Playing it wrong

I used to run away from battles in Paper Mario because I thought the coins coming out were from the enemy, not from my own pockets

I canā€™t think of any of these offhand but I did play morrowind and gears for the first time on machines that were extremely not cut out for them

morrowind involved having the fog slider turned pretty much the whole way up, gears involved hooking my radeon 9600 up to a TV via s-video because it was actually less muddy looking that way at 640x480 than on a monitor, and having to fiddle with my athlon xp clocks to find an arbitrary sweet spot where it wouldnā€™t bottleneck or hang

1 Like

and you knew to get indoors when rain were a cominā€™ because you could barely walk through Balmora in such a state

I remember when I went back with a card that could render the water shaders and !!!

1 Like

I played through the beginning of Oblivion on a monitor that was apparently dying and much dimmer than I had realized as it had been fading slowly over time (fun fact: I did not know that SB alternated black and dark grey boxes for quite a while due to this). Because of this no matter how high I set the brightness the cave or sewer you start the game in was pitch black, like I couldnā€™t see the walls unless I was right in front of them. Enemies as well were more or less invisible.

Eventually I exited the starting area, noticed that outdoors was rather dim as well and figured out that something was wrong. I didnā€™t really like the game and quit shortly, but the opening section stuck with me. It may have been better busted than it was actually designed to be.

Thereā€™s a 2-hour-long dungeon in line-of-sight when you exit Oblivionā€™s tutorial dungeon

Itā€™s filled with all their best traps and was probably lavished over as long as ten normal dungeons together

Of course after leaving tutorial dungeon I spent the next three hours wandering the barren streets of Capital of the World Cyrodiil

The more I think about the way Oblivion is designed the more pissed off I get. Itā€™s not just bad, itā€™s cynical.

In that itā€™s the destruction of all that was literary and intelligent and expansive in the companyā€™s decade-old series?

1 Like

my first exposure to doom was the snes port, does that count

1 Like

i tend to accidentally pick the worst character in any game with a tier list and stick with them at first from ignorance, and then from sheer stubbornness

kirby in melee

the healer class in nethack

cirno in any touhou fightman

when emulating kirby and the crystal shards, my health bar only updated when i switched rooms

if you lose track of how many hits youā€™ve taken, late game fights can be surprisingly tense

1 Like

for the beautiful inverse of this, see the morrowind unlimited view distance hack

combine with scroll of icarian flight for best results

ah yes, me with the greatsword in monhun, for the aforementioned 80 hours

I mean, yes of course and Iā€™ve talked about that like a million times. But it infects almost every detail, down to map layout. It makes me want to break Todd Howard over my goddamn knee

Take the peopleā€™s elbow to him.

I guess that depends on which MonHun youā€™re talking about. I managed quite fine solo Greatsword in 3U and much of 4U. Something something big single hits > loads of smaller hits.

Iā€™m not really being serious, I just have some bitterness!!! about those 80 hours that led me to think the whole game was supposed to feel that slow. I think itā€™s a rad weapon but it wasnā€™t good as my introduction. Also not really the best introduction is 3U itself since it has no weapon tutorials or training school. MHFU afterword was a transcendental experience for me.

I figured out what happened

1 Like

I bought a copy of the Game Boy Color Bionic Commando last year, and for some reason, it eventually started consistently freezing up during the pre-mission item select screens, but only if Iā€™d done an overhead perspective stage immediately before. This added a metagame to the whole experience, where I had to specifically avoid the map screen trucks in order to be able to continue playing.

3 Likes

The first time I played dark souls 2 scholar etc, I forgot that l1 and r1 were quick attacks and played for an hour with just heavy attacks

2 Likes

When playing The Guardian Legend as a kid, once I got to the hub area (assuming if I got to the hub area), I would always wander around aimlessly having no idea what to do and no idea how to go through the sealed gates. Years later I realized that the game puts markers on the pause screenā€™s map, and I was able to finish the game in a week.

Playing Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, I never really used the team attacks during the first half of the game, because I didnā€™t like memorizing the button sequences and because the damage output seemed low. Later in the game, I somehow realized that the team attacks levelled-up as you used them, and that they were probably intended to be your main source of damage. That moment was the first time I had an intelligent epiphany about an RPG system, but it also marked the moment when I dropped the game, because I didnā€™t want to grind the team attacks to bring them up to speed.

I also had a similar experience with Majoraā€™s Mask and the Bomberā€™s Notebook as a kid (when I was about 10 or 11, IIRC). I was able to get past the initial three days, but after that I didnā€™t want to interact with the bomber kids at all because I was somehow projecting my shyness/social awkardness into the digital realm. IIRC, this meant I didnā€™t get the Bomberā€™s Notebook, which meant that I could progress in the game, but I was missing out on the lionā€™s share of the gameā€™s interesting content. (I had a much better runthrough of the game several years later that petered out around the stone tower temple for reasons I canā€™t remember.)

1 Like