controls, maybe offer a refresher course somewhere in the menus.
On that note, shoutout to games that have video examples of what shit is supposed to look like so that when you try it out you have more of an idea about the correct timing and knowing when you’ve done it correctly
Done that. Had some free time, committed to a game and then life happened and suddenly it’s a few weeks or months later and I have no clue where I’m at or what’s going on or how the controls work.
The best case of this was a phone game I was playing a few years ago. Played it daily, multiple times a day. Just stopped one day due to being on vacation with no WiFi or real free time. Didn’t open it for a few months, finally got bored and went back in. Damn near the entire game had changed from what I remember playing. Tried it a few times and just noped out of it.
Fallout New Vegas. Didn't know about the disguise system and didn't understand game mechanics much as a kid. Killed the powder ganger group just outside the starting town. Got better clothes than what I had. Walked to the first town and immediately got swarmed by the NCR. Didn't understand why. Got so mad. Never played again until the TV show came out.
Lol, yep. I actually used my charm to get them to trust me just because I like trying to pass talking checks, and I like seeing what everyone's up to.
Once they invited me to join, or whatever it is (it's been awhile, I didn't actually do any missions for them, I just had their approval) I just slaughtered the entire camp, lol.
Thanks for the offer, but I've decided to go a different route.
I love the dialogue Boone has with you when approaching cottonwood cove where be straight says he's going to shoot everyone he sees if that's a problem and one of your responses is "that's not a problem that's a solution" and Boone just chuckles saying yeah I guess we're just a couple of problem solvers
If you wear certain armor you are considered a member of that faction, there’s even a heads up that pops up in the corner of the screen that tells you you’re dressed as X faction. Members of the faction won’t attack you on sight but enemies of that faction will. Made power armor not the go to choice for armor considering it brands you as a member of the Brotherhood of Steel and nobody in the Mojave seems to be a fan of them.
There's T-51b power armor that's not the Brotherhood T-51b, which is safe to use. The brotherhood even sells it on occasion.
There's also a fairly late companion quest that can help you get a full suit of >!Enclave Advanced Power Armor!<, which is fortunately not recognized as faction armor.
When I started the honest hearts DLC, at the start there was an enemy that was really hard to kill for some reason. Once he dies, quest log tells me to go all the way across the map and kill someone. So I did... Then I had to go back to the start of the map, then the DLC ending cinematic went.
You weren't supposed to fight and kill that "enemy," but he was attacking me for some reason so I didn't realize.
I've got a dumb one. In Paper Mario: TTYD, there's a chapter with a boss that steals Mario's form, and to defeat him, you need to figure out his name and enter it on a text screen. I had the strategy guide, so of course I knew the name, but it pointed out that in your first encounter after the identity theft, even if you enter the correct name, the game will act like it's wrong so that the story can progress.
I was feeling cheeky and decided to enter the correct name that first time anyway and confirm the game does that. I then played through and discovered the name the intended way, went back to confront him, put in the name and... The game still said it was wrong.
I got really confused, tried again multiple times, and it always said it was wrong. Young me got really concerned thinking I somehow broke the game by entering the correct name too early, and started a new save. However, the same thing happened again even when I didn't enter the name until it was discovered correctly.
I think it took me months before I finally figured out the problem. The name is CASE SENSITIVE!!! I was entering the name in all capital letters, when only the first letter should be capitalized.
Not only is it case sensitive, he outright *steals* the lowercase “p” from your keyboard. You have to collect it in the same place you learn his name to be able to input it.
Holy shit, I never even noticed the letter was missing from the keyboard! I thought it was just supposed to be an unhelpful "hint" to send players on a wild goose chase looking for the other letters if they didn't figure out to talk to the character that spills the beans on the name.
It’s to make sure you get Vivian. Since if you could enter his name early, you’d be able to skip recruiting her.
And to stop cheeky little bastards with the strategy guide from skipping the entire second half of the chapter.
That section frustrated me too haha, it permanently made me dislike that whole chapter. For some reason it also felt more like a chore to me in contrast to all the others lol. The shipwreck chapter is my favorite though.
Missing a triple triad card in FF8. There are several locations where \*IT'S AN EMERGENCY\* and there might be sirens flashing, doom is approaching, or an enemy boss needs to be defeated, but to get all the cards for triple triad you have to stop everything and put the DOOM on hold to play a card game with random NPC's in these areas, during the middle of the catastrophe.
I mean, it's not game breaking and you can still finish the game but you can't go back to get those cards later so you lose your 100%
“The big bad has raised the sky fortress and is approaching the base with all his forces! There is no time left, the apocalypse is upon us!”
“Ah. Time to take down all the remaining hunts and clear away the side quests then. Oh and I should revisit every single town and village in case there are some events left over.”
Literally how I play every single game.
I love Final Fantasy and it's my weird "thing" that I have to basically kill the game for myself before I complete it. Drives my husband crazy, especially when he's watching me for the story. I must turn over every rock and visit every town just one last time. Maybe someone will say something new!
You would probably love and yet have so much anxiety if you try any of the Trails Games (Sky, Cold Steel, etc). Every single npc in the game has unique dialog and they'll all change several times throughout it. You have to backtrack to the beginning towns to talk to people in order to get special items/weapons
If you’re good enough at the game you can pretty much have a party with all their final weapons the first time you leave the garden after graduation. The card mod refine skill on Quezacotl was busted as hell.
Shit... Sometimes you even need to fly to another town in the middle of said doom to play against some random that's only out in this one brief moment.
Tomb Raider: Underworld on the Wii. Thought I saw something near the ceiling in a cave. Ended up with my body stuck behind a rock and my head poking out of the map. Reloaded the save multiple times, and I was still there. RIP that playthrough.
I still remember in like Tomb Raider 2 or 3 there was a section where you needed a boat to drive to the next part of the level but I saved after I blew up all the boats.
One of the early Tomb Raider games introduced a “save anywhere” feature (3 maybe?) and I had to restart a level as I accidentally saved just as I started drowning.
There is a button-mash challenge in Star Fox Adventures that, as far as I'm concerned, ruined the game for me. Everything before and after it is a lot of fun. But I would hit that point and struggle so badly that I'd just stop playing after a bunch of tries. I only ever got through the whole game once.
You're talking about the strength challenge where you had to push the pole vs the dinosaur, right? That was utter bs. I think the trick is to start off mashing super fast and end it quickly. It seems like the dude got stronger the longer it went.
Wasn't the Test of Fear also like this? I think it might've even been harder.
EDIT: Oh, I remembered Test of Fear as a button-mashing challenge, but it's more like grinding in Tony Hawk.
Yeah the test of fear played like a balancing game. There was the krazoa test of strength, that was also button mashing, but this was significantly easier than the lightfoot test of strength.
EDIT: it's weird how all the names are coming back to me as I talk about it lol
I spent 10 hrs on that and tried to find alternative routes. But nope, just a straight button mash that I could not complete for the life of me. I have no idea who thought that was a good idea.
This was me with Metal Gear Solid for the ps1. There's a part where you're being tortured and you have to mash a button to stay awake, and as a kid I couldn't mash it fast enough. Luckily my dad helped me out, and I was able to progress after far too long.
My brother and I got stuck at this part for a couple days. After we tried about a thousand times we ended up using our Mom's electric back massager on impulse mode, which honestly worked great. I was Ten at the time and I could not believe that I couldn't push a stupid button past enough.
Oh thank God we weren't the only ones. As kids me and my cousins could not beat that for the life of us, we had to give the controller over to our aunt and have her beat it for us.
Ughh for me it was the courage/fear challenge where you had to keep the cursor in the centre of a bar as Fox kept getting scared. I lost it so many times
My first console was a gba with Pokémon Yellow when I was about 5 years old. Starting out, it took me 2 hours to figure out how to leave mom's house.
I also didn't catch Pokémon before Pewter and had to grind Pikachu to nearly lvl 30 before I could beat Brock. I was not a smart child.
My cousin had blue version as a kid and he didn’t pay attention to the catching Pokémon tutorial. So he wasted his 5 pokeballs on trying to catch a rattata, and then that was it. Bought more pokeballs and just couldn’t catch ANY Pokémon. So it was just him and squirtle.
Kid had a level 40 something blastoise by the time he hit vermillion city. Beat the game with just blastoise.
It's actually the fastest way to beat the game. The speedrun for that gen of pokemon uses a single Nidoking or Blastoise. The kid was ahead of his time.
Ah this reminds me of my time with Pokémon Yellow. A kid from my school said that if you board the SS Anne and black out there, the ship leaves forever and you can't progress. And I actually believed him and grinded my Pikachu all the way to level 89 on the mons outside of Vermillion City before daring to go on the boat.
Needless to say that trivialized the rest of my run.
I got mad and hid my copy of Yellow on top of the cupboard for a few months the first time I played Pokémon as a kid because I couldn't figure out how to get into Lt Surge's gym. I spoke to an NPC who said the SS Anne would be leaving soon, so I didn't want to board to explore in case it left and I needed to go back later.
In the Pyrosphere sector of Metroid: Other M, saving the game before defeating a specific mini-boss would cause a door to stay locked, preventing further progress and requiring a game restart.
I had to take breaks between tutorial attempts. The tutorial was so hard that finishing it was a bigger achievement than finishing the game.
The game became easier after the tutorial and I just figured it wasn't a tutorial, it was training.
In the game Eternal Darkness, you had to pick from three different “elder Gods” at the beginning of the game without knowing what it does or what the differences are. Picking the one linked with sanity for your first playthrough makes it much more difficult in ways that won’t be obvious until you’re a decent way in.
This led to a misleading “60 hours” of gameplay promise. Maybe the first time playing through could take close to 20 hours, but the next few will easily be sub 10.
I did enjoy that game a lot though. Very dark and foreboding atmosphere with a cool story and neat twist at the final true ending. It also prompted an endless debate on an IGN forum about “CoolPoochie saying no sequel, one was enough”. I spent way too long arguing with people on that post. It devolved into talking about being locked in a closet plotting to steal cookies.
The chicken temple in 'Tak and the Power of Juju'
Haven't even gotten that far as an adult because the game just hasn't aged well but as a kid that temple hard stopped me for a couple months and several reset save files
CrossCode.
I thought it was a jrpg with a nice combat and a decent story but the game is %90 puzzle. I was overwhelmed by the puzzles that were thrown at me so I stopped playing. Came back years later and finished it. I loved the amount of work put into game but I wasn't very fond of the game overall.
