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

I'm talking about the times where you were trying to find a solution to an obstacle for hours, only to discover you were doing something fundamentally wrong the whole time and it's much easier than you thought. It happens to all of us, even the best of us who think we're beyond it.

Case in point: I was playing Voodoo Vince yesterday, and I got to a section where 3 moving platforms are rotating around in a puddle of water. You die if you fall in the water, so you have to time the jumps so that you hit the platforms as their rotation faces you. I just could not manage to do it, I spent a solid hour getting mad at the game for being seemingly poorly designed, having this extremely difficult section right at the entrance of a new area. It doesn't help that the GameFAQs guide I ended up consulting also stated that the jumps were very difficult, validating and amplifying my frustration.

However, it wasn't hard at all. I had just forgotten that you can stay in the air longer if you do a spin attack after your second jump. Once I remembered that, it was piss easy and I felt like a goddamn moron. That's what happens when you are playing a game on and off for 12 years, I guess.

Probably will get mentioned but I had to share a similar reaction to Jeff about phoenix down.

When I was a kid I got stuck on Link to the Past in the 2nd or 3rd dungeon, the swamp palace I think. There is a room where the doors lock and then the floor tiles start flying at you. I would try my very best to avoid them, run away, use all my items - placing bombs to blow them up, slashing my sword - nothing would keep me alive long enough. So I gave up. I just couldn't do it, and since there was no internet for me to look up or any way for me to find out what to do, that was it.

I came back a couple of years later and got to the same point and just held up my shield. All the floor tiles smash against it harmlessly and you survive, and the doors unlock.

I felt like a real idiot that day.

I played through all of Lost Planet without knowing there was a dodge roll. It made the game considerably harder.

More recently I built a ton of stuff in Fallout 4 without knowing that you could rotate pieces you were placing with the left and right triggers (learned it from the quicklook in fact). I manged to get everything into place by maneuvering my character to the right angle.

The first time I played Ocarina of Time, it took me a depressing amount of time to figure out where the starting sword was. I seriously want to say it was 30-60 minutes of me wandering around, getting mad because I couldn't get into the first dungeon. There was a good 5-10 minutes of me being convinced that the deku sticks were supposed to be the first sword. When I finally figured it out (I can't remember for sure, but a friend might have come over and showed me where the sword was), needless to say I felt a right fool.

You're not alone. I did that for a good 4 or 5 hours until I saw how to rotate stuff in a video.

Every time I start a game of Dota I'm like "Yeah my team will be full of nice people this time and we'll draft a good team and win and it'll be fun" and it never happens. That's my idiot moment.

I was streaming SOMA and got so wrapped up in a thought about game design and using the environment to tell a story (an apt thought if you read on) that I walked right past a hatch you're supposed to use to get out of a subway tunnel. So I turned around and walked right past it again to the other dead end I came from.

I did this for a solid 10 minutes, back and forth, desperately trying to keep the stream moving, before I finally spotted it. It had a big flashing red light over it. I wanted to die.

Ok, maybe it's not us. Maybe it's just poorly designed.

Happens all the time but most recently when I was playing Killer is Dead. I didn't realized I got an upgrade that let's me recover health so I was banging my head against a boss fight for 2, 3 hours 'til I could beat him without taking a hit. I only found out about this ability towards the end of the game. I thought either I really sucked or it was a really difficult game but that upgrade made the game a breathe.

@thelastgunslinger: It's poorly (non-existantly?) explained, no doubt.

When I started bloodborne I didn't realize you got to pick a starting weapon from the messengers and tried fist fighting the werewolf for an hour and a half. I eventually almost killed it before turning to google and then it took like thirty seconds.

I had the same "Ooooh, down." moment as Jeff did with Phoenix Down. It took him getting it for me to get it.

For Fallout 3, it took me many, many hours to figure out holding the pip-boy button gave me a flashlight. The loading screen tip had come on super early and I wasn't paying attention, and then it never appeared again. Also holding E to continuously drink water.

I'm sure I've had other "Well this is stupid. ...oh wait no, I'm stupid." moments but I can't think of any others right now. Maybe (probably) one of the Portal games.

I'm currently having that experience with Elite: Dangerous.

As a side-note I did not believe I would be reading the sentence "I was playing Voodoo Vince yesterday" in 2016.

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

FF7. Path through ruins towards Wall Market.

Theres a pipe you're supposed to walk up but I didnt quite understand that I could do this, and assumed I was walking under it, so I couldnt find a way forward. Spent hours grinding.

