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Games you had no idea what to do in as a kid

EmptySpace said:
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just.....ugh.
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Came to post this.


Legacy of the Wizard, too. Impossible to beat if you don't have a guide. I don't know how anyone finished it "back in the day" without the help of the Internet. The music is GODLY, though.
 
The original Metroid I had no clue where to go or what to do. I could progress through some of the game but eventually would reach a point where I was just completely lost and wasn't sure what I should be doing next. Eventually I used a Game Genie to unlock all the power ups to explore some of the game and managed to find the end of the game, beat it, and had my mind melted when I discovered Samus was a girl. Wouldn't be until years later after beating Super Metroid that everything clicked for Metroid and I could beat it.

Metal Gear Solid when you have to call Meryl and her codec number is on the back of the game case. The game kept telling me to check the back of the CD Case but it never dawned on me that the fourth wall was being broken and it meant the game case. I spent a few weeks covering every square inch of that game looking for this CD Case and was on the verge of getting rid of it because I couldn't figure it out. I took it out of the my Playstation, put it inside the case, and then was looking it over trying to come up with reasons why I should keep it when I realized right on the back of the game it had Meryl's codec information. The really sad part was it wasn't until my next play through that I realized they meant the game case and didn't just fuck up displaying that on the back of the game.
 
Mercenary on the C64 - as an impressionable preteen I remember Zzap & C&VG heralding it as a classic so hunted down a copy. Cue utter bewilderment, repeated every few weeks whenever I tried to give it a go.
More recently, I spent time at university trying to play Grand Prix Legends using keyboard as input device. Never again.
 
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Shadowgate I eventually got as I got older. Hell for the first year I couldn't even get out of the 2nd room cause I couldn't find the key. My mom who never plays games actually saw how clueless I was as a kid and helped me find the key. I eventually beat it as I got older.

Deadly Towers is just pure garbage that should never have existed.
 
Vanillalite said:
Shadowgate I eventually got as I got older. Hell for the first year I couldn't even get out of the 2nd room cause I couldn't find the key. My mom who never plays games actually saw how clueless I was as a kid and helped me find the key. I eventually beat it as I got older.
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I had the same problem! The solution: there is a key in the first screen, hidden under a skull above the door. You have to use the OPEN command on the skull... WHAT?!?!?! There is no clue that indicates there is anything different about the skull, you can't take it, if you hit it, it doesn't say something like "it sounds hollow, something rattles beneath" to let you know you're on the right track. You have to use the OPEN command, the same for doors. I wasted a weekend staring at the first two screens of the game before having to return it. I guess I should have tried every command on every pixel of the screens. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
 
Drakkhen on SNES. It was a first person RPG and I had no idea what to do. There were also a couple NES games but I can't remember them right now.

Dezzy said:
I borrowed Populous from a friend of mine and played it for many hours, never actually knowing what the point of the game was.
I just terraformed the world and did random stuff.
I had no idea what the purpose of anything was, or what the goal was.
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This too! I can't remember where I played it but I remember playing it and not knowing what the fuck I was doing.
 
Gohma
in TLOZ Ocarina of Time. Mind you, I was an eight year old boy with very little knowledge of the English language, so I didn't know I had to stun him with the Deku Nuts. The facts that he scared the shit out of me as a kid didn't really help much, either. In the end, my father defeated him (pressing random buttons did the trick)
 
Fun fact about Ecco the Dolphin: At one point I got very frustrated by it and decided to "brute force" a password so that I could skip some levels. After not too many tries It freaking worked and I got to
one of the prehistoric levels.
How sick isn't that?
 
Videospel said:
Fun fact about Ecco the Dolphin: At one point I got very frustrated by it and decided to "brute force" a password so that I could skip some levels. After not too many tries It freaking worked and I got to
one of the prehistoric levels.
How sick isn't that?
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HAX
 
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Platoon for Nintendo. I just had no idea what the hell to do. I would walk up and down through the trails for hours, there must have been some certain pattern to follow that I simply could not understand.

Speaking of patterns, the last dungeon of Final Fantasy 1 (I think it was the last dungeon, as I never got past it) just completely destroyed me. There was some pattern you were supposed to follow, I have no idea how you were supposed to know what it is, I couldn't find it anywhere and simply could not brute force it. As a teen, I loaded the game and saw all my characters were level 99 sitting outside the damn tower for at least the past 8 god damned years.
 
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Exile for the C64. Don't think we had any instructions for it. Always thought it looked cool, but never had the first clue about what I was supposed to be doing.
 
For me, it was Princess Tomato for the nes. I never knew what the hell i was doing in it for the most part.

For a long time, I couldn't grasp the steering in RC Pro-Am. But then one day, it just clicked, and to this day is my favorite racer of all time.
 
King_Richard said:
There was some Indiana Jones game in the late 90's/early 2000's for the PC, I just had the demo and I had no idea what the hell I was supposed to do. I remember spending a good half hour just walking around the room trying to figure out how to get out of it.

EDIT

It was 1999's Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine

and there's actually a video of someone playing the demo on YouTube.
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I loved this game as a kid. We got all the way up to the raft bit, (I think it was right before the snow level) and got stuck. After a few years we managed it though, due to being able to look for online guides.
 