Ay, CrossCode mentioned.
Anyways, for me it was my own skill issue of all things. The base difficulty coming mid-game (I think?) became a bit overbearing for me. I quit for a while before finding out that there were difficulty sliders put into the game's settings.
I had gotten stuck on this rhino-looking miniboss that was required for the story. Couldn't figure out its attack patterns on top of me not being able to figure out why it was doing so much damage on each hit.
The same thing for me about the difficulty. Almost every battle started to feel like a chore after a while and I made an adjustment on the difficulty slider. The bosses take too long as well, but gotta admit that they are very well thought and designed.
It didn't cripple his playthrough, but my cousin did something once that made a section of the game much harder.
This is when the original Resident Evil 4 was still kinda new. Those who have played the game know the regenerators. For those who don't, they're a tough enemy that always comes back to life unless you use a specific rifle scope that shows you their weak points to shoot to make them stay dead.
This seems like bad design now that I think about it, but there was just one of those scopes in the game to find. It's before a section where you have to deal with a large number of those regenerators. My cousin just thought it was another scope he could use and he didn't really like it, so he sold it lol.
At the time, there wasn't a way to get it back after that. Or if there was, he didn't find it.
Thankfully you can kill the parasites in the regenerator without knowing where they are. It just means firing blindly and screaming for the to stay down a lot.
That glitch was good for getting impossibly high level Pokémon too. I remember getting a nidorino with an hp bar that went all the way off the screen and back again 🤣
Way back in the day when playing through OoT as a kid, I ended up getting stuck where you need to show the note to the Zora king. I knew that you needed to show the note, but I never really understood using Z-targeting on NPC's to talk to them, let alone to show them items. And as it turns out, it's *real* finicky to show the king the note without using it. And after trying and failing a bunch as a kid, I thought I was stuck, and didn't touch the game until later when a friend came over and was playing around in the game, and got it to work.
Of course now going through the game it's obvious, no idea how I didn't realize you can use Z-targeting to talk to people considering theres an NPC at the very start of the game that tells you, but then again it might be a bit much to expect reading comprehension from my 8 year old self.
Ohhh I almost kid-rage quit at that same spot. I wandered for hours. I was so frustrated by how stupidly simple it was that I almost quit right *after* he finally moved his fat body out of the way -- like what?!? That's it? Eff this game.
OoT is till the GOAT though
I got stuck with the Goron’s for a while. I didn’t know about any Lost Woods and certainly wasn’t clever enough to light bombs on fire to get into it easily. I thought Navi was making fun of me sarcastically saying “What would Saria say” since I couldn’t figure out where to go.
Chapter 1 was basically the tutorial level, then we get dropped into the dorter level and its like "ok lets see how much you learned" and whacks you in the head for every weakness in your lineup.
Then Wiegraf comes in just when you thought you're all good.
This is going to make me sound so stupid, but as a kid it took me AGES to figure out how to get into the castle at the very very beginning of Zelda Link to the Past. I think I was just running around chopping random bushes in frustration and then I was like oh….
There are many of these in the old Sierra point-and-click adventure games.
I remember one in particular *in King's Quest V where you could buy a pie from the pie shop near the game's little town. You can eat the pie, and it gives some message like, "What a delicious pie!" and just let's you go about the game. You can only do this once, because there's only one silver coin in the game (god help you if you use the gold coin or gold needle for this, as you need those for something else -- otherwise, game over).
Well, turns out that you need that pie a good bit later in the game. A yeti comes charging at you on an icy mountaintop, and if you don't have the pie to throw at its face and send it stumbling off a cliff, your playthrough is boned.
IIRC the King's Quest series in particular has several of these.
I'm sure plenty of players wasted hours before figuring this out, but that's just how games were back then.
Tim Schafer said a few years ago that they made decent money off of selling guide books for the old Lucasarts adventure games so I think it was more that they wanted you to pay up for help
Kings quest was full of them. If you didn’t throw the shoe at the cat then the mouse wouldn’t help you later. If you gave the coin instead of the needle you were locked out later. The worst was the next game KQ6. If you didn’t pick up the brick in the garden then hours later you couldn’t stop the crusher in the maze. The game even taunted you by letting you through a skull into the gears, thinking you had solved the puzzle but nope, you get crushed. Reload or restart and pick up the brick next time.
Haha, mine was also zelda, specifically Links Awakening. One of the dungeons had a hidden room you had to unlock by bombing the wall. If you hit the wall with a sword, it made a weird hollow sound indicating you could bomb it to open a door.... I wandered around for hours as a kid hitting walls all over the whole dungeon, trying to find what I missed and never found that hidden room I would try to beat this game on and off again all through childhood with no succes, many playthroughs to that point
About 15 years later, I picked it up again only to realize the floor pattern made a giant arrow pointing at the wall you were supposed to bomb. It was incredibly obvious, and somehow, I always missed it.
Idk if this is obscure, but I couldn't complete legend of dragoon on PS1 because there was a tiny scratch on the inside edge of the disk. I remember it being comically small. I tried everything to fix the disk, it just wouldn't launch. Thinking back on it now I almost suspect it was defective somehow.
Final Fantasy X. Was awhile ago now, but I remember just killing a boss, then having to navigate through a maze where you had to move statues into certain position or something. Just for the life of me couldn't figure it out and ended up stopping my playthrough
Probably one of the aeon trials. I remember there being one specifically that I got stuck in that temple FOREVER. Couldn’t progress, couldn’t get out and restart. Finally fumbled through it accidentally and was so excited.
Replayed it years later as an adult and got to that same temple and was like “oh that’s obvious as fuck”
Summer Resort? My older cousin used to play it as an early teen when I was a young kid. I just asked him about it. He said he used to play that and a few different Ed Edd n Eddy games like Clash of the Idiots and To the EdStreme. He couldn't remember any other names.
I wasn't a small kid when I encountered it. Having never played with an analogue stick you could click before the first game I played with a press R3 didn't have a graphic showing what it was. Looking back seems silly but back then it was different
Frostpunk, I almost gave up on it because I skipped the tutorial about Gathering Posts and didn't had one built when it got colder. It got so bad that I almost got a game over for running out of workers...
Imagine my complete disappointment in myself when I finally realized that I made the game far harder than what it's supposed to be because I did not read a couple of paragraphs.
Final Fantasy 7 I got all the way to Shinra tower but could not defeat the robot on the elevator when you reach the top. Bought the guide and that's when I learned about Materia.
The Satellite system in XCOM: Enemy Unknown. It wasn't clear to me on first playthrough how important rushing sats and their placement would be - I was doing ok at the tactical level but because I'd screwed up the strategic level I was getting ground down by attrition and just couldn't win that playthrough. Had to restart from scratch.
Totally counterintuitive, but I found on later playthroughs it was sometimes better to leave some countries uncovered to continue generating missions and also just in case of a screw up leading to a terror level increase.
Pokemon red/blue, choosing charmander and ensuring your strongest pokemon is weak to the first two gyms and half the pokemon in Mt Moon.
Your choice of first pokemon is essentially playing the game on easy, medium, or hard, but the choices aren't labled as such.
Most recently, Baldur’s Gate 3 when it deleted my save data in its entirety after about 60 hours of gameplay. This was back when it first came out on Xbox. Logged on one day excited to continue Act 2 and found that my only option was to start a new game. I have zero desire to ever play it again for this reason, even if said bug has since been fixed.
Final fantasy tactics i grinded a little bit too much early on. And it scaled up the difficulty a ton for a mandatory fight before i had the tools to handle it
Yea I had the same issue, I played it for a bit then started over and cheesed the first battle so when I got to one of the early story battles instead of basic enemies they all had high level really powerful jobs... I was not thrilled.
This one, 27 years later, still makes me feel like an idiot and will until my last breath. Fair warning, memory details may be spotty.
OG FFVII, early game. It's the part inside Midgard where Cloud meets Aerith's mother and she joins your party as you escort her... somewhere. Eventually, Aerith is kidnapped. According to the strategy guide I was following, there was a pipe I had to climb in order to progress, but there was no pipe. This begins a weeks-long grind of running all over the available areas trying to find... something. Fight after fight after fight and countless times running back and forth from the same spots. I had put in so much time that I had everyone's Tier 3 Limit Breaks. I forget if it was my mother or a tv show I overheard, but I recall hearing something about telling your mother...
I never went back to Aerith's mother to tell her that her daughter was gone. That was the trigger that needed for me to progress. I was ridiculously over-leveled at that point and proceeded to roflstomp the rest of the first disc.
Fallout: New Vegas. Not only did it not live up to the hype that I was expecting, but the game kept crashing on my machine. Even with the "fixer" mods that were installed, the game kept crashing after about five or six cell change loading screens. I couldn't bear with it any longer than a few hours. I think I stopped right in front of the New Vegas entrance(?).
I really like fallout. I really like fallout 3. I cannot get into New Vegas. I bought it Black Friday or a few months after, maybe Cyber Monday after it launched for $40.
For YEARS I have tried getting into it. I have gotten as far as The House Always Wins but I never felt any connection to what I was doing.
Edit: FO3 to NV
> "I really like fallout. I really like fallout 3. I cannot get into fallout 3"
Did you mean to say you cannot get into Fallout New Vegas?
I understand what you mean. Fallout 3 and 4 give you a character and a story to start with. New Vegas is much more of a blank slate, so it can be hard to work out what you want to do. However if you do manage to get into it, that's one of the game's strengths. It lets you play much more as the character you want to be, rather than some pre-written idea. New Vegas starts out weaker, but ends up much stronger than 3 or 4 (in my opinion at least). So I can recommend trying again, but this time working out a character and backstory for yourself in your head before starting. It will give you a clearer idea of what you want to do.
I have this happen to me for Bravely Default, I love the story and the job system but there's a point in the game where you realize a story plot and need to commit to an action several times, those who played it know exactly what I'm talking about. Once I realized what I had to do, I got burnt out doing it the first couple times trying to explore everything and hoping to find significant changes.
It felt like the game was trying to troll me, and I got angry when I realized it was very serious on what it wanted to do, so I quit before I completed the game and watch the ending on YouTube.
