Coincidentally I've recently started checking in on Reddit pretty regularly (having not even known what it was previous to that) so I can probably cross-post stuff to here when I'm at home. It's amazing/terrifying the amount of time you can waste browsing it.
One of the amusing things I read recently was a thread about 'features in games you didn't know about until later' which had a guy admitting that when playing most of Zelda: Wind Waker he genuinely never knew that you needed to deploy the sail when boating around the place. He played almost the entire game using the very slow movement on (I think?) the left trigger. Anyone who's played the game is probably boggling at the very idea because it would mean the majority of intra-island journeys (of which there's shitloads) literally taking hours rather than minutes.
Having just typed all that out though I found the thread in question pretty easily
here. Here's the relevant post:
Quote:
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker was my first Gamecube game, so I was really excited to start playing it. I got through the first part fine, and then met that red boat (The King of Red Lions) that Link uses to travel around the world. The boat tells me to go to Dragon Roost Island, which on the game map is like four ocean squares away, so I get in the boat and hold down the R trigger, which makes the boat inch forward. Man does it take a long time to get to that island, but I make it, do the quest, whatever, and then repeat the process to get to the next island.
And the next one.
And the next one.
Finally, I end up getting the ability to use bombs while on the boat to make a cool cannon to shoot monsters, and my little brother comes in and asks me why the hell I'm equipping bombs but haven't equipped the sail the entire game. This was after about 25 hours of gameplay.
tl;dr Would have gone through the Wind Waker traveling 20x slower than I was supposed to because I didn't realize that the boat was supposed to have a sail.
edit: I got the sail at Windfall so I had it in my inventory, but I didn't realize that I had to equip it to get it to be used. I thought that holding R was the only way to make the boat move forward and that the sail was working automatically even if I couldn't see it on the boat. I was about eight when I got the game, to be fair.
Heh, also, this one about Tomb Raider 2:
Quote:
I was 12 years old and had a Playstation 1 for Christmas. I had two games with it, one of which was Tomb Raider 2 that I was very eager to play. Take into account that I was brand new to having a games console and up until then I had only played on a Commodore 64.
So I had the main menu loaded up and scrolled through all of the options - as far as I was concerned the Passport icon was only for game settings and the option for "New Game" didn't come up automatically, so I decided that selecting "Lara's Home" was my best bet, since that was the first thing I had read about in the manual that came with it.
For three days, I played on Lara's Home. After playing the shit out of the obstacle course, running helplessly into the groaning butler and desperately trying to find the dual pistols, I was getting a bit tired of it by the third day.
Luckily, my cousin, a few years older than me, visited just after Christmas and had owned a PS for many years. He listened with pity on his face as I told him about my very boring experience with the first level of Tomb Raider.
And, of course, I watched in amazement as he selected "New Game" from the passport and I got to play the actual first level of Tomb Raider 2, with dual pistols, enemies and even cutscenes! I was so excited that I didn't even feel stupid about it until many years later.
TL:DR At 12 years old, I got a Playstation 1 for Christmas and played on Lara's Home for three days, completely missing the option for "New Game".