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

there's always 2 or 3 puzzle in every single Lego game there I can't figure it out and most of the time it's either 40 minutes to an hour..... actually sometimes I shut them off, wait for another day but I do end up going on youtube for a video solution. But its one of those frustrations where I go "this is a kids game" as I walk around the map trying to figure it out.

@slag: beat me to it. The absolute worst. That game made me cry.

I think a runner up, though due to my stupidity, was how for the longest time i missed a stupid little cave you had to go through to advance the story in final fantasy iv. It was right before you met edge. I put that shit down for six months!

@monkeyking1969: That's interesting. I also think there's a lot of merit in "job" systems like FF uses for this kind of thing too. You can adjust things on the fly and not feel so tied down. Dragon's Dogma has a cool class system that way where equipment is what really matters and you can change classes pretty freely.

I hope it's something RPG designers look at in different ways (like the one you suggest) and try some new things. For a simple solution I kind of like games starting off simple with classes and then going with subclasses or whatever later to become more specialized.

Only tangentially related to video games, but:

Ash Ketchum.

Yup, that took me way longer than it should have.

http://memegenerator.net/instance/53868641

I had to look this up...it's a pretty weaksauce pun if you ask me.

I'm sorry, you can do what?

@thedew: If you're on the map you can use the d-pad to quickly call in helicopters or supply drops where your cursor is. If you didn't know that I didn't either for a long while. And eventually discovered a trick where you do that move then go back in game and light up one of uncle Snake's whacky cigars and the package instantly smashes into your head making the supply drop take only like 1 second which is great.

@quantris: that's a terrible pun and it doesn't deserve to be understood

Puzzle in Portal 2. Was doing stuff outside the testing rooms. Had to get some white goop above me so I could advance. Spent 3-4 hours off and on for 2 days trying to do a weird precision timing thing that just barely worked enough to make me think it was the solution. Brother watches me a couple minutes, says "What's that pipe at the top of your screen for?"

That pipe was the solution. I be Smrt.

@quantris: Yeah, it's really bad. Maybe not even intentional? My friends were all "well duh" when I noticed though.

Besides the puns, I had the same reaction to customizable loadouts that Dan (and a lot of other people in this thread) had. I had to look up how to customize D-Walker, but it never occured to me that there's a loadout option I had not noticed.

@dave_tacitus: Remind me to not get a bounty since my latest revelation was with docking, and I actually got fined 400c for bumping into stuff. But now since I park like the elderly, I'm at the point where Jeff is in the game where I don't know what the fuck to do. I mean I'm guessing that I can go the bounty hunter route since shooting shit is my forte in games because I'm too dumb to do anything else, but I'm still looking for some kind of pattern or indication of where I can smoke dudes for money instead of just flying around aimlessly and refueling at a sun every once in a while.

At least I have Freelancer as a back up.

@facelessvixen: There are combat zones of various intensities where you can satisfy your naked bloodlust but for making serious money I'd recommend buying a Frame Shift Drive Interdictor and hanging out in Supercruise in a well populated system. Sit near a spawn point and scan every ship that appears - Go after the Wanted ones and turn the bounties in at the local station.

Lara Croft Go has made me feel plenty of this to last a lifetime.

Last year? 40 hours into Metal Gear Solid V when I realized I had expected that to be a good game. Jokes on me.

LEGO TT games are the absolute worst. I love playing them, but some of those puzzles are crazy confusing.

I played probably 15 hours of random missions in X-Com before I realized I had to actively follow the quest line, it wasn't just going to happen to me. I regret nothing.

Jak and Daxter 2's final boss. As a kid, I remember fighting him was a nightmare since he would constantly chase you around a pit, shooting projectiles. Every enemy in the game is of the type that if their hitbox touches you, you take damage. Years later playing it for the umpteenth time, I finaly discover he does chase you only to never actually run into you.

In a less direct way, every damn time you have an epiphany about a pokemon name.