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Every time one of those giant claw things would come into the arena (I remember them looking a lot more pink on my TV when I was a little) I would just die. Also I didn't know you were supposed to hit the doors the enemies were coming out of.

To be fair I was like 2 or 3.
 
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This game was so cryptic that I had no idea what to do most of the time. I would consider this game to be the granddad to demon and dark souls.
 
I can't remember the name, I'll need to go look for it later since I know I still have it. There was a Flight Simulator for the Mega Drive, and it confused the absolute hell out of me. Never figured out what I was meant to be doing but I remember enjoying it anyway.
 
I managed to beat a lot of those "impossible" games. Deadly Towers, Legacy of the Wizard, Friday the 13th etc. Mostly out of desperation because I never had a ton of games. And Genghis Khan was one of my favorites. My friend and I would waste whole weekends playing that game.

Deadly Towers was probably the worst until purely by accident I found a secret area with a powerful weapon upgrade in one of the towers. That made the game possible.

Dragon Power was probably the game I hated the most. I couldn't return the opened game for a refund, but noticed the store only had one more copy, so I claimed it was defective, then said the same about the other copy. Bought Karnov with the refund.
 
In 1996, as a seven-year old boy in a non-English speaking country, I convinced my mom to buy this new football game for me:
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Safe to say that I was completely lost. But somehow, that purchase still became the start of a still ongoing CM/FM addiction...
 
-Zelda: Ocarina of time- The water temple. I was 10 at the time. It gave me the most horrible headaches I've ever experienced. Also, I was always lost and unable to know what to do next. I never bought guides at the time, so I had to stop playing the game, even though I had loved it till that point.

-Aladdin for the Genesis- I was 4 or 5 and I just sucked at it. I loved to play it though.

-Jurassic Park for the Genesis- I still hate that game.

I'm pretty sure I was a better gamer when I was kid though. Used to beat 10 to 12 games a year. Now I'm lucky if I beat 5.

Edit: Oops, misunderstood the question from the OP. Close enough I guess?
 
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Where's Waldo NES. I still curse whoever it was at Funcoland that tricked my mom into buying this horrid turd. She figured since I enjoyed the books, that I'd like this, too.

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I had trouble enough determining if objects were human or not, let alone if they resembled Waldo. Mostly I'd randomly click at things that vaguely looked like they could be Waldo (I'm still not really sure what he's supposed to look like in this game) and run out of time because of the penalties for not correctly selecting Waldo. When I was lucky enough to select whatever misshapen form was meant to be Waldo, I'd move on to the next screen for more "fun" finding Waldo in a different location until my timer inevitably counted down to zero from my wrong guesses.

I also remember my dad rented an NES RPG once which I didn't comprehend at the time. I kind of remember wandering around what looked like a world map with some random trees and water and having no idea what to do.
 
I'm ashamed to say it, but Fallout 2. I wasn't even a kid when I played it - I was probably 17 or so and it was not long after it came out. I just was not used to playing CRPG's and it kind of throws you into an open world without a lot of guidance after the first hour or two. I would actually love to try replaying it now that I think I'd get it.
 
Jaws. I actually enjoyed the game but no one in my family could figure out how to beat Jaws. We would just motor around the map racking up crazy points and wondering what we were doing wrong.

It turns out you need to go from port to port.



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Turning in shells to increase your power. For some reason we would just increase the power once and never think to return to the original port. I finally tried it after setting up the NES in 2004 and lo, I was able to destroy that punk ass fish.


Then, when my older brother was visiting on return from Iraq I showed him. For nearly his entire life he never knew how to beat Jaws and when I told him he promply set out to do. What did he get for his 30 year long wait?

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This shitty end screen. "What, are you fucking kidding me?" was his response.



Ace Harding said:
I'm ashamed to say it, but Fallout 2. I wasn't even a kid when I played it - I was probably 17 or so and it was not long after it came out. I just was not used to playing CRPG's and it kind of throws you into an open world without a lot of guidance after the first hour or two. I would actually love to try replaying it now that I think I'd get it.
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With The Fallout Restoration Project Mod that is a must!
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It comes with it's own installer and adds a bunch of features.
 
Chrono Trigger was one. Only times I made progress was when my older cousin would come over and play it for me. I also remember some Lord of the Rings pc game we had that I would play a lot when I was like 5 and I had no idea what I was doing.

Edit: Found which one it was

War For Middle Earth
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There were plenty of hard n frustrating nes games on my plate as a kid, but the two that stick out most in my mind? Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Ghostbusters. I only remember the one being Indiana Jones because of the black cart heh... as far as I can recall, I never made any progress in either of those. 7ish year old me could beat SMB and Zelda, but never once understood wtf was going on in either of those other two.
 
3bdelilah said:
Gohma
in TLOZ Ocarina of Time. Mind you, I was an eight year old boy with very little knowledge of the English language, so I didn't know I had to stun him with the Deku Nuts. The facts that he scared the shit out of me as a kid didn't really help much, either. In the end, my father defeated him (pressing random buttons did the trick)
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I had to call Nintendo to get through the cobweb at the bottom, the one you needed to burn.
 
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