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

@rwbladewing: Honestly, I think it would be a valid criticism for that game. You have some movement options that are very situational and if you don't use them enough you kind of forget about them. The passing through walls thing and the drones come to mind. That or maybe I'm just dumb.

Other than that, I really like the game.

Finding the Man on Fire's corpse in MGSV... spent 40 minutes looking for that jerkass only to have him be RIGHT in plain sight.

I had the same problem as @Undeadpool. I looked at a faq, and even a video walkthrough, and felt so dumb.

I also had a really dumb one when I was younger. I bought Pokemon silver, and upon meeting your rival for the first time, he says his name is "????". So a little while later the policeman or whoever asked what his name was, I entered "????". I spent the whole rest of the game waiting for his name to be revealed like some crucial plot detail. On a second playthrough I realized that I was supposed to name him whatever I wanted...

came here to post this

Watching Drew and Dan playing MGSV and realising despite playing the game for 60 hours I had missed out on many features I didn't know about.

As a child i stopped and restarted playing FF7 like 5 times before i managed to get past this area - i could never discover the path to get past it to the trainyard and would eventually just give up thinking i must have missed something vital

I got stuck in the original Secret of Monkey Island, right at the very beginning of the game. I didn't realise you could walk North through the archway :

First time I finished Ocarina of Time, I could only kinda read english. So I totally missed the part where they tell you to go pick up Din's Fire from the Great Fairy. Then I played through the entire game up to the entrance of the shadow temple, where you NEED the stupid thing (the only point in the game?) and I could not fucking figure out how to open the door. I had to ask a friend to show me what to do and he was like "you don't have the fire spell wtf?". :(

These "I'm so dumb" moments happen a lot to everyone, I shrug it off pretty well so no recent memories of stuff like that has stuck. But I guarantee it has happened, probably even in the past week.

EDIT:@questionable I DID THAT EXACT THING TOO. SCREW THE PERSPECTIVE ON THAT SHOT!

Same as some of the previous posters with the corpse of "that one character," in MGSV. I looked for a loong while and actually had to look it up online.

Currently, I'm feeling pretty dumb about some of the basic stuff in Rebel Galaxy on the consoles. Pro tip. Look at controller maps.

I played through the entirety of Butcher Bay without getting a single health upgrade. I only discovered that they existed when it was blatantly pointed out by the game (on my second playthrough).

Haha, yes, same! I went around the entire base too and interrogated everyone in hopes they would tell me where it was, and even broke my no kill rule I had out of pure frustration. "I don't NEED to know where your god damn specialist is!" stabstabstabstabstab

So I've played through Bloodborne multiple times, I think I'm on NG+4 or 5 right now, don't remember exactly, have every trophy minus the DLC I'm going through right now.
Literally just yesterday I discovered you can use L2 to attack while holding a double handed weapon.
Auhgggggggoooooooooooo I feel so dumb right now. I know you can shoot with L2, but I thought the only melee attacks were R1 and R2, I had no idea!

Pheonix down got me like it did Jeff.

I played Fallout 3 on 360 for around 30 hours before realizing I could map weapons to the d-pad.

Attacking Precilla was the worst though, that sucked.

I must have spent literally several hours trying to work out how to fully open a door in Batman Arkham City. Only to realise you have a power-slide manoeuvre which you can use to get you underneath the part opened door.

What an idiot

It took me a good twenty or thirty hours on my first play-through of Fallout 3 to realize you could hold A to keep drinking from water sources, so much time wasted just tapping A to take another drink as I wait for the animation to finish.

Most puzzles in lots of games, I can get pretty good at using all my skills effectively in combat situations but once fuckers start asking me to solve puzzles I can turn into a lost three stooges brother at times. I've gotten better at it but I still feel like I can get stumped or take too long with puzzles than I think is acceptable, or maybe I'm just too hard on myself. Either case if we're trapped in a mansion filled with zombies and I have to puzzle my way out, we're all going to totally die.

There was this one encounter in Space Marine that was way harder than anything else. Very powerful enemies kept spawning. Eventually I devised a "system" (kill these enemies, sprint to this enemy, etc.) and after an hour or two of trying and perfecting it I cleared the room.