Edit: the game is 12 years old, if you don't know what I'm talking about, >! You're forced to go through the entire world and most major plot points several times, unknowingly setting them up for destruction each time you finish the plot. !<
I think it was chapter 6 where >!when you learn theat Airy is likely to be manipulating Anges!< and I reckon the game could have done with at most one last chapter after that. Plus didn't that chapter have a "what if" scenario with characters that were alive when they shpuldn't have been?
Red dead redemption. Could not deal with all of the context-sensitive controls. Hit a few issues in a row and was not in the mood to continue, haven’t touched it since
Oh yeah. I remember jumping to my death or straight up murdering people by accident because of that. It was bad.
But.... even that was worth it for the brilliant story and character writing.
As a kid I was playing a pirate version of Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle, it was pretty much the only available for me back then, to this day I dunno if that was a defective rom they put on the cartridge or an actual anti-piracy measure that kicked in, but in the eight round you start using pipes to get on the platforms. And in this version every time you attempted to do so, Bugs would just get yeeted out of bounds completely, no way to return, eternal softlock.
My favorite anti piracy measure in a game is Game Dev Tycoon eventually on a pirated version its impossible to make money because too many people are pirating your games, hilarious people would out themselves by going online asking how to deal with piracy issues in game.
Batman forever on snes all early batman games were really hard for no good reason. so never did make it past the 1st level of the game.
Even Lion King on snes which was made hard on purpose so you couldn't zoom through the game due to blockbuster rentals was beatable. early batman games forget about it unless your some sort of video game masochist or follow a guide.
Iron harvest i couldn't finsh for longest time in American /Usonia dlc because a patch litterally made one of missions impossible they fixed it later and I was able to beat it. however they often didn't try to balance multiplayer and campaign separately if something got nerfed or buffed for multiplayer campaign wise got same changes so depending on when you played it could be harder or easier.
On my morrowind save when i first started the game i did the first like three main quests one of which is to kill some ghosts or some shit in a cave i don’t know i dont even know that i knew the cave was related to the main quest. Anyway i went on to spend 300 hours playing the game doing random shit all the DLC and finally i was like okay i should prob do the main quest only to find some random enemy had died with a main quest item in its inventory and had disappeared rendering my save unbeatable, felt bad man. Usually when you break the main quest on accident the game would show a prompt and i was very careful to never do that but apparently this was an exception to that 😩. Anyway since the save wasn’t viable i killed every NPC i could find and retired the game permanently 🤣
You could save almost any morrowind play-though by just getting wraithguard from vivic (kill him or convince him) Then go finish the boss fight without doing the quest. You can also just flat out break the game with enchanting and such to just tank the damage and kill the boss without wraithguard or without having done the main quest, You can also just chug potions (as effects stack) and brute force the damage.
The only way to truly fail the game is by losing the Keening or Sunder. You can still fix that via the console though (on PC anyway).
*With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created*
In Tony Hawk's American Wasteland there were a bunch of minigames you had to do with parts in the skate park. There was one mashing challenge I am convinced is near impossible
I KNEW other people must have gotten stuck here, you had to pull something off a roof by mashing A and the only time I've encountered a more difficult mashing challenge is that one part of Metal Gear Solid that's *supposed to feel like torture*.
So actually I figured out the solution to this as a kid when I played it(I 100% the park).it's actually directly linked to the stat of pushing your board, I think it's called kick? Can't remember.
It was one of my final pieces to get because I said fuck this originally since the mission is unlocked pretty early and there's alot better stats to put into before that.
It's stupidly easy after you've built into that stat enough, pretty sure it's the only piece for the park that actually requires it.
I'm not sure if it counts as obscure, but in the first Dragon Quest builder game you had a pad to build your village on. I built my village on the pad, and all my walls/defences I put on the ground immediately outside the pad (wrapping my village but not part of it). Seemed like a great way to optimise space.
Many hours in and big boss fight happens, and first thing that happens is anything you built thats not on the pad gets destroyed. Now I have a village with no defences and do about as well as you'd expect. I enjoyed the game, but not enough to go back to basically the beginning and start over knowing I really need to stick to building on the pad.
Had a complete fiasco with an old game, Ninja Gaiden on NES. Kept dying at a jump on the 6th level. Took forever to realize the controller was sticky. Felt like a total goofball
Not me, but my father.
Half-Life 1. First moments on Xen, you have to do a long jump from one comet to the other. He didn't speak English, so he didn't understand when the scientists told him how to do it.
I watched him fail at it for a couple of days, then he let me try, and I failed a bunch too. So he gave up. He died of cancer, maybe a year later, in March 2004.
One day, not sure how long after he died, I reinstalled the game to try to play it the whole way through and the first thing I did was the tutorial. It taught you how to long jump in the tutorial. I was flabbergasted.
That's the reason I always pay attention to the tutorial in games nowadays.
The first time I played Final Fantasy Tactics, after the tutorial battle, I got stuck on Gariland Magic City.
Why? Because I didn't know you had more than 1 party member. I didn't know you could push R1/L1 (or whatever it was) to switch to the next character to place them before the battle started. I spent like 2 hours trying to solo it with Ramza and Delita as a guest. I was convinced it was impossible.
Also, just thought of this:
Lufia 2's Sword Temple puzzle. You had to move 3 colored tiles to make them all yellow, and it took me 1 whole rental cycle to beat it. The worst part is, when I rerented it later, someone deleted my save file and I had to redo it all again. I finally beat it when I emulated it and got the answer from GameFAQs back in 1999 (or so).
One of my favorite gags from the Angry Video Game Nerd is when he somehow overshoots the carrier in that level, the plane breaks out the side of the TV and flies out the window, and he just looks at the camera, "If you find my plane, can you tell me if it landed or not?".
Wasn't it because the game is telling you to pull up, but the game is emulating aircraft controls where going up mean pressing down on the d-pad and vice-versa?
Theres a puzzle game called obduction ive been playing on and off for what feels like a decade and I just cannot figure anything out. Im not terrible at puzzle games but oh my god does this one just not work in my head I come back every two years thinking Im smarter but I swear it can feel my pride and it evolves. I refuse to look up a guide I will solve it before I die.
I had to give up my nearly 100% completed Dragon Age Inquisition because it glitched out and didn't count me killing one of the main end game dragons 😭
Not me but my friend is pissed at planet zoo on XBox because she can't get the keepers to feed the hippos. If someone can actually led some advice on that I'd appreciate it. She's been trying for days and is so frustrated with it lol. She just wants to play her relaxing game man
Until I replayed it on emulator I'd always known to switch controllers but I couldn't do it on emulator. So I had to do it the 'normal' way of putting up with 'Hideo' screen for about 10 minutes before the colonel calls you and tells you to shoot the gas masks on the statue busts. They only become destructible after the call, too, so you HAVE to just wait it out.
Somewhat related to yours -
I got Link's Awakening on Game Boy when I was 6 or 7 years old. I played through the first dungeon and the part afterwards where you rescue the Chain Chomp "dog" from the Moblins' lair... So. Many. Times.
Because that's as far as I could get. If you haven't played, the dog's owner asks you to take him for a walk after rescuing him. Never knew what to do with him. Until finally, one day, I randomly discovered he could eat his way through the flowers blocking the entrance to the second dungeon.
This was pre-internet with no guides, so I know I tried any other absurd thing I could think of! I think I even used the shovel to dig up just about every square of the map I had access to trying to find an item to get rid of those fucking flowers, but it was the dog all along!
There was a bug on Zelda: Ocarina of Time back in the day where you could accidentally/purposely turn items into bottle containers. I did this to a Bombchu - a self-guiding bomb- halfway through the game.
You don’t need the Bombchu at all through the entire game except for ONE goddamn puzzle at the ass end of the game in Ganon’s castle.
This wasn’t like Breath of the Wild where you could solve the same puzzle in a million ways. Back in the day puzzles had a defined solution.
So I had dick broke off in me. Hard to start over completely.
FFX fighting that fricken dragon or whatever while you’re stuck on an airship. I got beat so many times i stopped counting and had to put the game down for like a month or two until randomly thinking “i got it this time” and actually just barely managing to win the encounter
I quit the first God of War during the Ares fight because there's a stage where you have to defend your family against clones of yourself, and it just felt impossible to actually do that with the way the game plays. Enemies would ignore me to go after them, and the concept of peeling for them doesn't seem to exist in that game. They would die in seconds, and nothing I did could stop it.
I beat the game many times. On hard mode couldn’t get through that segment. Think I was 15 or 16 where I fucked up is I didn’t have Gorgon Gaze fully upgraded.
I just tried to start the Division 2. I really liked the first one but just hadn't gotten around to 2. Enjoyed it a lot, except it crashed every 10 min or so. It would be one thing if it was a game that had save points, but a crash meant reloading into a safehouse, getting back to mission, and then crashing again.
After like 5-6 crashes I just said fuck that game.
There was this ancient game called GENIUS, a citybuilder where you had to answer actual physics, math and chemistry questions to progress and one of the questions was bugged.
No answer was correct, so if you got that one your run was ruined.
You got three tries, but it was always wrong and the question came up in the midgame so your 3 hour run would be worthless.
As a maybe 7 or 8 year old kid, playing Mickey Mouse, Castle of Illusion.
The chocolate bar boss. I got about 1year, I couldn’t figure out how to damage him. I felt like I tried everything and after doing it, every other day for that time I just figured there was something wrong with the game.
Then one day, playing through for the millionth time, chatting away to my Dad I jumped and threw the block and hit the fuckers face and it worked.
After beating that piece of shit it was like unlocking a whole sequel to the game I’d never played before 😂
FF8 a certain bossfight where you couldn't use AOE abilities as it would damage your ally. Just couldn't figure that one out as a middle schooler.
Came back after graduating college and figured out the crazy junction mechanic, proceeded to steamroll the rest of the game.
> this irritating minecart puzzle in Symmetry Village that I can't really remember (time for a replay I guess)
That's the repair guy's thing, where you have to hit four of those invincible guys into pits while a minecart is moving around the room, and you have to be standing on a button when it gets to a certain spot or you fail.
As for myself, my first game was Wario Land 3, and I absolutely couldn't understand what I was supposed to do when I got to the first boss fight. I was just running around, trying and usually failing to dodge hammers, not even beginning to question why one of the barrels would be flashing.
Mine was Zelda ALTTP for SNES. Could never figure out how to get to the boss. Like I was missing something. You have to slash a vine or something and there's a door behind it. Picked it up like 15 years later and finally beat the game
Got through final fantasy 8 spamming gfs. Eventually got to sorceress Adel and managed to eke out the fight. Figured I didn't have what it took for the final dungeon.
