This is exactly it. I definitely used a lot of walkthroughs as a kid. I also feel like games in the 90s and early 00s were just plain harder, or sometimes poorly designed.
These days I only look something up when I have got to a point of near rage over how much of my limited gaming time has been wasted, and I need to know if I am just a moron, or if it’s a bug, or bad game design. Of course, then I get mad that I can’t find it written out, and have to skim around in some fucking YouTube video to figure it out.
For me it’s the opposite. I remember getting stuck in a game for days or weeks in the 90s. I would get to a point where I would just try to click everything on the screen, use every item with everything else, try all possible item combinations, etc. These days, if I’m stuck for more than an hour or two I’ll just Google it. I’d rather move on faster and get to play more games in the limited time I have for such things.
An excellent opportunity to reference a bit of true Internet culture: Old Man Murray’s dressdown of one of the puzzles in Gabriel Knight 3. The most relevant part is their final summary:
That was the one where you had to use cat hair to add a mustache to a fake ID to impersonate a character that had no mustache? Yeah, I don’t really miss moon logic.
One time I used a GameShark mid game for a Zelda game, I saved my file and came back later to find that by maxing out, I had ruined my save file and lost all my progress. I cried my eyes out and it took days to get back, boringly replaying the game.
I always wondered if that was an intentional lesson by the GameShark devs… ChatGPT seems designed to make you act against your best self interest.
I’ve had a similar train of thought. I work with a lot of people that have been doing their jobs for many years and know what they’re doing. They might benefit from an LLM since they already have the expertise to tell what to take or leave. A novice would benefit more long term from learning the hard way.
Continuing with that train of thought though, if someone has been learning and growing for years, is there really a point where it’s okay to stop, say “I don’t need to learn more,” and start relying on the easy method while their skills stagnate?
Counterpoint, like, I can draw things, but I can't draw people, but I have used AI to generate pictures of people that I can then trace to learn how to draw people, and because it's a new person, and it's something I'm in control of, I feel more encouraged to fire up Krita and work on my drawing.
I still suck, don't get me wrong, but I have done more artwork since having access to AI art tools than I did for several years prior to that.
There's just something about having an idea of knowing what the finished output is supposed to look like that helps me figure out how to draw what I'm supposed to draw.
And eventually I will be fully drawing my own stuff from scratch, thanks to using AI as a self-learning tool.
Weird, I love problem solving. Its why im so upset with people complaining about computers when all they have to do is tinker with them or google about it. Walkthroughs are for when you need it, if you have an urge to use the walkthrough only instead of actually playing the game, then thats a you problem.
I mean, I guess, it was their realization that the walkthrough skips the fun problem-solving part. That it shouldn’t be a tool you use during the problem-solving.
Man, I was recently working with another senior. The guy has been in this job like ten years longer than me. And to be fair, we were working with a language that he isn’t familiar with, but I had a problem which wasn’t language-specific (basically, I had a user-provided timestamp and needed to guesstimate whether that’s winter or summer time).
And yeah, his first thought was to ask ChatGPT. On some level, it is a wrapper around Bing and I did a web search, too, so sure, let’s do another web search in case I missed anything.
But ol’ Chappity G spat out the same solution attempt, which I had also found initially, which wasn’t actually applicable there. So, we told it what the problem with that was, and it generated another attempt, which didn’t cover edge cases. The next time around, it generated a solution which used an entirely different time library. And so on.
The guy was absorbed for ten minutes trying to explain to the Magic 8 Ball what our problem was precisely and why its solution attempts were bad.
I’m not saying ChatGPT should’ve been able to solve this problem. Date/time handling is one of the hardest computer science problems.
It was more just that he was constantly pulling the slot machine, hoping it would suddenly spit out the perfect solution, when even just five seconds of independent thinking should’ve made him realize that there is no easily web-searchable solution and the spicy autocomplete cannot do the reasoning to come up with a solution of its own.
I had a a guidebook for Desperados. I ended up using the “hide around corner, shoot, and then blast everyone coming around the corner”-tactic instead of the guidebook 80% of the time.
desperados and commandos were both just that kind of game. i revisited desperados recently and the amount of mileage you can get out of “lie down in tall grass, quicksave, stand up, shoot, lie down” is frankly ridiculous.
I grew up when solutions either were not available or cost money to get either by subscribing to a magazine, buying a magazine, or calling a 1800 hotline which cost ludicrous amounts of money for the time.
When gamefaqs and the like became popular it was great to get the answer instead of giving up. I couldn’t imagine growing up always having the answer handed to you though.
I’ve been running Nobara on my machine for like a year and it’s been a really easy experience! The creator also maintains a popular build of proton and designed it to be pretty hands off.
I’m a noob when it comes to gaming on Linux, having to rely on WINE just working without any changes or Proton on Steam if there’s no Linux port. Still learning how to do more advanced things with WINE rather than just run and hope the program works.
So far I haven’t had any major issues with getting games to play, except for a couple old PC games I found on MyAbandonware that probably need some extra work to work properly. Doesn’t display correctly or play the music for either. Otherwise, my experience has been pretty good.
As for distro side of things, I don’t know, outside of SteamOS on my Steam Deck, I have no clue on what’s happening in the games sphere. I just have Steam downloaded from either my package manager or flathub and call it good there.
Oh, and I also have the native Itchio storefront program and it works just fine as long as I don’t change the language to a certain language because it’ll just cause sorts of problems ( probably due to me not having a language pack for it installed ). The one visual novel I’ve played on Itchio on my laptop worked just fine out of the box, but I assume that’s more or less thanks to the devs.
I decided to use GPT to help me with gaming, specifically when I had little to no clue what to do or where to go.
What I did was write instructions in my prompt, asking it not to be too specific and not to give me a straight answer. Sometimes, I even asked it to be intentionally cryptic. That way, I could still make progress without ruining the fun, since the vague hints still left room for me to figure things out on my own.
That’s wild, I was just thinking of a replay. Do you know about RetroAchevements? The achievements kind of give me goals which have helped me actually finish these games.
Edit: I wanna add that I was thinking it’d be good to play with my 3yo, I don’t think she can mess anything up playing as the dog lol
Looks like quite a few completionist achievements, too. Totally my thing (with a guide) although people who don’t wanna grind for a day at endgame might just want to go for the “beaten” status. Lol
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