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Hitting the brick wall
Dangerous
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
?Nice try, but not quite. The wall I am referring to is of the metaphorical variety. This is a thread to celebrate the moments in our favorite games where the devs thought it would be a funny joke to not give the players a sweet fucking clue what to do next.
Before the internet the only solution was hours upon hours of trial and error, or hoping to god that one of your friends had the issue of nintendo power that explained what the holy hell you were supposed to do with the magic flute. Let's reminisce some of our best moments in gaming frustration.
My most recent experience was playing through rebirth mode of Resident Evil DS. I'd just gotten to the fountain where you need the 2 medallions. I cracked open the blue book and found one. Now where could the other be? I searched for the other book in every bookshelf, cupboard and drawer. You know, logical places. After about an hour I said screw it and took a trip to Ye olde gamefaqs.
It turns out I was supposed to backtrack through hordes of zombies and hunters to the room where you fight the giant plant, then engage in a fucking knife battle with the giant snake, who drops the red book which contains the last medallion. Oh god, it's all so obvious now! I'm sorry but even by RE standards that is just plain retarded.
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It wasn't until later that I tried playing it again, again getting to the the weird reset screen, and again getting frustrated. Out of frustration, I went to turn off the Genesis, only to accidentally hit the reset button... and low and behold, thats what I was supposed to do all along.
Looking back, it seems so obvious, but for me then, it was a real "Holy shit thats some outside the box game design."
I got to a hallway with a hidden door. I know there is a hidden door. I know the spell I need to use and its alignment to make it so that I can see that hidden door. Nothing works. I swear to god I tried every spell in every alignment at every level to make that goddamned door appear. Nothing. So I just stopped playing it.
Eventually, I returned to the disc while clearing out massive backloggery. Loaded up my save game, tried a spell, oh look! A door.
J%#$O@%&)(*$%&$*()FJDKSL
Anyway, beat the game and then played through it three more times for the best ending. I loved the game except for that bullshit hallway.
or Brawl. 4854.6102.3895 Name: NU..
Carnival Night Zone.
The drum.
Haha ohh god yes, X-Men. I wasn't really into it at the time but my brother loved it. I remember watching him get to that part so many times, only to run out of time trying to figure out where to go. Come to think of it, I'm not sure he ever did beat that part the right way.
I seriously don't know how obvious it was that, when Professor X told you to "reset the computer," you had to actually reset your goddamn Genesis. How many people actually got that by themselves, I wonder.
Now whenever I look at the game, it fills me with a sense of great remorse knowing that I perhaps ruined one of the greatest gaming experiences ever by using that damn guide.
A Link to the Past- Whenever I defeated Agahnim for the first time and entered the dark world, I would delete the game and start over. I don't know if it was either the dark world looked too scary for me to play through or that I couldn't figure out how to get the moon pearl, it was just a brick wall I set up for myself.
Super Mario RPG- The password on the sunken ship. Not only were the mini-games to get the password hard, I actually thought for the longest time that the password was something that fit in pretty logically but still didn't work. Eventually got past it, but it also took a while.
Once you do it all it kind of makes sense, but when you first start you're totally left clueless.
Fix'd and limed for truth.
Seriously, "click on and try everything" has now become the basic strategy of me for any given graphic adventure game. Except for the most reason Sam & Max games, which I adore greatly.
HAH --- the best example of this is Escape from Monkey Island: the abomination of nature, specifically.
It's ALIVE!
I spent so many hours on this.
As a kid I didn't know any better. I thought I just had to have great timing with my jump, but tails just kept fucking it up. ><
Eventually I pulled my sister in the room, and had her help me. We managed to time our jumping enough that it went down far enough for me to slip thru.
It would be til years later, I would find myself accidentally holding down, and wondering why it was moving.
Immediately after, was a facepalm of epic shame.
Pokemon Safari - Sneasel, Pawniard, ????
Thanks to the internet, a few years ago I finally found out that you're supposed to have one of the relics you get equipped when you talk to the ferryman, and he takes you to the last mansion. Ain't that a bitch.
also, pretty much every FPS on the 360 is a 'brick wall' for me. I love FPS games on the PC, but I get frustrated at using controllers for them, so I simply can't abide by console FPS games. I got about 20 minutes into Halo 3 before I died a few times and realized I wasn't having any fun and stopped playing it. same with Gears of War, though it took me about an hour before I got frustrated and quit that one.
That damn drum held me up for at lest 4 years till I realised you could hold down...*sigh*
360 GamerTag: Culver42
Sc2 Beta ID : Culver. Culver
And I'm somewhere in Hotel Dusk. God knows where, but I'm somewhere.
You know the part where you storm the castle with the Master Sword and reach Zelda just as Aghanim teleports back to the room behind the altar? Yeah, I stared at the screen for a solid half hour twice before I figured out I could cut the curtains with the sword.
While I eventually got that one myself, I wasn't able to figure out how to enter the second dungeon in the dark world. I had to tear open that little book of secret hints that came with the game.
The feather and the cat.
18 months of torture.
Oh fuck.
The waterfall.
Fuck that shit. Fuck it to hell.
its like you guys watched me grow up.