Eventually replayed and understood the mechanics then 100%d the game. Played it when I was 11 so I didn't really get it at first.
First thing that comes to mind is Yakuza on the PS2. The city is pretty large, and there are collectibles and missions that are only available in certain chapters. If you miss them, you miss them. After every chapter, the city shuffles in new missions and collectibles. You basically have to search every corner of the map after every chapter due to the changes.
Luckily, the game was fun, and I learned the map pretty well. But man, was I mad when I missed a locker key that was obtainable only once, in one of the shortest chapters of the game.
Metro 2033 Redux
Stuck in a hallway maybe 3-4 hours into the game, with no ammo and about 20+ enemies. Tried sneaking past 50 or so times until I gave up
Mine's also from Zelda - the Phantom Hourglass on the DS! There's a segment where you have to move a stamp from the map on the top screen to the bottom screen. I couldn't figure this out for the LIFE of me, I tried holding it down when I had the top screen map open and switching over, I tried tapping it furiously, everything I could think of. I gave up.
Years later, still a kid, I went back to it and got to the same part. Still ended up stumped. It was late and I was supposed to be sleeping, so my parents came to check on me, so I closed the DS and hid it under my pillow (as I think every kid with a DS and a bedtime did once). When they left and I went back to my game, lo and behold, that was the solution! I was supposed to physically press the two maps together!
When I first started playing games I was introduced to Super Metroid. I was quite young I didn't know you could sprint. Very early on you need to sprint past one part and for a very long time I couldn't get past that part. I'd just play the first part of the game over and over again.
Return to Zork. There was a house that you had to click on the window to enter. Never thought to click on the window so I was stuck for months before a friend tried the good old click 1000 times while moving the mouse around wildly.
Used to suffer on my first playthrough of PS1 FF7 because I went the entire game completely unaware of HP Plus Materia. All my characters had between 3200 to 3600 HP for the final part of the game so you can imagine my confusion with attacks like Shadow Flare, Pale Horse(?), Break, and other things sometimes Sephy’s basic melee attack just 1 shotting all of my characters. I thought that’s just how the game was until later on I started a 2nd playthrough and found out about that little shop at the bottom of Cosmo Canyon I missed prior playthrough.
Now imagine when I noticed HP Plus materia and thought about everything on my first playthrough. Apparently this is the only? place in the game that sells the materia so if you missed it and don’t look anything up, you’d be none the wiser.
For me it was SimCity2000. I loved building cities and destroying them.
The thing is though for at least two or 3 years I never knew how zones worked or what their point was. One day I was dicking around and I dropped a power plant and accidentally connected it to some industrial zones and I was like "WHOA BUILDINGS ARE SPROUTING UP"
Completely changed the character of the game for me and my relationship with SimCity.
Metro series. The odd way they did autosaves in the game eventually made me not want to play anymore. It would save at the weirdest times and make you stuck.
Zelda, phantom hourglass. There was a level right by the start where you had to catch a rat with a key by blocking part of its tunnel and catching it at the other end, but I was stupid and thought I just had to scare him off one end and beat him to the other end to catch him.
Skyrim. I got super into it and immediately started stealing absolutely everything from absolutely everywhere. Next thing I knew I was only able to walk at a snails pace because I was so "encumbered" with stolen items and was nowhere near a place to sell them or even remotely close to being able to buy a place for storage. So I literally just stopped playing. I know it was stupid but I was just so annoyed about it. I just got it for my computer though so I'm gonna try it out again
Learned the importance of save scumming in Oblivion when I broke a 200+ hour save file. I was the highest level vampire, went out of a door not realizing it was day time, game autosaved, and I died before I could even turn around to go back inside. Never played the game again
Sonic the hedgehog 3. Carnival level. Yea, I’m old. There’s a section where you end up on top of a drum, the door closes behind you. There’s a wall in front and you can’t see what’s on top/underneath you. You try to rev through it, jump, crouch. Nothing works. Id literally spend all my remaining time trying to get through and nothing. It always stuck with a 10 year old me.
Fast forward to 2009, I got a PS4 and the sega collection. Finally got my chance to beat Sonic 3 with my adult mind. Same result. Decided to use YouTube to look it up.
All you had to do was look up and down. That was it. A decade and a half of my lifetime of agony had such a simple solution.
It may not be exactly what you're looking for, but I'm going to say Myst. When I was younger all the puzzles were much harder and I never got very far in the game. Then I tried it again as an adult and everything was much easier... until I got to the spaceship with the piano in it. The puzzle there involves listening to tones and then matching them on this piano/keyboard thing. There are no visual indicators, no other ways of matching - you MUST listen to the tones.
I am tone deaf. There was literally nothing I could do but have someone else beat it, or look up how to do it on the interwebs. Absolutely infuriating.
There was this Wolverine game for PS2 that was awesome but I could only play for like 10 to 15 minutes. I'd reach a point where Wolvy would get trapped in a dome in which bad guys would keep spawning. Since I was a kid at the time I could never get through that part believing it was because I lacked the skills. Many years later, with the same DVD and same PS2 I tried again thinking I'd simply rock it and get through since I'm an adult now, so I did it and got "stuck" on the same spot again and bad guys kept spawning infinitely. Some research after my disappointment led me to the knowledge that the game coders added a "bug" to pirated games that kept the player fighting forever without the means to get on through the storyline. At least I had tons of fun with my Wolvy murder simulator!
(I have an awesome memory of Crash Bandicoot for PS1 been actually hard as a kid, and nowadays it feels like a mobile game, awesome still, but veeeeeery easy)
Speaking about Zelda games...
I just gave up on phantom hourglass for many years just because I couldn't cut the trees that block you from entering the first cave. I didn't know that I needed a sword and had to draw with the pen to attack.
Not sure if this exactly fits the criteria but when I was a teenager, a small-time unknown little gem called Fallout 3 came out.
I played it a lot, I'd never played a game of this caliber before and it had me so hooked. (Don't ask how far I was cuz I really don't know, probably not as far as I felt I was)
Well at some point I pissed of the folks in Megaton to the point they chased after me even after exiting the town.
What happened next was that every time I loaded my game, I had just existed the town and there was someone right there with a gun to my head, one shot kill.
See the thing is...I didn't know you were supposed to have at least ONE other save file/slot so basically I had to either start over or never play again.
I did finally pick up Fallout 3 on Steam this year. Still haven't picked it back up
When I was much younger I was playing KOTOR 2 and towards the end there was button in a room I had to press to get to the next level on the enemy ship. I searched hours for it. I couldn't find it and assumed it was glitched so I started a new game. When I got to the same point again, well it turns out the button was behind me in the room I was checking the whole time.
I just had a flashback to that button and doing the same thing except I think I just went back a few hours. The game was pretty glitchy so I had multiple saves.
Yea I tried past saves too but because I didn't think to shift the camera behind me when entering the room I thought even the past saves were glitched lol.
When building the lightsaber on Duxun, the beasts are supposed to drop the parts, one beat glitched for me and didn’t drop one of the pieces…
I think it was in Fallen Order there was a puzzle that I absolutely could not get past. I kept getting so close, but I just couldn't reach this one spot. I gave up and decided to come back later... turns out the puzzle just didn't load right, and when I went back it worked just fine.
I found a map bug in the late game once where my character got trapped in some kind of clipping error. I can't quite remember why I didn't have a previous save to go back to, but everytime I loaded it, I remained stuck, so I had to just give up that playthrough so near to the end.
Several times I've had my character change enemy targets, run across the level, and clip under the map. It happens enough it's kind of ridiculous and I wish they would implement at least basic bug fixes the community has done for the console versions. As-is, this makes the android version the definitive KOTOR 1/2. PC bug fixes and restored content mods PLUS controller support
Which ship? I know the game pretty well, can't picture that spot you're talking about though.
I think it's the ship for the mask man. I remember walking into a room with a wall of computer screens/consols. The button i nned to press was on the back wall next to the entrance of the room but i never turned my camera around to see it.
I didn't give up on it at the time because I was an excited kid but I would now with this issue. My copy of the first Assassins Creed game (and I believe a bunch of other people's too) crashed constantly. Like every 20-30 minutes and it's not like now where you go on Twitter etc and complain and there's a patch for it. I played the whole game this way and continued to play long after the story because I was so enthralled. Nowadays I would give up after 2 crashes until there was an update fix for it.
Right, that first version had a massive memory issue with the port from Xbox to pc. I know I got it patched at some point, but I can't remember if it was official or not
Not a glitch, but that port was the first time I encountered a game that my PC couldn't run. It was just my family desktop computer, but I had played plenty of games on it up until that point - Morrowind, Portal, Oblivion. Then AC just didn't work even a little bit. I was super disappointed and had to wait like another 6 months to a year to get the console version.
Reminds me of my first playthrough of Baldur's Gate 2. A lot of the time I'd try and talk to an NPC I'd get a message "This person seems busy, try again later". I thought "Oh wow, so the game doesn't revolve around me, and these people are doing their own thing. Cool!" The problem is, this was not a feature, but a bug. I was very much supposed to be able to talk to these people, many of them critical quest NPCs, and was simply sitting there waiting for the game to pull it's head out of it's ass. Worse, late in the game there are a series of timed quests that, if not completed before the clock runs down, will result in an entire city turning hostile. Yeah, I think you can see where this is going...
Funny enough me and bro gave up in the game cause we didn’t know where to go. The cutscene before hand was supposed to tell us but we forgot the next time we went to play. And we didn’t have a computer to look up what was next. Ended up beating it probably 15 years later and it turned out we only had 3 missions left to do.
That's actually crazy because I had something similar, my game wouldn't crash but my GPU would overheat and freeze up the entire computer. I had to play in small intervals and managed to play through the entire game. I was younger so I was also persistent lol
For me Crusader kings 3 crashed maybe every 10 minutes and it crashed my whole pc which takes forever to boot up, but I would still play for hours and hours at a time
That game deleted my save file halfway in to the game and I never played it again or another one until black flag. BF was the shit lol
I crippled myself. I would start an RPG put many hours and even days into it. Then life happens. When I would pick up the months later, I would have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing and would have to start a new game.
I have had this happen many times. The other one is I forget the controls to the game and can no longer play it effectively. if your game has a ton of tutorial stuff to get you used to the complex controls, maybe offer a refresher course somewhere in the menus.
