What are your biggest "I'm an idiot" revelations in games?

Watching that latest old game show, I realized the meaning of Joypad and in turn Joystick. I never really thought about it in terms of the word Joy.

Finding out you can charge your jump in Super Adventure Island. It makes that game go from pretty difficult to super easy.

sadly, i played through all the levels of mega man without realizing i could use the robot master weapons. i was on an emulator so i was overwriting a save point at the end of every level. can't remember exactly why but i was unable to beat dr. wiley. i didn't get something along the way or i somehow got stuck and saved the game so i was trapped. i can't remember; as is usually the case when playing mega man, i rage quit at that point.

Holy crap, made it to the front page! Anyone could have made this topic though.

Also, I have a new one to add: I bought Chromehounds. In 2016. All I saw was FROM Software on the back, and remembering that people liked it, and I now know that the servers were shut down 6 years ago and there is nothing in the game except "training" missions. Oh well.

I played through 95% of Need For Speed without realizing that you can fast travel around the map. I remember thinking to myself that they should really have implemented a fast travel system.

I join the people in not realising Phoenix Down, as in feathers. which i realised when i heard it on the bombcast.

Yea this kinda blew my mind, also another moment in the last few years that just completely floored me was finding out Arbok and Ekans from pokemon were Kobra and Snake backwards.

Not really what you're talking about, but I felt like an idiot when the twist was revealed in the original KOTOR. It just felt like something that I should have picked up on.

More in line with what you are talking about, happens all the time. There was a moment during the (hard) final boss battle of Metal Gear Rising where all I had to do to avoid something and complete a move was to shift the camera up slightly.

There's a part in Golden Sun where you use a spell, "Ply," on a statue.

Took me.. at least a year and a half to find that out, and it was because I loaned my copy to someone else.

Not the same kind of idiot moment, but the first time I found a wild shiny pokemon I got scared, worried my game was corrupted, and turned off my game. Same thing with pokerus.

Oh my god, I have one of these. I played through the entirety of Final Fantasy 9 without knowing you could cast magic on multiple targets. Through the ENTIRE game I was using healing spells on one ally at a time and attacking enemies one at a time. I remember wondering halfway through the game when I'd get a spell that attacked more than one target. I finally figured out how to multicast after beating the game when I accidentally tapped the 'select all targets' button on the controller, I think it was as simple as hitting L1, L2, or something.

On the bright side, I started the game again and had fun with my new found knowledge.

I can't remember all of the details (it was more than a decade ago), but I remember there was a part on Prince of Persia that I couldn't get past. There was an area where it seemed like there was no way to progress. I got so mad that I thought that my game was defective because there was literally no way to move forward. Eventually I decided to just do a bunch of wall running and found out that all I had to do was run up a wall and he would grab a hold of a ledge (that I didn't see for some reason) and that was it. Me and my sister (who bought the game for me) had a good laugh about it.

I'm amazing this hasn't been said, since I think this was true of a lot of people:

Learning the Mako had a main cannon in addition to a machine gun in Mass Effect 1.

The worst? I didn't know Oblivion had fast travel... I played well over 400 hours because of it...

I never finished Zelda OoT because I didn't want the game to end. Looking back, that was dumb but I finally finished it and just started another game.

@slag said:

There was a horrific jump In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that was so close to the ceiling it seemed impossible that took me years to realize I could just walk over the gap

That fuckin' game man

wait.. you can walk over that?

@aquacadet: NSFW (language)

Oh, i had a friend who played like 30-40 hours of fallout 3 without using VATS.

In Who Framed Roger Rabbit for the NES, if you give a rose to Jessica Rabbit, she'll give you a phone number to call. I SCOURED that game for HOURS looking for a goddamned phone in the game. Finding the magical mystery building around the lake just added fuel to my fire; if I could find that, surely I could find a phone.
Eventually, they had a listing for WFRR in what must have been Nintendo Power. I begged my parents to buy it for me, so I could finally find the phone (the copy at the Sev was sealed in plastic, so I couldn't just look inside). They did, and inside the magazine in the WFRR section, they had a little Q&A section, and one of the questions was "How do I use the phone number Jessica Rabbit gives you", something like that. Their answer? "Easy. Find a phone, and give her a call."
Find. 'Find a phone.' If I could find the fucking phone, I wouldn't have bought the goddamned magazine. I was beyond pissed off.

It wasn't until years later, during the AVGN episode, that I realized it was a real telephone number.

Phoenix down.

@originalgamer: I never used VATS in Fallout 3 or 4... I felt it took away from the game.

I played through about 90% of Buu's Fury for GBA without realising that, while characters levelled automatically, you had to increase their stats manually. I thought the game was incredibly difficult until I discovered I'd been unintentionally handicapping myself.

when I opened this thread

Not directly game related, but a console moment. When I've watched movies on my PS3 I've always used my controller to navigate the menus and all that, which is a little uncomfortable since you don't want to hold the controller when watching, and obviously turn off all the lights. Reaching for the controller on the table and finding the right buttons tends to result in a bunch of misclicks. Either way, in a slip of the mind I instead reached for my TV's remote control and pressed it's arrow buttons and could navigate the bluray menus with that. Took me a moment to realize I didn't hold the controller, but once I backed out to the XMB and I realized I was holding the remote but could still navigate my mind was pretty much blown.