I finally get to that encounter on the hardest difficulty and my "system" doesn't work anymore. So I admit I might need a new system, and run forward instead of to the side like I always did ...

... right into a heavy weapon pickup (autocannon) that lets you clear the encounter with ease. It was supposed to be a fun sequence where you mow down all these really powerful enemies, not the hardest encounter in the game.

Miles Prower.

Ash Ketchum.

My buddy had a great one back when fallout 3 came out. He never realised he could repair his weapons so he was constantly having to change weapons and he had that. In his defense I thought the same thing, but only for 2 hours when I first started, not the 120 he put into the game.

I often have brain fart moments like not finding the man in fires corpse or not understanding a specific direction/command in games. Then I get impatient and look up a guide and feel dumbbut move on quickly.

I beat the Ocarina of Time Water Temple without the blue tunic. Ended up skipping the frozen zora king even though I was already taught that the bottled flames melt ice. While I was playing it I thought "no wonder this temple is so infamous, I keep drowning!". When I beat the game and saw the zora king unfrozen I immediately thought "ah fuck".

Pretty sure I played through the entirety of Persona 3 without realizing the student at the head of the classroom after school is a fast travel into town. I manually ran out of the school pretty much every fucking day.

After about 400+ hours of playing Borderlands 2 (I have a problem. SEND HELP!) I finally found out that I could tag badass things to do at the top and didn't have to scroll to find it again to see how much more I needed to do.

I didn't know NPC merchants in Morrowind could remember what was and what was not their property. I know, common sense, but I've become so used to exploiting things in Bethesda games. Really just an underestimation of AI. Or at least it would've been, if I hadn't MADE THE SAME MISTAKE with items that technically weren't theirs but clearly resembled what had mysteriously disappeared under their noses.

@habster3: In Fallout 4 I have a bunch of power armour frames in Sanctuary, and apparently I stole one of them because whenever I take a fusion core out of it, it says I'm stealing it. And I've had that frames there for a while; I have no idea who I took it from.

@questionable: Worst screen in a JRPG.

I felt like an idiot for spending 30 minutes on a bossfight in undertale that i had to lose.

This. This forever.

recently in Life is Strange Ep 5 when you are going to the Diner and the oil trail and fire blow that shit up! Well I walked around and around and hit rewind after rewind looking for a way to stop it happening and had I walked 2 steps further the tipped over sand would have been revealed to me. I don't know how long this took but it felt like forever. Vinny found it instantly in their playthrough which did not make me feel any better.

I still manually ran out every single day after finding that out. How else was I going to find out if I could date Mitsuru or not yet.

I fought pretty hard against Shadow of Mordor. I had spent a few attempt on playing that game, getting more and more frustrated. I started having two thoughts, firstly that my ps4's controller seemed a bit unresponsive. Secondly, i started thinking that this fucker was harder than bloodborne. Then I realised that I should be holding the sneak button all the time, and things picked up much easier. Ugh.

I remember it well, it happened when I was playing the HD re-release of the classic PS2 game Shadow of the Colossus, maybe you've heard of it. I was having a problem where I kept climbing up the very first Colossus and then inexplicably falling off, for whatever reason my character just kept letting go as I tried fruitlessly to make my way to the tantalizing glow of his weak spot. It made the fight impossible to finish and I looked like an absolute knuckle-dragging buffoon trying to climb this magnificent creature, the grand orchestral soundtrack only serving as a punchline to the joke that was my utter incompetence.

It was only later that I was to discover I had been overlooking the most fundamental mechanic in the game--the grip meter! Hah, I'm sure you can imagine how red my face turned upon figuring that one out, can't you! Luckily enough for me there was no one around to see me make such a fool of myself and I lived happily ever after--even grew a beard at one point.

Metal Gear Solid 5

I am 26 and I realized maybe only 3 years ago that you can you use healing skills outside of battles in JRPGS.

Not game related but I recently realized Sissy Spacek and Kevin Spacey weren't related.

I am forever grateful that you gave us this moment:

I played CS:GO for like a year and 1000 hours before I realized that the auto-snipers and auto-shotgun would continue to fire if I held down mouse 1. You know, like an automatic weapon...