As a child playing my first JRPG, I was unable to figure out how to get out of the house in Pokemon Red for what felt like an absolute eternity. I'm not sure exactly how long it took, but I was well and truly stumped. It just made no sense to me at the time.

Struggling to remember others (I have plenty, feel like this happens with every other game I play), but I don't think any really compare to that.

Breath of Fire 5, The game asks you to pray in front of a statue. Could not figure out the combination of buttons I was suppose to press to pray. I ended up grinding several levels before coming back. I pressed all the buttons as usual. Sat there for several seconds agitated at which point I got up to power down the system and then the cut scene started. I was just suppose to just stand there for 10 seconds or so.

I completely forgot one of the greatest ever. Turning off my PS3 several times in a row because I was afraid I was gonna lose my savefile to an autosave in Batman: Arkham Asylum after the game appearantly crashes and restarts. Except it wasn't crashing. Bless you, RockSteady.

I didn't know I could scroll down in the Fallout 4 perks menu until I had maxed out all of S.P.E.C.I.A.L. thinking that's how you unlocked the lower ones.

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 was listening to the GOTY Day 5 podcast half an hour ago.

Her Story is a play on "history."

One time when I was playing the original Motorstorm I, without realising, enabled the "motion-sensor" controls which swapped out your standard joystick controllers for the dualshock's sixaxis control. For a good few weeks I was convinced my game was bugged and that my vehicles wouldn't go in the direction it's supposed to.

@dukeofthebump: Wait, what? I though you had to jump on them to make it go down and it never seemed like it worked...

Well FUCK, this is it for me too then!

Gabriel Knight 3. The now infamous Le Serpent Rouge puzzle.

If you actually beat that thing without using Gamefaqs, I will buy you a beer. I am clearly not Robert Langdon.

In F4 took me like three minutes to realise I needed to wear the hazmat suit while the child of atom people were shooting at me. We do dumb things all the time but we only sometimes realise.

I know that this sort of thing has happened to me a fair amount, but it's hard to remember specific instances off the top of my head. The only one that's coming to mind is the Vamp fight in MGS4. I'm new to the series, and started playing the games ahead of Drew after watching all of MGS1. It just was not registering in my brain that they wanted me to stab him with a syringe. I forgot I even had that syringe, which is probably the biggest issue. I think I even tried consulting Otacon, who hinted very directly what to do, but whatever he said just seemed like crazy nonsense to me at the time. After wasting all of my ammo for two different guns I had to look it up and I felt like a jackass.

I bought Baldur's Gate and had a really rough time with the combat. Somehow I managed to brute force my way through the gibberlings near Candlekeep, but then I ran into a squad of hobgoblins and could not progress further. When I came back to school on Monday my classmate asked me how I liked the game. I told him I didn't understand how you were supposed to give your party orders since the enemies slaughtered everyone so fast. He asked why I didn't use the pause function. Had no idea it existed and I did play through the combat tutorial.

First time playing KOTOR I totally missed HK-47. Had no idea. Only found out after talking to friends. The second playthrough was so worth it.

Splinter Cell Double Agent, I think it was the first mission, it loads up and I move forward and no matter what I do I cant find a way to progress there's just stuff in the way everywhere. I look up a FAQ and it says something to the effect of "just go on to the next section" which was infuriating to read because clearly I was missing something. Turns out when the game loads you in to that level, it loads you facing the wrong direction so I was trying to go backwards, turned around and I felt like an idiot.

It took me restarting the entirety of ff7 4 times from the beginning, as after leaving Midgar I got stuck and had assumed I had missed an item earlier in the game or broken something and spent at least 4 or 5 hours in each play through to try and proceed. Only to realize I had to go to the town Kalm and trying to fight the Zolom also served as a massive red herring as I thought progression had to do with him as well. I was like 7 at the time though.

Getting lost in a certain area of a level, walking in circles for hours because I missed something super obvious.