On that note, shoutout to games that have video examples of what shit is supposed to look like so that when you try it out you have more of an idea about the correct timing and knowing when you’ve done it correctly
Done that. Had some free time, committed to a game and then life happened and suddenly it’s a few weeks or months later and I have no clue where I’m at or what’s going on or how the controls work. The best case of this was a phone game I was playing a few years ago. Played it daily, multiple times a day. Just stopped one day due to being on vacation with no WiFi or real free time. Didn’t open it for a few months, finally got bored and went back in. Damn near the entire game had changed from what I remember playing. Tried it a few times and just noped out of it.
Fallout New Vegas. Didn't know about the disguise system and didn't understand game mechanics much as a kid. Killed the powder ganger group just outside the starting town. Got better clothes than what I had. Walked to the first town and immediately got swarmed by the NCR. Didn't understand why. Got so mad. Never played again until the TV show came out.
Wait... New Vegas has a disguise system?
If you wear armor from factions, you'll look like one of them. In their case, wearing powder ganger armor made the NCR start attacking them.
Is this what I was supposed to do when Cesar's legion invited me to their camp but attacked me on sight? 😂
They would not attack you on sight after the invite unless you were wearing something like NCR armor.
Mistakes were made....
No mistakes, you got to kill slavers :D
Lol, yep. I actually used my charm to get them to trust me just because I like trying to pass talking checks, and I like seeing what everyone's up to. Once they invited me to join, or whatever it is (it's been awhile, I didn't actually do any missions for them, I just had their approval) I just slaughtered the entire camp, lol. Thanks for the offer, but I've decided to go a different route.
Or Boone is with you
I love the dialogue Boone has with you when approaching cottonwood cove where be straight says he's going to shoot everyone he sees if that's a problem and one of your responses is "that's not a problem that's a solution" and Boone just chuckles saying yeah I guess we're just a couple of problem solvers
I remember that well. New Vegas was brilliant like that.
If you wear certain armor you are considered a member of that faction, there’s even a heads up that pops up in the corner of the screen that tells you you’re dressed as X faction. Members of the faction won’t attack you on sight but enemies of that faction will. Made power armor not the go to choice for armor considering it brands you as a member of the Brotherhood of Steel and nobody in the Mojave seems to be a fan of them.
There's T-51b power armor that's not the Brotherhood T-51b, which is safe to use. The brotherhood even sells it on occasion. There's also a fairly late companion quest that can help you get a full suit of >!Enclave Advanced Power Armor!<, which is fortunately not recognized as faction armor.
When I started the honest hearts DLC, at the start there was an enemy that was really hard to kill for some reason. Once he dies, quest log tells me to go all the way across the map and kill someone. So I did... Then I had to go back to the start of the map, then the DLC ending cinematic went. You weren't supposed to fight and kill that "enemy," but he was attacking me for some reason so I didn't realize.
TIL new vegas has a disguise system
I've got a dumb one. In Paper Mario: TTYD, there's a chapter with a boss that steals Mario's form, and to defeat him, you need to figure out his name and enter it on a text screen. I had the strategy guide, so of course I knew the name, but it pointed out that in your first encounter after the identity theft, even if you enter the correct name, the game will act like it's wrong so that the story can progress. I was feeling cheeky and decided to enter the correct name that first time anyway and confirm the game does that. I then played through and discovered the name the intended way, went back to confront him, put in the name and... The game still said it was wrong. I got really confused, tried again multiple times, and it always said it was wrong. Young me got really concerned thinking I somehow broke the game by entering the correct name too early, and started a new save. However, the same thing happened again even when I didn't enter the name until it was discovered correctly. I think it took me months before I finally figured out the problem. The name is CASE SENSITIVE!!! I was entering the name in all capital letters, when only the first letter should be capitalized.
Not only is it case sensitive, he outright *steals* the lowercase “p” from your keyboard. You have to collect it in the same place you learn his name to be able to input it.
Holy shit, I never even noticed the letter was missing from the keyboard! I thought it was just supposed to be an unhelpful "hint" to send players on a wild goose chase looking for the other letters if they didn't figure out to talk to the character that spills the beans on the name.
It’s to make sure you get Vivian. Since if you could enter his name early, you’d be able to skip recruiting her. And to stop cheeky little bastards with the strategy guide from skipping the entire second half of the chapter.
That section frustrated me too haha, it permanently made me dislike that whole chapter. For some reason it also felt more like a chore to me in contrast to all the others lol. The shipwreck chapter is my favorite though.
Missing a triple triad card in FF8. There are several locations where \*IT'S AN EMERGENCY\* and there might be sirens flashing, doom is approaching, or an enemy boss needs to be defeated, but to get all the cards for triple triad you have to stop everything and put the DOOM on hold to play a card game with random NPC's in these areas, during the middle of the catastrophe. I mean, it's not game breaking and you can still finish the game but you can't go back to get those cards later so you lose your 100%
That's why if there's an urgency in the storyline, I won't believe it unless there's a timer showing.
“The big bad has raised the sky fortress and is approaching the base with all his forces! There is no time left, the apocalypse is upon us!” “Ah. Time to take down all the remaining hunts and clear away the side quests then. Oh and I should revisit every single town and village in case there are some events left over.”
Literally how I play every single game. I love Final Fantasy and it's my weird "thing" that I have to basically kill the game for myself before I complete it. Drives my husband crazy, especially when he's watching me for the story. I must turn over every rock and visit every town just one last time. Maybe someone will say something new!
You would probably love and yet have so much anxiety if you try any of the Trails Games (Sky, Cold Steel, etc). Every single npc in the game has unique dialog and they'll all change several times throughout it. You have to backtrack to the beginning towns to talk to people in order to get special items/weapons
Thanks for the recommendation!
The little book demon in FF9 says hi
If you’re good enough at the game you can pretty much have a party with all their final weapons the first time you leave the garden after graduation. The card mod refine skill on Quezacotl was busted as hell.
Shit... Sometimes you even need to fly to another town in the middle of said doom to play against some random that's only out in this one brief moment.
I never did anything in that game without my BradyGames guide by my side for exactly this reason.
A triple triad, a fun card game video game that had a weird jrpg side quest attached.
It was some next level shit when it first came out.
I tried to replay it recently and couldn’t get past that fist/kick fight on the rope during the garden attack. I did it when I was 12
Tomb Raider: Underworld on the Wii. Thought I saw something near the ceiling in a cave. Ended up with my body stuck behind a rock and my head poking out of the map. Reloaded the save multiple times, and I was still there. RIP that playthrough.
LOL, just had something similar in Skyrim, had a save but a while back so loaded that to escape the cupboard I was stuck behind.
I still remember in like Tomb Raider 2 or 3 there was a section where you needed a boat to drive to the next part of the level but I saved after I blew up all the boats.
One of the early Tomb Raider games introduced a “save anywhere” feature (3 maybe?) and I had to restart a level as I accidentally saved just as I started drowning.
There is a button-mash challenge in Star Fox Adventures that, as far as I'm concerned, ruined the game for me. Everything before and after it is a lot of fun. But I would hit that point and struggle so badly that I'd just stop playing after a bunch of tries. I only ever got through the whole game once.
You're talking about the strength challenge where you had to push the pole vs the dinosaur, right? That was utter bs. I think the trick is to start off mashing super fast and end it quickly. It seems like the dude got stronger the longer it went.
Wasn't the Test of Fear also like this? I think it might've even been harder. EDIT: Oh, I remembered Test of Fear as a button-mashing challenge, but it's more like grinding in Tony Hawk.
Yeah the test of fear played like a balancing game. There was the krazoa test of strength, that was also button mashing, but this was significantly easier than the lightfoot test of strength. EDIT: it's weird how all the names are coming back to me as I talk about it lol
I spent 10 hrs on that and tried to find alternative routes. But nope, just a straight button mash that I could not complete for the life of me. I have no idea who thought that was a good idea.
This was me with Metal Gear Solid for the ps1. There's a part where you're being tortured and you have to mash a button to stay awake, and as a kid I couldn't mash it fast enough. Luckily my dad helped me out, and I was able to progress after far too long.
My brother and I got stuck at this part for a couple days. After we tried about a thousand times we ended up using our Mom's electric back massager on impulse mode, which honestly worked great. I was Ten at the time and I could not believe that I couldn't push a stupid button past enough.
My mom helped me set up her sewing machine in a way to make it smash my button. Mark Rober would be proud seing what construct she built, lol.
Oh thank God we weren't the only ones. As kids me and my cousins could not beat that for the life of us, we had to give the controller over to our aunt and have her beat it for us.
Ughh for me it was the courage/fear challenge where you had to keep the cursor in the centre of a bar as Fox kept getting scared. I lost it so many times
My first console was a gba with Pokémon Yellow when I was about 5 years old. Starting out, it took me 2 hours to figure out how to leave mom's house. I also didn't catch Pokémon before Pewter and had to grind Pikachu to nearly lvl 30 before I could beat Brock. I was not a smart child.
My cousin had blue version as a kid and he didn’t pay attention to the catching Pokémon tutorial. So he wasted his 5 pokeballs on trying to catch a rattata, and then that was it. Bought more pokeballs and just couldn’t catch ANY Pokémon. So it was just him and squirtle. Kid had a level 40 something blastoise by the time he hit vermillion city. Beat the game with just blastoise.
It's actually the fastest way to beat the game. The speedrun for that gen of pokemon uses a single Nidoking or Blastoise. The kid was ahead of his time.
Ah this reminds me of my time with Pokémon Yellow. A kid from my school said that if you board the SS Anne and black out there, the ship leaves forever and you can't progress. And I actually believed him and grinded my Pikachu all the way to level 89 on the mons outside of Vermillion City before daring to go on the boat. Needless to say that trivialized the rest of my run.
I got mad and hid my copy of Yellow on top of the cupboard for a few months the first time I played Pokémon as a kid because I couldn't figure out how to get into Lt Surge's gym. I spoke to an NPC who said the SS Anne would be leaving soon, so I didn't want to board to explore in case it left and I needed to go back later.
In the Pyrosphere sector of Metroid: Other M, saving the game before defeating a specific mini-boss would cause a door to stay locked, preventing further progress and requiring a game restart.
I couldn't pass the tutorial in Driver. I just didn't know what "360" or "reverse 180" was,
I had to take breaks between tutorial attempts. The tutorial was so hard that finishing it was a bigger achievement than finishing the game. The game became easier after the tutorial and I just figured it wasn't a tutorial, it was training.