Played through 10-15 hours of Rebel Galaxy before I found out that L1 is lock-on... I'd been going into the scanner menu to lock on the whole time and was cursing the game for being so clunky...

I did a bunch of sidequests in Yo-Kai Watch running and biking around the entire town, making sure I got a lot done before I progressed too far in the story.

The main quest I did after that unlocked fast travel. Well!

Undertale took me a while to figure out you are supposed to move the heart to dodge the attacks

I have a good one, I love the Half Life series and I have played Half Life 2 countless times, there is a scene where you have to fight the helicopter in the airboat while its dropping bombs on you while your trapped in this little arena. When you beat the helicopter your supposed to go off to the left and climb up a ladder and go back to this warehouse to open the watergate to move on.

For YEARS I thought something was wrong with the spot because the very first time I played through the game I actually jumped into the next "zone" by going over this wooden ramp which your not supposed to use until you open the damn gate, I didn't even know that other small section existed even after playing the game many times. Its worse than you think because by taking the path I was it wasn't even loading in the next area because I was jumping into it early so I was always so confused as to why that section didn't load in properly until I literally landed in the water everything was invisible when I found the proper path I felt like the BIGGEST dumbass ever.

The first time I realized you could parry Gwyn in Dark Souls. I had died to him like 20 times in a row, just getting my ass completely handed to me. And then I decided what the hell might as well try parrying him and started laughing my ass off when I parried him 10 times in a row and killed him on my first attempt

I played most of Skyrim never realizing there was a sprint button.

In Ocarina of Time there's a boulder in front of the third dungeon which you have to bomb with a bomb-flower that is placed on a ledge far above it. The ledge with the bomb-flower seemed like a totally different place in my head, so I spent a good six months doing everything else in the game before I realized. I'm blame being 8

I managed to have two of these moments from the same boss fight in Final Fantasy V.

First, dealing with the (seemingly difficult) fight against Sol Cannon I found out that Cure spells can cure the entire party if you push Right on the d-pad. Felt stupid, considering how I spent half of the game up until that point wishing that I could.

Then, after spending a good few days on this boss, I found out that he'd be able to be killed before even firing if you turned the party into Ninjas and just threw a bunch of Lightning Scrolls at him.

@error52: I think... you just gave me a revelation. If this applies to Final Fantasy X? I've been playing that game like a goddamned buffoon.

@dave_tacitus:

Dunno I've ways felt shoulder buttons are intuitively for rotating items.

Back when I was about 10, I managed to get most of the way through Viper Manor in Chrono Cross before I figured out what Allocate meant... which was how you equipped your Elements, a.k.a. your spells. No idea how I managed that. My brother also got all the way to Lynx without realizing he could equip items. As an added bonus, neither of us knew until a few years ago, when Chrono Cross came to PSN, that you could run away from literally any fight, even boss fights. You could just leave, heal, and try again. We must have wiped so many times because of that, and it's really funny to think that we never considered to try that.

@questionable: That screen stumped me for way longer than I care to admit. Glad to know it wasn't just me.

Playing Resident Evil 6. Thankfully I wasn't a big enough idiot to purchase it.

This is maybe premature because I haven't finished the game, but I'm playing XCOM. Not sure how far I've gotten, but I'm currently building the Hyperwave Relay. Money and resources have always been tight, stuck on laser and low level armor, but I always thought it was part of the game. I take a little break and then look up some tips, you know, to get back in and found out something about my playthrough:

NEVER. BUILT. A. SATELLITE.

One of my first none 2D games was Legend of Dragoon. I wasn't used to the graphics and my tv at the time was TINY (as in my little kid self could pick this sucker up and walk from room to room. My ps1 was wider than the tv itself.).

This all being noted, my dumbest moments was when I first started playing the game in Helena Prison. I was in the tower which is split into multiple screens for each floor of said tower...and I got lost. As in, I was going in a circle over and over again trying to find the door to get out of the tower or move up a floor. This went on for some time before I got so frustrated I gave up.

A few months later I got a bigger tv and tried to play the game again. Upon getting to the tower again on the floor I got stuck, the exit was much easier to see. I felt super dumb because it had been right in front of me the whole time and I had been running past it.

@sku: I never knew that either till I accidentally did that on the remake for the ps4. Really one of those face palm moments.