During Christmas I decided to fire up the Talos Principle with my entire family in the room (Wife, Mom, Dad, Sister, Nieces and my own children). I was in the first stage and I didn't realize that you could point the jammer, from a far distance, to jam the guns. For some reason I thought you had to get within a few feet of them. So I ended up trying moronic stealth tactics while failing miserably. After about 15 minutes I realized that I was an idiot (and my family did too). :)

Not sure if it's the biggest, but the most recent I can think of is Dragon Age: Inquisition(been playing the DLC for the first time recently and it made me remember this). I was using the rings that increase the duration/damage of specific abilities wrong. I just read the description that says "increases ability damage by 30%" or whatever and completely ignored the actual name of the rings. So, I had characters wearing rings for abilities that they hadn't even learned. Not sure how long it took me to realize, but it was probably half of my first play through, at least(maybe longer).

I have another one. . . I had forgotten that you can cling to walls in Guacamelee. There was a section that had vertically moving panels that you had cling to. Instead of clinging to the panels I slowly slid down them and took advantage of a glitch (if you jumped at the right time you would go up the panel instead of jumping off of it). I spent about 20 minutes getting through a portion that should have taken me 30 seconds.

Most recent was the same as Dan with the different loadouts in MGSV. I just never noticed before Drew changed his in that MGScanlon episode.

I had an "I'm an idiot" moment every time I tried to complete a more elaborate block sliding puzzle in Professor Layton. There was no fundamental misunderstanding there; I'm just a big idiot that is completely atrocious at doing those puzzles.

I feel like I've had this sort of moment with tower defense games, where I'm really trying to fit a square peg into a round hole in the sense that I'm really set on using a specific configuration of towers. Then I reconsider the challenge, and realize that it's really pushing the player towards using another type of tower or configuration, and the whole thing ends up being much, much easier. Can't think of a specific example, but I feel like that's the entire genre in a nutshell.

@facelessvixen: First time I got a bounty in that game I flew to a station to pay it off, found that I couldn't then flew to another. And another.

Then I deleted my save because I assumed it was a bug - I was playing the early Beta and had read tales of notifications sticking in the HUD no matter what you did.

It took me about a week to realise that bountys don't work in the same way as fines...

I think everyone's had moments of frantic, desperately-reached conclusions like this.

"This must be it. I can't think what else it can be. It must be this."

When I was a kid, my friend and I could never beat a boss in Mega Man. Because of this, we never knew that you got better weapons when you did defeat them. Only recently did I figure out that this was even a thing.

So. Many. Adventure game puzzles.

A recent "idiot moment" (at least it wasn't just me) was the first strike in Destiny. The level 8 one. Three of us, pounding away at the Devil Walker for a solid hour. It wasn't until he was almost dead that I realized we could have killed him much, much faster if we weren't all so focused on the same two legs for the whole fight.

Thankfully the end fight of the strike was super easy, because I was so exhausted from the previous fight.

When I got mad because Bioware didn't include an in-game map in Dragon Age: Inquisition. Not only is it there, it's actually the most accessible item in the pause menu.

The most recent was thinking that Fallout 4 was Bethesda tackling a lot of the issues I had with Skyrim and then realizing I'm an idiot.

I feel like there has to be someone out there who can post on this thread in regards to Fallout 4 and the VATS system. I like how the game doesn't bother with a tutorial since I have experience with the franchise, but a new comer to the game must be fucking lost. The game tells you nothing about how to play it.

Most recently it's invisible inc.

Invisible ink.

AAHHHH!!! What just happened to my brain!?

Here's a couple of cool tips for you as well. If you hold L1/LB and X/A and then use the right stick, you can lower and raise objects without having to look up or down. You can also move objects closer or farther away from you in the same manner. That helped me a lot.

Oh, and if you haven't already, you should learn how to clip things in the editing mode. It basically means that you create your buildings in the sky, and then move the whole thing by holding X/A. This way, you can move whole buildings, and they'll just clip straight through most objects. I made a treehouse in Sanctuary that way.

If you want specifics, check out Eurogamer for their advanced building tips in Fallout. Also a video for programming and powering stuff.

Miles. "Tails". Prower.

Undertale - the boss fight where the only way to advance is to flee, which up to that point meant giving up as in any other old school jrpg. I must have fought this boss for an hour, needlessly memorizing the looping attack patterns.

Call Of Duty 4 - the mission where you're chasing a guy in a tracksuit. I kept chasing the guy down this street filled with dogs but could never quite reach him by the end of the street resulting in an automatic game over. But the more I tried, the closer I was getting to catching him at the end of the street. Turns out you're not supposed to catch him and all I had to do was turn left down an alley.

I rented Secret of Evermore as a kid. Made it through the whole 1st area, about a 4th of the game. In the 2nd area I came to a bridge with a gap I could not cross. I was stuck for sometime, nothing worked. I called a buddy of mine and asked him if he remembered what to do. He told me to change control over to the dog companion and jump the gap. This was the first I'd heard that was even possible. The game didn't come with the instruction manual and I don't recall there being any indication in the game this was possible. I played through a good chunk of the game not knowing this.

