Zelda: Link’s Awakening on the GameBoy Color in the mid-90s. I got to the second temple, and was totally stuck - to progress I needed to learn to jump, which I inferred was in this temple, but I just couldn’t figure out where it was.
Wandered all over the available map, which of course was constrained due to lacking the jump skill and other story-driven tools. Nothing.
Finally bought a game guide, which explained to me that I needed to bomb a wall in one room in the second temple to progress. It was indicated by a small crack, a staple in Zelda games but invisible to me in my first experience with the series.
The cherry on top was that by that point, I didn’t have any bombs to break the wall, and I recall that I didn’t have the ability to buy or acquire any and had to restart the game to progress past the point where I was stuck.
After that point, Zelda: Links Awakening became one of my favorite games of my childhood. It is hilarious how much frustration it caused me before that realization.
Some games really do depend on learned conventions from previous games which can feel a bit unfair to the uninitiated. It’s a double edged sword of avoiding too much tutorializing vs alienating newcomers.
Yeah, well, the original Zelda flagged bomb spots even less, so...
It's weird to me that Simon's Quest gets so much grief for this when Zelda 1 and 2 (and particularly the localized version of those) were full of that exact "defer to the guide" nonsense.
In fairness, some of that stuff comes from trying to play older games out of context, since a lot of tutorializing used to happen in the manual, but not on any of those NES examples.
I’m playing Oracle of Ages for the first time in a while, and it is not great! The level design is flawed. The eighth dungeon is a a dark room, some ghosts, and a hint owl that tells you to “attune your ears to the sound of sword on stone” which, right, standard Zelda fare, good of them to make explicit the reminder. But none of the walls clank! You need to push one of the non-pushable statues out of the way, in the dark, to even expose the bombable wall. I went over the whole place twice, and then thought “oh maybe they’re doing a cool metapuzzle thing and I’ve got to leave the dungeon and bomb a new entrance” so I went out and tested the whole area with my sword and then bombed everything in case I was just misinterpreting the clank sound.
The underwater dungeon had the interesting raise/lower water level mechanic, but I explored in loops for an hour before looking up where to go next. I’m not saying it’s supposed to be easy, I like a challenge, but it felt like the layout was deliberately withholding information, which is bad design.
The Long Hook is an upgrade for the Switch Hook. The improvment is marginal and the puzzles that require it feel confusing (I finally have the tool for this but it’s not working (before you know about the L2 version)), forced (this is the same puzzle but the anchor object is two tiles further away) or frustrating (oh of course I was supposed to know about the offscreen anchor).
The Long Hook has an entire dungeon dedicated to it.
It seems all my fond memories are actually from Oracle of Seasons. I wonder if they had parallel teams working on them.
I sorta had the same problem with Ocarina of Time. Was stuck in the Deku Tree basement. Didn’t know you had to use a stick with fire to burn cobweb. I thought the game was broken and was thinking about returning the game until I accidentally solved it by fucking around. Not sure if Navi explained it or not, but my English wasn’t very good when I was 10 and the game didn’t had my native language as an option.
When I was 5 or 6, my grandmother got a NES and three games. One was Crystalis.
Me and my two cousins played the game in turns, and we eventually got to the first boss, which was quite an achievement because there are puzzle elements to the game.
We could not beat this boss. Several years later, I have my own NES and I borrow Crystalis. I’m pretty sure I got to that boss again and realized something. Hitting him produced a sound that no other monster had. It sounded like hitting solid glass. I finally intuited that I wasn’t strong enough and leveled up to level 3, and wouldn’t you know it, I beat the boss.
It’s one of my all time favorite retro games. It was so ahead of its time. Worth playing if you’ve never tried it.
Back then on my GBA I got stuck in a Zelda Oracles dungeon for quite some time until I looked up what I was supposed to do. Turns out there was a hint, I had read it, but it was mistranslated and was garbled in my language.
It’s supposed to tell you running makes you jump farther. Translated text doesn’t mention jumping and instead sounds like a weird nonsensical idiom about “travelling far”. Specifically travelling in the sense going on a trip, not just going from place A to place B.