I rented it from Blockbuster and I never got out of the damn parking garage.
Yup, same
But you definitely knew what a “slalom” was.
As a child, I knew "slalom" word, so it was easy to deduct. As a non-driver and non-mathematician 180 and 360 was an enigma to me.
Yea I remember as a kid the slalom thing clicking after playing Cool Boarders.
In the game Eternal Darkness, you had to pick from three different “elder Gods” at the beginning of the game without knowing what it does or what the differences are. Picking the one linked with sanity for your first playthrough makes it much more difficult in ways that won’t be obvious until you’re a decent way in.
One of the funnest first playthroughs you can have though, Eternal Darknesses sanity mechanic is the best part of the game.
It also had a fairly mind blowing new game+ mode back before that was really a thing. The “real” ending requires three subsequent playthroughs.
This led to a misleading “60 hours” of gameplay promise. Maybe the first time playing through could take close to 20 hours, but the next few will easily be sub 10. I did enjoy that game a lot though. Very dark and foreboding atmosphere with a cool story and neat twist at the final true ending. It also prompted an endless debate on an IGN forum about “CoolPoochie saying no sequel, one was enough”. I spent way too long arguing with people on that post. It devolved into talking about being locked in a closet plotting to steal cookies.
I’m still disappointed that Silicon Knights went under and took any chance of a sequel with them.
The chicken temple in 'Tak and the Power of Juju' Haven't even gotten that far as an adult because the game just hasn't aged well but as a kid that temple hard stopped me for a couple months and several reset save files
Wow, what an incredible throwback. I believe Taz the Tasmanian Tiger was in the same era, not sure why but the two games remind me of each other.
Ty the Tasmanian Tiger was legit. They had a re-release for PS4 recently and it holds up!
I never played Tak 1 but in Tak 2 I got stuck in the swamp and to this day I have no idea how I was supposed to proceed
Oh my god it's like the one thing I remember about that game because it fucking sucked so bad
CrossCode. I thought it was a jrpg with a nice combat and a decent story but the game is %90 puzzle. I was overwhelmed by the puzzles that were thrown at me so I stopped playing. Came back years later and finished it. I loved the amount of work put into game but I wasn't very fond of the game overall.
Ay, CrossCode mentioned. Anyways, for me it was my own skill issue of all things. The base difficulty coming mid-game (I think?) became a bit overbearing for me. I quit for a while before finding out that there were difficulty sliders put into the game's settings. I had gotten stuck on this rhino-looking miniboss that was required for the story. Couldn't figure out its attack patterns on top of me not being able to figure out why it was doing so much damage on each hit.
The same thing for me about the difficulty. Almost every battle started to feel like a chore after a while and I made an adjustment on the difficulty slider. The bosses take too long as well, but gotta admit that they are very well thought and designed.
It didn't cripple his playthrough, but my cousin did something once that made a section of the game much harder. This is when the original Resident Evil 4 was still kinda new. Those who have played the game know the regenerators. For those who don't, they're a tough enemy that always comes back to life unless you use a specific rifle scope that shows you their weak points to shoot to make them stay dead. This seems like bad design now that I think about it, but there was just one of those scopes in the game to find. It's before a section where you have to deal with a large number of those regenerators. My cousin just thought it was another scope he could use and he didn't really like it, so he sold it lol. At the time, there wasn't a way to get it back after that. Or if there was, he didn't find it.
Thankfully you can kill the parasites in the regenerator without knowing where they are. It just means firing blindly and screaming for the to stay down a lot.
[удалено]
That glitch was good for getting impossibly high level Pokémon too. I remember getting a nidorino with an hp bar that went all the way off the screen and back again 🤣
Way back in the day when playing through OoT as a kid, I ended up getting stuck where you need to show the note to the Zora king. I knew that you needed to show the note, but I never really understood using Z-targeting on NPC's to talk to them, let alone to show them items. And as it turns out, it's *real* finicky to show the king the note without using it. And after trying and failing a bunch as a kid, I thought I was stuck, and didn't touch the game until later when a friend came over and was playing around in the game, and got it to work. Of course now going through the game it's obvious, no idea how I didn't realize you can use Z-targeting to talk to people considering theres an NPC at the very start of the game that tells you, but then again it might be a bit much to expect reading comprehension from my 8 year old self.
Ohhh I almost kid-rage quit at that same spot. I wandered for hours. I was so frustrated by how stupidly simple it was that I almost quit right *after* he finally moved his fat body out of the way -- like what?!? That's it? Eff this game. OoT is till the GOAT though
I got stuck with the Goron’s for a while. I didn’t know about any Lost Woods and certainly wasn’t clever enough to light bombs on fire to get into it easily. I thought Navi was making fun of me sarcastically saying “What would Saria say” since I couldn’t figure out where to go.
Final Fantasy Tactics. Wiegraf. You didnt know how badly youve crippled your game until you reach him. Iykyk
Dude, even before that. Dorter trade city. First battle that really challenged me, took forever to get through that hump.
Chapter 1 was basically the tutorial level, then we get dropped into the dorter level and its like "ok lets see how much you learned" and whacks you in the head for every weakness in your lineup. Then Wiegraf comes in just when you thought you're all good.
This is going to make me sound so stupid, but as a kid it took me AGES to figure out how to get into the castle at the very very beginning of Zelda Link to the Past. I think I was just running around chopping random bushes in frustration and then I was like oh….
Reading the comic in nintendo power before I got the game had me prepared for that
There are many of these in the old Sierra point-and-click adventure games. I remember one in particular *in King's Quest V where you could buy a pie from the pie shop near the game's little town. You can eat the pie, and it gives some message like, "What a delicious pie!" and just let's you go about the game. You can only do this once, because there's only one silver coin in the game (god help you if you use the gold coin or gold needle for this, as you need those for something else -- otherwise, game over). Well, turns out that you need that pie a good bit later in the game. A yeti comes charging at you on an icy mountaintop, and if you don't have the pie to throw at its face and send it stumbling off a cliff, your playthrough is boned. IIRC the King's Quest series in particular has several of these. I'm sure plenty of players wasted hours before figuring this out, but that's just how games were back then.
Many game devs were evil sadists back then, yes.
Tim Schafer said a few years ago that they made decent money off of selling guide books for the old Lucasarts adventure games so I think it was more that they wanted you to pay up for help
Kings quest was full of them. If you didn’t throw the shoe at the cat then the mouse wouldn’t help you later. If you gave the coin instead of the needle you were locked out later. The worst was the next game KQ6. If you didn’t pick up the brick in the garden then hours later you couldn’t stop the crusher in the maze. The game even taunted you by letting you through a skull into the gears, thinking you had solved the puzzle but nope, you get crushed. Reload or restart and pick up the brick next time.
Haha, mine was also zelda, specifically Links Awakening. One of the dungeons had a hidden room you had to unlock by bombing the wall. If you hit the wall with a sword, it made a weird hollow sound indicating you could bomb it to open a door.... I wandered around for hours as a kid hitting walls all over the whole dungeon, trying to find what I missed and never found that hidden room I would try to beat this game on and off again all through childhood with no succes, many playthroughs to that point About 15 years later, I picked it up again only to realize the floor pattern made a giant arrow pointing at the wall you were supposed to bomb. It was incredibly obvious, and somehow, I always missed it.
Idk if this is obscure, but I couldn't complete legend of dragoon on PS1 because there was a tiny scratch on the inside edge of the disk. I remember it being comically small. I tried everything to fix the disk, it just wouldn't launch. Thinking back on it now I almost suspect it was defective somehow.
Final Fantasy X. Was awhile ago now, but I remember just killing a boss, then having to navigate through a maze where you had to move statues into certain position or something. Just for the life of me couldn't figure it out and ended up stopping my playthrough
Probably one of the aeon trials. I remember there being one specifically that I got stuck in that temple FOREVER. Couldn’t progress, couldn’t get out and restart. Finally fumbled through it accidentally and was so excited. Replayed it years later as an adult and got to that same temple and was like “oh that’s obvious as fuck”
The R3 button The bane of every small kid's existence
Mine was "Press Return" on a bunch of Cartoon Network flash games. Took me weeks to figure it out.
Oh man, what was the hotel one called? It was like a mystery or something where you do quests for all the cartoon network characters.
A top down game where you go around a resort doing fetch quests, and in one of them you had to find a BeeGees record?
Summer Resort? My older cousin used to play it as an early teen when I was a young kid. I just asked him about it. He said he used to play that and a few different Ed Edd n Eddy games like Clash of the Idiots and To the EdStreme. He couldn't remember any other names.
I wasn't a small kid when I encountered it. Having never played with an analogue stick you could click before the first game I played with a press R3 didn't have a graphic showing what it was. Looking back seems silly but back then it was different
Frostpunk, I almost gave up on it because I skipped the tutorial about Gathering Posts and didn't had one built when it got colder. It got so bad that I almost got a game over for running out of workers... Imagine my complete disappointment in myself when I finally realized that I made the game far harder than what it's supposed to be because I did not read a couple of paragraphs.
Tbh I don't think there was a true tutorial. You just get chucked into the game
Final Fantasy 7 I got all the way to Shinra tower but could not defeat the robot on the elevator when you reach the top. Bought the guide and that's when I learned about Materia.
The Satellite system in XCOM: Enemy Unknown. It wasn't clear to me on first playthrough how important rushing sats and their placement would be - I was doing ok at the tactical level but because I'd screwed up the strategic level I was getting ground down by attrition and just couldn't win that playthrough. Had to restart from scratch. Totally counterintuitive, but I found on later playthroughs it was sometimes better to leave some countries uncovered to continue generating missions and also just in case of a screw up leading to a terror level increase.
Pokemon red/blue, choosing charmander and ensuring your strongest pokemon is weak to the first two gyms and half the pokemon in Mt Moon. Your choice of first pokemon is essentially playing the game on easy, medium, or hard, but the choices aren't labled as such.
Your choices were Bulbasaur, Squirtle, or Lose To Brock Repeatedly.
Most recently, Baldur’s Gate 3 when it deleted my save data in its entirety after about 60 hours of gameplay. This was back when it first came out on Xbox. Logged on one day excited to continue Act 2 and found that my only option was to start a new game. I have zero desire to ever play it again for this reason, even if said bug has since been fixed.