I spend an absurd amount of time in one of the earlier sections of Shadow Warrior and couldn't found a way out (the bamboo forest in the second chapter). It is not even that big of a map, but something in the layout of the forest makes it really hard to see some of the paths... I ended up watching a LP of the entire chapter to see where the key was.

It took me a while of playing Final Fantasy 8 to realize that drawing magic was an important mechanic. Because of that, I was stuck after the T-Rex boss for some time.

I also played most of MGS without realizing you can choke enemies if you grab them from the back.

@tonyblue87: Haha. I just started playing Soma and I know the hatch you're talking about. Although luckily I found it the first time I walked by. I actually didn't immediately go through because it seemed like an obscure hidden thing and not the critical path, but once I explored the remainder of the dead end subway line I realized it was where I needed to go. And yeah, that red light is there too, but it's not the most obvious thing. So yeah, I feel like that one wasn't really on you so much.

I know this isn't quite on topic, but I did buy Donkey Konga twice.

@mlarrabee said:

Oh booo. Puns should just stop.

I played through the Advanced Warfare campaign without knowing you can boost dodge/dash.

It has nothing to do with puzzles, but I spent the entirety of my first playthrough of Metal Gear Solid 3 not knowing you were Big Boss. The part where President Johnson awards you the title of "Big Boss" was a legitimate surprise for me. I was 14. I have no regrets.

It took me like a year to get the "Miles Prower" pun, and whenI did I thought it was really funny.

I've been playing Axiom Verge after all the positive buzz around it during game of the year talk and reached a point where I was stuck. After a boss, a path opens up but seems to go for a dead end. There's some kind of gate that I needed to hit a switch to pass through. I tried looking a some walkthroughs and all of them all said something along the lines of "Go to the end of the room after the boss and watch a cut scene". I thought "How do I go to the end of the room?! There's a energy thing blocking my path.

After a few minutes I remembered that I can pass through narrow walls. I felt like a complete dumbass.

I had listened to Austin's impassioned defense of Invisible, Inc for about fifteen minutes.

...

"Ohhhhh, invisible ink. Got it."

Playing Xenogears years ago when it came out. Got to this door that I could not get to open. Eventually gave up. Then my memory card with all my rpg saves was erased (a dark day indeed), so I never went back to it. Fast forward to like 2014, finally sat down to play through it again. When I got to that part door opened no problem. As far as I could tell, something was caught on geometry when I was trying to open the door the correct direction and I had been trying to open it the wrong direction the entire time. To add insult to injury, it was about 5 minutes before triggering the final boss fight of the game XD.

I was about 10 and spent somewhere around an hour trying to figure out the map.. I have NO idea how I managed to not understand the map.. But there it is. Even as a ten year old I knew that particular event stemmed from dumbtitude.

Xenoblade Chronicles. 55 hours on the savegame when I discovered fast-travel.

: D

Wow. I didn't know you could freaking do this.

Christ that's a lot of walking. I can totally see how without watching the QL or something you would miss that feature though. I did the same in oblivion for about 10 hours, I kept hitting A on road signs thinking that was how you did it but it never worked.

That first puzzle in Soma was the hardest in the game. I could not find the code for the door at all. I tore that office apart for like an hour. Then I just looked it up online.

Also every Zelda game ever made.

I know for sure there was something like that last year, but I can't recall what it was. But one pretty big one of those in my childhood was spending more than a year playing Elite II using time acceleration to get between planets instead of the jumpdrive, because I hadn't figured out it used hydrogen for fuel. You even start the game with one unit of hydrogen so you can use the jumpdrive, but I always started off by selling the hydrogen so I had more funds to fill my cargo bays.

@justicejanitor: This happened to me too. Except instead of remembering after a couple minutes, I spent an hour backtracking across every part of the world I'd unlocked, INCLUDING several trips through narrow walls, before the thought finally occurred to me that "hey wait a second, wasn't that dead end I couldn't get past before just a narrow wall too...?" I was pretty much just speechless at my own failure by that point.