Day of the tentacle got me so many times. when i first played the game years ago, when it was on 3.5" floppy, i found out this guy who worked in my local Game store that had played and finished the game, so visited this guy everytime i didnt know what to do. im sure he used to see me coming and make a run for it.
Okami's last area has this one narrow hall wherein you must pass successive obstacles which move back and forth horizontally, unsynchronized. Each has an extremely narrow gap to pass through. If you run into one it kills your forward momentum and circumstances force retrying from much further back. The obstacles cannot be leapt over or bypassed and all your godly powers don't affect them. The killer bit is that the collision detection on the obstacles is absolutely atrocious, requiring luck to get past even one and luck of cosmic scale to get past all of them. Eventually you'll die as hutting the obstacle inflicts damage.
Shadow suffers from a similar problem: The incredible physics engine which made for an amazing game suddenly quits. The final hurdle is akin to climbing a glass wall smeared with fresh banana pudding. The Wanderer repeatedly fails to grip massive ledges right under his hands, suddenly has tremendous trouble surmounting corners, and staggers off what the rest of the game you just played taught you should be level. Each fall means repeated 2-3 minute climbs just to get back to the start of this frustration; one's progress is dead and so is the fun.
PSN: theIceBurner, IceBurnerEU, IceBurner-JP | X-Link Kai: TheIceBurner
Dragon's Dogma: 192 Warrior Linty | 80 Strider Alicia | 32 Mage Terra
For example, Myst 4: Revelation had an in-game 3-tiered hint system that you could invoke for all the puzzles, where each tier spoiled a little more about the puzzle solution.
Here's I came up for games I'm making for how to continue when you get stumped.
I call it a "thought ticker", as thought bubbles take up a lot of space on-screen. What it does is that a small black row at the bottom of the HUD which at first glance looks like it's not part of the HUD will occasionally scroll by with the thought your character is having right that second. The text inside the ticker could be different fonts, colors, and sizes depending on the thought... like if the thought is only a passing thought it might be a shade of grey instead of the usual white, or it might be red and in all caps if your character is startled by something or in pain.
Anyways, it would make sense for the game developer to assume that your character would know or be able to figure out what to do even if you the player don't. As such, if the game determines that you the player are stumped, it'll give you "hints" from the mind of your character via the thought ticker.
Castlevania 2 was full of brick walls. I still don't know where you learn you're supposed to kneel for awhile to open up a secret passage.
Overall it is just a very confusing game.
There was another puzzle where you had to reflect the top screen off the bottom screen somehow, but even after reading up on how to do it, I still couldn't get it to work right.
It felt great when you would get on a roll only to get stuck at some testimony. Then you basically either
A: Wear out your power button by saving and reloading constantly
or
B: Internet
Only happened about 5 or 6 times the entire series for me but I think I tried about 20 different things for one case before I said "screw it". That's a lot of power cycles for my poor DS.
It took me a good month or so to figure out how to throw Scar off the cliff in the final battle. I had seen the movie, so I knew what I had to do, but I didn't now how to do it. That was the worst.
This is just a tribute.
Yeah, it's a pain in the ass to present all logical evidence, only to realize later the proper evidence to present is some off-the-wall shit.
Thats what a lot of games were like. It took me fucking 17 years of trial and error until I finally beat lord of the sword.
Wait, wait. Just holding down works?
FUCK.
Even after learning up and down work on that thing, I always assumed you needed to alternate between up and down to build momentum.
Really, it boggles the mind how, in a game with such wonderful level design, they can put in one thing that is so inconsistent with every other set-piece in the game. Every other object you interact with on the game is either automatic, or its function is really intuitive. There are other drums in the game that move on their own, even up and down, but that one just had to be different.
I agree. The second story in the second game (with Maya and her village) was just a pain, because I knew what to do, but I had to do it the computer's way. I'm not your slave, computer. It's the other way around.
Also, that X-Men game was the first time I ever used a cheat, specifically because of that damn reset trick. I used the Danger Room cheat to go to any level and have unlimited assists.
Also, remember the Wolverine game for Nintendo? You fight Sabertooth in the end, but I think there was a trick to it or something because I sat there punching him for about twenty minutes, switching between claws and no claws, not knowing WHY HE WON"T FALL DOWN, and I just turned it off. Never went back to even try.
"Graham must eat something, or he'll starve!"
*eats pie*
*Abominable Snowman in THE VERY NEXT SCREEN which you do not know about, at which the pie must be thrown, attacks you*
*absence of pie*
*death*
All it would say is 'hold down to move the drum in Sonic 3'
Sam and Max Episode 4 is frustrating me, but I usually figure those puzzles out after a break.
Dreamfall, thankfully, has had very few moments like that.
That won't do it. You have to bob with up and down. Holding down won't do anything.
Did we play the same games? I don't remember having these problems at all.
As for me? I hit the brick wall in Myst way back when. You're supposed to recreate a melody using a keyboard and a series of sliders. I came back to it like a month later and lucked upon it.
I had to resort to the strategy guide for the Pharos Lighthouse in FFXII. That shit was retarded.
I even hit a wall in Ocarina of Time. As Young Link, I didn't get the Epona song at the ranch, so when I became an adult, I couldn't get Epona immediately and I couldn't go back in time just yet either. Frustrated, I restarted the game. Didn't have any other problems that I remember, though.