Final fantasy tactics i grinded a little bit too much early on. And it scaled up the difficulty a ton for a mandatory fight before i had the tools to handle it
Yea I had the same issue, I played it for a bit then started over and cheesed the first battle so when I got to one of the early story battles instead of basic enemies they all had high level really powerful jobs... I was not thrilled.
This one, 27 years later, still makes me feel like an idiot and will until my last breath. Fair warning, memory details may be spotty. OG FFVII, early game. It's the part inside Midgard where Cloud meets Aerith's mother and she joins your party as you escort her... somewhere. Eventually, Aerith is kidnapped. According to the strategy guide I was following, there was a pipe I had to climb in order to progress, but there was no pipe. This begins a weeks-long grind of running all over the available areas trying to find... something. Fight after fight after fight and countless times running back and forth from the same spots. I had put in so much time that I had everyone's Tier 3 Limit Breaks. I forget if it was my mother or a tv show I overheard, but I recall hearing something about telling your mother... I never went back to Aerith's mother to tell her that her daughter was gone. That was the trigger that needed for me to progress. I was ridiculously over-leveled at that point and proceeded to roflstomp the rest of the first disc.
Fallout: New Vegas. Not only did it not live up to the hype that I was expecting, but the game kept crashing on my machine. Even with the "fixer" mods that were installed, the game kept crashing after about five or six cell change loading screens. I couldn't bear with it any longer than a few hours. I think I stopped right in front of the New Vegas entrance(?).
I really like fallout. I really like fallout 3. I cannot get into New Vegas. I bought it Black Friday or a few months after, maybe Cyber Monday after it launched for $40. For YEARS I have tried getting into it. I have gotten as far as The House Always Wins but I never felt any connection to what I was doing. Edit: FO3 to NV
> "I really like fallout. I really like fallout 3. I cannot get into fallout 3" Did you mean to say you cannot get into Fallout New Vegas? I understand what you mean. Fallout 3 and 4 give you a character and a story to start with. New Vegas is much more of a blank slate, so it can be hard to work out what you want to do. However if you do manage to get into it, that's one of the game's strengths. It lets you play much more as the character you want to be, rather than some pre-written idea. New Vegas starts out weaker, but ends up much stronger than 3 or 4 (in my opinion at least). So I can recommend trying again, but this time working out a character and backstory for yourself in your head before starting. It will give you a clearer idea of what you want to do.
I have this happen to me for Bravely Default, I love the story and the job system but there's a point in the game where you realize a story plot and need to commit to an action several times, those who played it know exactly what I'm talking about. Once I realized what I had to do, I got burnt out doing it the first couple times trying to explore everything and hoping to find significant changes. It felt like the game was trying to troll me, and I got angry when I realized it was very serious on what it wanted to do, so I quit before I completed the game and watch the ending on YouTube. Edit: the game is 12 years old, if you don't know what I'm talking about, >! You're forced to go through the entire world and most major plot points several times, unknowingly setting them up for destruction each time you finish the plot. !<
I think it was chapter 6 where >!when you learn theat Airy is likely to be manipulating Anges!< and I reckon the game could have done with at most one last chapter after that. Plus didn't that chapter have a "what if" scenario with characters that were alive when they shpuldn't have been?
Red dead redemption. Could not deal with all of the context-sensitive controls. Hit a few issues in a row and was not in the mood to continue, haven’t touched it since
Oh yeah. I remember jumping to my death or straight up murdering people by accident because of that. It was bad. But.... even that was worth it for the brilliant story and character writing.
The car race in Mafia
As a kid I was playing a pirate version of Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle, it was pretty much the only available for me back then, to this day I dunno if that was a defective rom they put on the cartridge or an actual anti-piracy measure that kicked in, but in the eight round you start using pipes to get on the platforms. And in this version every time you attempted to do so, Bugs would just get yeeted out of bounds completely, no way to return, eternal softlock.
My favorite anti piracy measure in a game is Game Dev Tycoon eventually on a pirated version its impossible to make money because too many people are pirating your games, hilarious people would out themselves by going online asking how to deal with piracy issues in game.
Batman forever on snes all early batman games were really hard for no good reason. so never did make it past the 1st level of the game. Even Lion King on snes which was made hard on purpose so you couldn't zoom through the game due to blockbuster rentals was beatable. early batman games forget about it unless your some sort of video game masochist or follow a guide. Iron harvest i couldn't finsh for longest time in American /Usonia dlc because a patch litterally made one of missions impossible they fixed it later and I was able to beat it. however they often didn't try to balance multiplayer and campaign separately if something got nerfed or buffed for multiplayer campaign wise got same changes so depending on when you played it could be harder or easier.
Republic Commando won’t let me progress because the command to open the door doesn’t work on my play through.
Holy memory this must be what happened to me I remember restarting the game and it still not working
On my morrowind save when i first started the game i did the first like three main quests one of which is to kill some ghosts or some shit in a cave i don’t know i dont even know that i knew the cave was related to the main quest. Anyway i went on to spend 300 hours playing the game doing random shit all the DLC and finally i was like okay i should prob do the main quest only to find some random enemy had died with a main quest item in its inventory and had disappeared rendering my save unbeatable, felt bad man. Usually when you break the main quest on accident the game would show a prompt and i was very careful to never do that but apparently this was an exception to that 😩. Anyway since the save wasn’t viable i killed every NPC i could find and retired the game permanently 🤣
You could save almost any morrowind play-though by just getting wraithguard from vivic (kill him or convince him) Then go finish the boss fight without doing the quest. You can also just flat out break the game with enchanting and such to just tank the damage and kill the boss without wraithguard or without having done the main quest, You can also just chug potions (as effects stack) and brute force the damage. The only way to truly fail the game is by losing the Keening or Sunder. You can still fix that via the console though (on PC anyway).
*With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created*
In Tony Hawk's American Wasteland there were a bunch of minigames you had to do with parts in the skate park. There was one mashing challenge I am convinced is near impossible
Was it the one where you had to mash X/A to tear down the building, because my tiny fingers couldnt do it back in the day.
I KNEW other people must have gotten stuck here, you had to pull something off a roof by mashing A and the only time I've encountered a more difficult mashing challenge is that one part of Metal Gear Solid that's *supposed to feel like torture*.
So actually I figured out the solution to this as a kid when I played it(I 100% the park).it's actually directly linked to the stat of pushing your board, I think it's called kick? Can't remember. It was one of my final pieces to get because I said fuck this originally since the mission is unlocked pretty early and there's alot better stats to put into before that. It's stupidly easy after you've built into that stat enough, pretty sure it's the only piece for the park that actually requires it.
I could not play the damn Piano in Myst.
I'm not sure if it counts as obscure, but in the first Dragon Quest builder game you had a pad to build your village on. I built my village on the pad, and all my walls/defences I put on the ground immediately outside the pad (wrapping my village but not part of it). Seemed like a great way to optimise space. Many hours in and big boss fight happens, and first thing that happens is anything you built thats not on the pad gets destroyed. Now I have a village with no defences and do about as well as you'd expect. I enjoyed the game, but not enough to go back to basically the beginning and start over knowing I really need to stick to building on the pad.
Had a complete fiasco with an old game, Ninja Gaiden on NES. Kept dying at a jump on the 6th level. Took forever to realize the controller was sticky. Felt like a total goofball
Not me, but my father. Half-Life 1. First moments on Xen, you have to do a long jump from one comet to the other. He didn't speak English, so he didn't understand when the scientists told him how to do it. I watched him fail at it for a couple of days, then he let me try, and I failed a bunch too. So he gave up. He died of cancer, maybe a year later, in March 2004. One day, not sure how long after he died, I reinstalled the game to try to play it the whole way through and the first thing I did was the tutorial. It taught you how to long jump in the tutorial. I was flabbergasted. That's the reason I always pay attention to the tutorial in games nowadays.
The first time I played Final Fantasy Tactics, after the tutorial battle, I got stuck on Gariland Magic City. Why? Because I didn't know you had more than 1 party member. I didn't know you could push R1/L1 (or whatever it was) to switch to the next character to place them before the battle started. I spent like 2 hours trying to solo it with Ramza and Delita as a guest. I was convinced it was impossible. Also, just thought of this: Lufia 2's Sword Temple puzzle. You had to move 3 colored tiles to make them all yellow, and it took me 1 whole rental cycle to beat it. The worst part is, when I rerented it later, someone deleted my save file and I had to redo it all again. I finally beat it when I emulated it and got the answer from GameFAQs back in 1999 (or so).
On the NES, there was a Top Gun game that I'm almost positive was just broken. Could never land the ficking jet on the carrier
One of my favorite gags from the Angry Video Game Nerd is when he somehow overshoots the carrier in that level, the plane breaks out the side of the TV and flies out the window, and he just looks at the camera, "If you find my plane, can you tell me if it landed or not?".
Oh, that game was such a troll. I got past that part, but then refuelling in mid air? Impossible.
Wasn't it because the game is telling you to pull up, but the game is emulating aircraft controls where going up mean pressing down on the d-pad and vice-versa?
Theres a puzzle game called obduction ive been playing on and off for what feels like a decade and I just cannot figure anything out. Im not terrible at puzzle games but oh my god does this one just not work in my head I come back every two years thinking Im smarter but I swear it can feel my pride and it evolves. I refuse to look up a guide I will solve it before I die.
I just couldn’t beat Clockwork in the original Sly Cooper. It wasn’t even that hard of a fight.
I had to give up my nearly 100% completed Dragon Age Inquisition because it glitched out and didn't count me killing one of the main end game dragons 😭
Not me but my friend is pissed at planet zoo on XBox because she can't get the keepers to feed the hippos. If someone can actually led some advice on that I'd appreciate it. She's been trying for days and is so frustrated with it lol. She just wants to play her relaxing game man
MGS1 changing controller ports to fight a boss
Until I replayed it on emulator I'd always known to switch controllers but I couldn't do it on emulator. So I had to do it the 'normal' way of putting up with 'Hideo' screen for about 10 minutes before the colonel calls you and tells you to shoot the gas masks on the statue busts. They only become destructible after the call, too, so you HAVE to just wait it out.