I hit select, jumped the gap, and finished the game. I was pissed.

Pretty much all of Portal 2.

Might very well be because I had the same problem on PC. I don't find the building part all that fun on Fallout 4, but not figuring out the rotation part made it just enough frustrating that I stopped building bases.

I recently found out what i was doing wrong in metal gear rising revengeance, in the tutorial it said "move the joystick in the direction of the attack." apparently that means moving the joystick towards the enemy attacking you, and I had thought it meant moving the joystick in a way based on the attack was moving, so if the enemy was slashing i would move the joystick to the side, or if the attack was a thrust I'd move it forward. This of course caused me to miss pretty much two-third of all parries and for the longest time I was like "man the fricking parry system in this game is fucking busted, shame cause I really like it but this part of the game is impossible." and I got through most of the game like that before the playthrough I was doing for that game ended. I felt so stupid and angry when I found out about that.

@dave_tacitus: Oh no, it is explained. You just have to think to open the "help" menu to find this stuff. Because all well designed games assume that you should go into a menu to find explanations for basic mechanics.

It took me too long to figure out how to wire things up to generators.

Playing Resident Evil: Code Veronica like a three-person shooter/action game. Code Veronica was my first entree into the Resident Evil series. I did not play RE, RE2 and Nemesis until later in the PS2 era. It was my first time dealing with tank controls and kept forcing myself to play it like Metal Gear Solid. I was wasting bullets and herbs on almost every minor encounter. When boss battles came around, I was screwed. It took a while for me to stop resisting tank controls.

@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

Theres a glitch where you can jump up there from the bottom floor. You can to really know what you're doing to get the turtle to flip into the hole instead of jump in the standing animation like they tend to do when you jump up before pressing left or right. But, if you do it, you can clip through the platform and blink to the second story, where you need to go. I hadn't gone right in so long that I forgot what was over there until watching The Angry Videogame Nerd play the level and complain about the very jump you're talking about.

I think that should absolutely be the way games should work.

What's the alternative? Make the player sit through a long, dumb tutorial about mechanics they have no interest in currently, and may never have any interest in? No thanks. In-game "Tutorials" aren't good way to convey information. If forces a garbage experience onto people who don't want to know the information/don't need the information, and it's frequently impossible to return to if you FORGET the information or need a refresher. Instruction manuals/ out-of-game tutorials are a way better way to convey information.

When I come back to a game after a break and I struggle for hours because I forgot certain crucial game mechanics. For example. I forgot you could focus the flashlight in Alan Wake. I forgot you could glide and use special powers in Darksiders. I forgot you could wipe off your gasmask and pump up the flashlight in Metro Last Light.

When you finally remember these things, yeah, you feel like an idiot.

You can stack fruit in Animal Crossing....

@bananasfoster: Except all too often you end up with situations where people go through video games oblivious to basic mechanics. And being oblivious usually influences their experience of the game for the worse. Unless, of course, those mechanics are don't actually matter to the game; as is the case with settlements in Fallout 4.

But I suppose it becomes a trade-off, then. Do you annoy a small subset of gamers who are oblivious to who to access those basic mechanics, or do you annoy the subset who are annoyed by tutorials?

Jeff keeps saying on the bombcast, "Every video game is somebodies first video game". That's a side-quote of Stan Lee who would always say, "every comic book is somebodies first comic book". But that comment was justification for why comic characters would always talk in long-winded sillioques that explained their backstory and their powers in older comic books.

"I, Storm, will use my mutant gift and birthright to control the elements and trap you in a gust of natures fury!"

Sure it explains to EVERYone who Storm is, how she got her powers and what her powers are... but it's also considered bad writing nowadays. Is it worse to confuse someone for an issue about who Storm is and have them look it up, or to bring the total quality of the writing down for EVERYone.

The same thing could be said for television. Back in the 80s, when all television was "watch-it-the-first-time-or-never", shows had to constantly restate their premise and reintroduce their characters every single episode. Now we consider that bad writing. We EXPECT shows to expect the viewer to have a basic familiarity with the show or else to look it up.

I feel games are in the exact same boat. Starting every game with a tutorial that assumes that this is your first Rodeo is just bad design. Games should remember that it's possible that this is the first game a person has played, but those concerns should be managed at the design equivalent of a help-desk.

I've been playing that latest Wolfenstein game. I was positive until the level in the U-boat that the machine pistol and the silenced pistol were two separate guns. I didn't realize I just had to tap C to switch attachments. Spent a lot of times on levels trying to find a silent pistol .

@kasaioni: There's a help menu?