@asko25: I was listening to an old bombcast and Jeff and I both realized at the same time what "Phoenix down" was. I have played several ff games

Every time I break my "never preorder or buy on the first week/month of release" rule.

Every. Time.

Also, that boss in the forest dungeon in oot. Working out you can hit his projectiles back at him with your sword took me longer than I'd like to admit.

@mason20: I still don't get this. Is "Phoenix Down" a play on words or something? I don't really play Final Fantasy games but feel dumb for not knowing.

Most puzzles in The Swapper.

Since I'm not a native english speaker it took me a while to get that too, down is a kind of feather, so it's a feather of the mythical bird Phoenix (which was reborn from it's ashes after death).

@poobumbutt said:

That's the way it's supposed to be, actually, nothing in the game's marketing hinted at who Naked Snake is, and it's meant to be a twist ending. I was super pissed at Dan for just telling Drew right off the bat in Metal Gear Scanlon.

Some time during my 2nd play though of Dark Souls 2, and having played Dark Souls and Bloodborne, I realized that I could back up my save games and never have to worry about losing souls/blood vials. Definitely a "how stupid could I have been?" moment. A form of cheating? Ya, sure, but what a pain in the butt having a crapton of souls and getting ganked by a mob with a dirty attack the devs thought would be cute to implement. I say you gotta get a leg up on those games somehow, short of actually hacking the game itself, of course. I suspect Dark Souls 3 will have code that will prevent backing up so I enjoy it while I can.

I'm about 25 hours in Bloodborne and I just figured out I can hold circle to run, and I'm not even new to the series.

So goddam dumb!

Every Lego game I've ever played, really. Those games sure make me feel like an idiot, at least once.

I played through and beat Breath of Fire 4 without ever realising that you could hit right on the d-pad to bring up a whole other list of spells in battle.

@dukeofthebump said:

In Sonic 3, I quit in the carnival zone because I couldn't figure out how to get past these things.

Years later I went back to the game and tried again. Turns out you have to stand on it and press up to make it go up, then down to make it go down.

This is one of the many reasons Sonic 3 blows.

I'm not alone! 100% this!!!!! Back in the day I could only ever beat Sonic 3 with Knuckles since he had his own alternate routes. None of my friends knew how to get through this part either. We would always try everything like jumping to try and get perfect momentum and try to barely pass through with no success. My mind was blown/idiot moment happened a little more than a decade later when YouTube became a thing and I saw someone play through and show that you had to press up and down while standing on the thing! I tried everything except for what you needed to do...

Sonic 3 is bullshit. Still completed it all afterwards though.

Oh wow! I totally did that too! I don't feel that bad about it though, a lot of the time I wanted to mosey around the school and talk to people.

My biggest was in the original Phantasy Star 1:

I was at the end of the game - and there is a dungeon that leads to a section where you literally just walk through a few parts and you're at the last battle. I'm typing this from memory (played this when I was a kid at original release), but the dungeon forks - go, say, left and you go to a different area, go right and you're on your way to the King and the final boss.

For some reason - I NEVER went the right way there, but knew I needed to get to the last area. I spent, literally, 1.5 years coming back to that game periodically and never managed to find that turn. I re-explored every area on every dungeon of every planet over and over before finally one night I saw the turn I wasn't making - went there and BOOM - there's the final boss.

By then, I was so over-leveled and powered that I practically slept through all the fights. I was both elated that I'd finally beaten the game and embarrassed that it had taken me so long. Note - the path wasn't hidden at all - and going back to it, it was clearly obvious that was the way to go.

I got all the way out of Midgar in Final Fantasy VII without ever trying the Cure materia, because I thought it sounded lame.

"LISTEN, DO NOT MOVE, NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENS"

I pressed A every time. I rented this game from blockbuster for two weeks and returned it because I couldn't get past this cutsene.

@slag: That gap is as far as I ever got in TMNT. It wasn't until 2006, when I stumbled upon an AVGN video about that game... It blew my freakin' mind.

• Phoenix down
• Tails Miles Prower
• Ash Ketchum

All three are thanks to Giant Bomb.

In Bloodborne I never understood why someone would even use a pistol. They did like no freaking damage and had very little range. I played for a good chunk of hours before I read on one of the GB forums that it could be used for parrying. I felt really stupid, must've missed a message about it or something...

I paid for Daikatana.

I had less of a "facepalm I'm an idiot" and more of an existential "oh God I'm an idiot and I can't be fixed" moment when I tried to play the Witness.

Well I now have one! As @mattyftm and @sparky_buzzsaw would reply..."Northwest."

@zombiepie: EAST!!!!

I've been playing Digimon Cybersleuth on the Vita. At ~35 hours in, I just figured out you can name the digimon. At ~32 hours in I accidentally figured out how to feed the digimon. I think I finally understand all the systems in this game.

The worst examples are those where you actually think you've figured it out, or maybe assumed all along. Figuring out something you don't know is far more likely than figuring out something you think you already know. Realizing you even made a mistake sometimes requires outside assistance.

It took me years before I learned that holding Down + B didn't actually make pokeballs more effective.

Not knowing the Mako in Mass Effect had a zoom function until Virmire, about, oh, 40-some hours into the game.