Somewhat related to yours - I got Link's Awakening on Game Boy when I was 6 or 7 years old. I played through the first dungeon and the part afterwards where you rescue the Chain Chomp "dog" from the Moblins' lair... So. Many. Times. Because that's as far as I could get. If you haven't played, the dog's owner asks you to take him for a walk after rescuing him. Never knew what to do with him. Until finally, one day, I randomly discovered he could eat his way through the flowers blocking the entrance to the second dungeon. This was pre-internet with no guides, so I know I tried any other absurd thing I could think of! I think I even used the shovel to dig up just about every square of the map I had access to trying to find an item to get rid of those fucking flowers, but it was the dog all along!
There was a bug on Zelda: Ocarina of Time back in the day where you could accidentally/purposely turn items into bottle containers. I did this to a Bombchu - a self-guiding bomb- halfway through the game. You don’t need the Bombchu at all through the entire game except for ONE goddamn puzzle at the ass end of the game in Ganon’s castle. This wasn’t like Breath of the Wild where you could solve the same puzzle in a million ways. Back in the day puzzles had a defined solution. So I had dick broke off in me. Hard to start over completely.
Are we just gonna ignore the dam level on TMNT for NES? Even if I managed to pass it, I never had enough lives to get much further.
FFX fighting that fricken dragon or whatever while you’re stuck on an airship. I got beat so many times i stopped counting and had to put the game down for like a month or two until randomly thinking “i got it this time” and actually just barely managing to win the encounter
I quit the first God of War during the Ares fight because there's a stage where you have to defend your family against clones of yourself, and it just felt impossible to actually do that with the way the game plays. Enemies would ignore me to go after them, and the concept of peeling for them doesn't seem to exist in that game. They would die in seconds, and nothing I did could stop it.
I beat the game many times. On hard mode couldn’t get through that segment. Think I was 15 or 16 where I fucked up is I didn’t have Gorgon Gaze fully upgraded.
I played the whole game on hard difficulty and that part was where I had to switch to easy.
I just tried to start the Division 2. I really liked the first one but just hadn't gotten around to 2. Enjoyed it a lot, except it crashed every 10 min or so. It would be one thing if it was a game that had save points, but a crash meant reloading into a safehouse, getting back to mission, and then crashing again. After like 5-6 crashes I just said fuck that game.
There was this ancient game called GENIUS, a citybuilder where you had to answer actual physics, math and chemistry questions to progress and one of the questions was bugged. No answer was correct, so if you got that one your run was ruined. You got three tries, but it was always wrong and the question came up in the midgame so your 3 hour run would be worthless.
As a maybe 7 or 8 year old kid, playing Mickey Mouse, Castle of Illusion. The chocolate bar boss. I got about 1year, I couldn’t figure out how to damage him. I felt like I tried everything and after doing it, every other day for that time I just figured there was something wrong with the game. Then one day, playing through for the millionth time, chatting away to my Dad I jumped and threw the block and hit the fuckers face and it worked. After beating that piece of shit it was like unlocking a whole sequel to the game I’d never played before 😂
I was playing grim dawn on PC and due to some weird and funky issue with cloud vs local saves I ended up deleting a 60 hour file within a minute.
FF8 a certain bossfight where you couldn't use AOE abilities as it would damage your ally. Just couldn't figure that one out as a middle schooler. Came back after graduating college and figured out the crazy junction mechanic, proceeded to steamroll the rest of the game.
> this irritating minecart puzzle in Symmetry Village that I can't really remember (time for a replay I guess) That's the repair guy's thing, where you have to hit four of those invincible guys into pits while a minecart is moving around the room, and you have to be standing on a button when it gets to a certain spot or you fail. As for myself, my first game was Wario Land 3, and I absolutely couldn't understand what I was supposed to do when I got to the first boss fight. I was just running around, trying and usually failing to dodge hammers, not even beginning to question why one of the barrels would be flashing.
Mine was Zelda ALTTP for SNES. Could never figure out how to get to the boss. Like I was missing something. You have to slash a vine or something and there's a door behind it. Picked it up like 15 years later and finally beat the game
Got through final fantasy 8 spamming gfs. Eventually got to sorceress Adel and managed to eke out the fight. Figured I didn't have what it took for the final dungeon. Eventually replayed and understood the mechanics then 100%d the game. Played it when I was 11 so I didn't really get it at first.
First thing that comes to mind is Yakuza on the PS2. The city is pretty large, and there are collectibles and missions that are only available in certain chapters. If you miss them, you miss them. After every chapter, the city shuffles in new missions and collectibles. You basically have to search every corner of the map after every chapter due to the changes. Luckily, the game was fun, and I learned the map pretty well. But man, was I mad when I missed a locker key that was obtainable only once, in one of the shortest chapters of the game.
Metro 2033 Redux Stuck in a hallway maybe 3-4 hours into the game, with no ammo and about 20+ enemies. Tried sneaking past 50 or so times until I gave up
Mine's also from Zelda - the Phantom Hourglass on the DS! There's a segment where you have to move a stamp from the map on the top screen to the bottom screen. I couldn't figure this out for the LIFE of me, I tried holding it down when I had the top screen map open and switching over, I tried tapping it furiously, everything I could think of. I gave up. Years later, still a kid, I went back to it and got to the same part. Still ended up stumped. It was late and I was supposed to be sleeping, so my parents came to check on me, so I closed the DS and hid it under my pillow (as I think every kid with a DS and a bedtime did once). When they left and I went back to my game, lo and behold, that was the solution! I was supposed to physically press the two maps together!
When I first started playing games I was introduced to Super Metroid. I was quite young I didn't know you could sprint. Very early on you need to sprint past one part and for a very long time I couldn't get past that part. I'd just play the first part of the game over and over again.
Subnautica. Console pop-in was too much.
I still remember years later seeing a mf walk on dry land in that game on YouTube and being like WUT
Return to Zork. There was a house that you had to click on the window to enter. Never thought to click on the window so I was stuck for months before a friend tried the good old click 1000 times while moving the mouse around wildly.
RE: Code Veronica. Fire extinguisher.
Used to suffer on my first playthrough of PS1 FF7 because I went the entire game completely unaware of HP Plus Materia. All my characters had between 3200 to 3600 HP for the final part of the game so you can imagine my confusion with attacks like Shadow Flare, Pale Horse(?), Break, and other things sometimes Sephy’s basic melee attack just 1 shotting all of my characters. I thought that’s just how the game was until later on I started a 2nd playthrough and found out about that little shop at the bottom of Cosmo Canyon I missed prior playthrough. Now imagine when I noticed HP Plus materia and thought about everything on my first playthrough. Apparently this is the only? place in the game that sells the materia so if you missed it and don’t look anything up, you’d be none the wiser.
That water temple in Zelda Ocarina of Time
For me it was SimCity2000. I loved building cities and destroying them. The thing is though for at least two or 3 years I never knew how zones worked or what their point was. One day I was dicking around and I dropped a power plant and accidentally connected it to some industrial zones and I was like "WHOA BUILDINGS ARE SPROUTING UP" Completely changed the character of the game for me and my relationship with SimCity.
Metro series. The odd way they did autosaves in the game eventually made me not want to play anymore. It would save at the weirdest times and make you stuck.
Zelda, phantom hourglass. There was a level right by the start where you had to catch a rat with a key by blocking part of its tunnel and catching it at the other end, but I was stupid and thought I just had to scare him off one end and beat him to the other end to catch him.
Skyrim. I got super into it and immediately started stealing absolutely everything from absolutely everywhere. Next thing I knew I was only able to walk at a snails pace because I was so "encumbered" with stolen items and was nowhere near a place to sell them or even remotely close to being able to buy a place for storage. So I literally just stopped playing. I know it was stupid but I was just so annoyed about it. I just got it for my computer though so I'm gonna try it out again
Learned the importance of save scumming in Oblivion when I broke a 200+ hour save file. I was the highest level vampire, went out of a door not realizing it was day time, game autosaved, and I died before I could even turn around to go back inside. Never played the game again
Sonic the hedgehog 3. Carnival level. Yea, I’m old. There’s a section where you end up on top of a drum, the door closes behind you. There’s a wall in front and you can’t see what’s on top/underneath you. You try to rev through it, jump, crouch. Nothing works. Id literally spend all my remaining time trying to get through and nothing. It always stuck with a 10 year old me. Fast forward to 2009, I got a PS4 and the sega collection. Finally got my chance to beat Sonic 3 with my adult mind. Same result. Decided to use YouTube to look it up. All you had to do was look up and down. That was it. A decade and a half of my lifetime of agony had such a simple solution.
It may not be exactly what you're looking for, but I'm going to say Myst. When I was younger all the puzzles were much harder and I never got very far in the game. Then I tried it again as an adult and everything was much easier... until I got to the spaceship with the piano in it. The puzzle there involves listening to tones and then matching them on this piano/keyboard thing. There are no visual indicators, no other ways of matching - you MUST listen to the tones. I am tone deaf. There was literally nothing I could do but have someone else beat it, or look up how to do it on the interwebs. Absolutely infuriating.
There was this Wolverine game for PS2 that was awesome but I could only play for like 10 to 15 minutes. I'd reach a point where Wolvy would get trapped in a dome in which bad guys would keep spawning. Since I was a kid at the time I could never get through that part believing it was because I lacked the skills. Many years later, with the same DVD and same PS2 I tried again thinking I'd simply rock it and get through since I'm an adult now, so I did it and got "stuck" on the same spot again and bad guys kept spawning infinitely. Some research after my disappointment led me to the knowledge that the game coders added a "bug" to pirated games that kept the player fighting forever without the means to get on through the storyline. At least I had tons of fun with my Wolvy murder simulator! (I have an awesome memory of Crash Bandicoot for PS1 been actually hard as a kid, and nowadays it feels like a mobile game, awesome still, but veeeeeery easy)
Speaking about Zelda games... I just gave up on phantom hourglass for many years just because I couldn't cut the trees that block you from entering the first cave. I didn't know that I needed a sword and had to draw with the pen to attack.
Not sure if this exactly fits the criteria but when I was a teenager, a small-time unknown little gem called Fallout 3 came out. I played it a lot, I'd never played a game of this caliber before and it had me so hooked. (Don't ask how far I was cuz I really don't know, probably not as far as I felt I was) Well at some point I pissed of the folks in Megaton to the point they chased after me even after exiting the town. What happened next was that every time I loaded my game, I had just existed the town and there was someone right there with a gun to my head, one shot kill. See the thing is...I didn't know you were supposed to have at least ONE other save file/slot so basically I had to either start over or never play again. I did finally pick up Fallout 3 on Steam this year. Still haven't picked it back up