I had a similar problem with ocarina of time (and lemme tell you having to run around in not one but multiple times was a… blast…)
It was the first Gannon fight where you shoot the paintings… I’d never played a Zelda game before and it took me ages to give up and look it up (thankfully this was after the internet was born, and walkthrough sites were all over)
I got stuck in the first dungeon, because one room required pushing two blocks together but I didn’t even think any of these blocks could be pushed at all!
Rimworld definitely makes it harder when you’re doing well. You can control the parameters a bit though in the storyteller settings. It depends on your colony’s wealth, number of people, how long it’s been since something ‘bad’ happens (colonist dies or gets injured), etc.
This is advice I’ve given to new Rimworld players, and I hope it was helpful. The game (on most difficulties) is itching to give you the next “scenario.”
Building your wealth in valuable equipment is not very good at the start of the game, because your town’s silver value will go up much faster than its defensive/offensive capabilities. You end up putting a target on your back for raids.
Better to build a surrounding wall and set up trap corridors than to worry about getting everyone a gun.
I’ve had success doing that too. Buttload of traps. The raids that will circumvent your traps are definitely a problem though. Also the raids that just have a bunch of grenadiers can destroy your defenses in no time.
I willing to bet the new console isn’t significantly better hardware (which was already outdated when the Switch released), but just made to have a system the didn’t already have emulators for it. The Switch emulators work perfectly (better than the console). The new one probably is focused specifically at preventing them from working and not being a better device for consumers.
That website was really tempting… until I remembered that these run on AA batteries and don’t have gyro or a touchpad. M$ really selling an 85$ controller without the features of the 50$ ps5 controller
Edit: apparently dualsense are 75$ now?? Wtf. and apparently they’ve never been 50$? Just discard my comment
Its actually a plus for me. I don’t want to use proprietary batteries and rather use standard AA sized (rechargable) batteries. They can be charged with any battery charger, you can have multiple of them and each pair lasts much longer than any builtin battery. I agree on the other parts for missing gyro and price though.
Yeh this one cost me £4 and came with a recharchable battery pack. I’ve always used my controller wired (playing on PC) but now maybe I’ll try wireless!
If latency was an issue for you, I can assure that its not even for competitive gaming. I played years with friends Fighting games in a competitive manner (offline) and since 360 days it was wireless. And in general with modern controller and batteries, a pair lasts for me at least a week if no longer, when I play at least 5 hours per day. Can’t beat that! Replacement is also cheap. Good if you don’t want to rely on original batteries in the future.
Nah I’ve never had issues with latency and don’t play anything competitive I’ve always just prefered wired to be honest. My favourite controllers were the wired 360 controllers that got rid of the massive bump at the back and were a really nice weight. I wish they did an official modern wired only version.
100%! I love controllers that use AA’s. So much easier to replace the batteries. I’m dreading the day I need to go hunt down replacement batteries for things like my DS, 3ds, Playstation controllers, etc. It’s probably not hard to find replacements. But it requires more work than just whipping out some rechargeable AA’s and calling it a day lol
Deep Rock Galactic, play solo on the lower difficulties and just vibe and mine. Bosco the robot that follows you on solo missions can kill pretty much everything for you most of the time, or you can have it do the mining and tasks while you shoot everything in sight.
I agree. 2009scape scratches the itch that RuneScape provides and it’s playable offline. The game doesn’t have every single quest, but the addictive part is still there.
I’m really happy that the one time I got to visit the UK was during Liz Truss’ time in office. It was wild seeing the protestors, and when I landed back at home I heard she was gone.
This one isn’t super new, but Druidstone. It’s a story based tactics game with some RPG elements and it’s just excellently done. I’ve never heard anyone else mention it and I think more people should know about it.
It was pretty good, but I got stuck on an annoying mission and dropped it. Really wish that dev had just made grimrock 3, but I respect not wanting to do the same thing over and over…
And DOTA2 has the worst matchmaking I’ve ever seen in casual too. My third game I was placed with the sweatiest sweats and it completely turned me off the game.
I’m pretty sure you can still join servers like that. I haven’t played in years, but last time I did, the server browser was still there. A lot less lively because it was hidden compared to the matchmaking button, but it was still there.
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