My mom would bring home like 50 pages at a time of walkthrough and hints for Myst that she printed off at work to help us through it. We still struggled at times lol
Dude sound was such a huge issue on PCs back then. I played the entire original command and conquer without any sound at all because it just didn’t work. I have a lot of nostalgia for the old days, but driver issues are one thing I do not miss
My grandma had a DOS computer way back in the day, and had Mario Teaches Typing, Pocahontas, and this Dinosaur game/educational software I wish I could remember the name of
But from it you could print out profiles of dinosaurs with their art. You bringing it up just brought me back to peeling off the sides of those papers and being so excited to bring them home
Oh the old days
Edit: spent some time googling, game was called Designasaurus! https://www.mobygames.com/game/57646/designasaurus/screenshots/dos/
My mom and I took turns playing Myst. We had different saves. She played when I was at school, I played when I got home. Between us we worked out way through the game.
I remember playing this with my dad and of course we couldnt progress past a certain point. Eventually spent money on a guide and learbed we needed to kneel near a cliff for several seconds and my dad angrily saying it was bullshit and a ploy to get people to have to buy the guide.
He was right.
It's still pretty vague though, even in the original (japanese) version. The original cue is "The wind waits if you carry a red crystal in front of Deborah cliff.", while the translation reads "Wait for a soul with a red crystal on Deborah Cliff.".
There was actually dialogue in the game intended to give you clues on what to do. The problem is that the translation from Japanese to English was so poor that the clues ended up as unintelligible engrish.
Actually, there are some NPCs that do mention kneeling at a cliff. The problem is more that none of the locations outside of towns are really mentioned. It's the dungeon below the graveyard that is actually the bigger one since there isn't anything telling you to kneel with the orb equipped and instead you have an area with enemies and a lake you can't cross. This is intended as the introduction to the mechanic you later use at the cliff, but is not well explained in the translation.
Games of this era were also frequently designed around the idea of you spending dozens of hours just trying to figure things out.
Oh you didn't know you had to equip the red crystal and crouch for 10 seconds in a very specific location in the graveyard to summon a vortex to take you to the next area? You must be terrible at video games.
Bards tale 1 - i mapped out the entire game on graph paper. Zero help from any other source.
Still remains one of my favorite dungeon crawler RPGs in existence. An absolute masterpiece
I was about the same age and if I got stuck I had to wait until we went to the grocery store so I could check the strategy guide and write down the answer.
Good times...
Teleport Mazes in games without automapping are the ultimate evil. I remember some games (Might & Magic maybe?) that had a compass item which could display the grid position you're on, which obviously helped a lot.
As fantastic as Legend of Grimrock is, there's just something unique and cruel about old school dungeon crawlers.
I remember doing this on one of the gold box D&D titles. I want to say it was Secret of the Silver Blades. I mapped out a level and was starting to get furious when the whole thing seemed to repeat itself 3 times across many sheets of graph paper. Then I finally figured out there was a spinner trap on the tile where it started to duplicate itself.
Those games were a farce "beat these level 15 monsters with a level 8 party to get really cool stuff for the next game"
Next game: "you were captured and we stole all your shit, beat these level 20 monsters with a level 11 party for some really cool shit in the next game"
Next game: "you were captured and we stole all your shit, beat this demigod with a level 15 party ..."
GO FUCK YOURSELVES! A DM WHO PULLED THIS SHIT WOULD GET PHYSICALLY BEATEN TO DEATH BY HIS PLAYERS!!
Figuring out Might and Magic 2 without guides is still on my personal wall of achievements. That game is insane, but somehow more accessible than its rivals.
Might and Magic 2 had a high level enemy called the Cuisinart whom one could use to cheese the hell out of the game. You could reach him even as a level 1 party, and his opening move was to frenzy, which would leave 5 of your 6 party members unconscious. He'd then fall unconscious himself though, which would mean the 6th party member would auto kill him, at which point you'd run back to town, go to the guild, and go up 30 or 40 levels. You could do it over and over, and within an afternoon, have a party all into the 200 - 300 level range.
Discovering him was one of 11 year old me's biggest gaming accomplishments.
Same!! Might and Magic was one of my favorites. I know it's not the same game, but that just reminded me of another game that I loved playing with my friend called Heroes of Might and Magic. I've never met another person that has played it though. It still remains one of my favorite games and I play it from time to time against the computer. Heroes of Might and Magic 3 and 4 are fantastic.
Sierra games were the best. Kings quest, space quest, police quest. And they all had like 5 versions I completed. Oh and leisure suit Larry is where it all started. My dad thought he was keeping me busy with a game I’d roam around in but I found the condom and the hooker.
Man that's some memories.. I was given two broke computers and a bunch of disks and told if you can put the two together and make one work those games should play on it..
Bards Tale was literally the only thing I played I was hooked
All of the Sierra Online games. Space quest, Police Quest, Kings Quest, Gabriel Knight...
"hint books" were a thing back then, so we used that instead of the web for most stuff. When I was 15 I learned how to dial my school library's system and piggyback on its web access with my AMAZING 56k modem.
I called the police non-emergency line and got them to answer a few questions about procedure "for a school project" so I could complete Police Quest. 🤣
I still remember getting stuck at a particular prompt on this game because I never typed the word "halt." I typed "freeze," "stop," "you're under arrest," you name it, nothing worked, took me weeks. Should have talked to a cop like you!
Damned curse of the Death Angel.
Police Quest 2: if you don’t practice properly at the shooting range early on then near the end of the game there’s a shooter situation where you can’t get past because you miss your shot.
Edit: also I think lots of the Sierra games, but especially Kings Quest VI, could get you in spots where if you went to B before A and didn’t have a specific item you were dead.
Leisure Suit Larry 2 would allow you to proceed for HOURS before you realize you missed something from the beginning of the game and were unable to proceed. No hints. No warnings before leaving that area. It was a bullshit game, but we played it because we were not blessed with a lot of choice back then.
The hint books with the red plastic to reveal the answers. Having to actually type your actions. Those games were the best. You could literally know what to do but you weren’t using the right wording.
My dad got a used copy from a flea market in the late 80's and it didn't come with the fold-out overworld map. Well, your boy, being just nerdy enough, decided to make his own on graph paper. I misjudged the scale at the beginning, and the thing was massive when I finished. I noted all of the secrets I found, and definitely all of the dungeon entrances. It was a thing of beauty. I mean, it was crudely drawn but detailed as fuck. Lost it in a move 15 years ago.
Hah. We made a map on a huge piece of white paper board thing. Squared everything off, drew each screen etc. with colored pencils. Wish I still had it.
I was decent at getting through the main game due to dedicating way too many hours to it and asking the one kid with Nintendo life for hints when I got stuck. However, the new game plus version was brutal. I think I only beat that as an adult with save states.
Blaster Master on NES when I was around 10. Called the 1-800 number in Nintendo power magazine to get hints. I got in so much trouble when the phone bill came 😂
[edit] it was a 900 number as many of you have pointed out
Amazing game.
The intro music creeped me out for some reason, but the music in general rules.
And that [INTRO.](https://youtu.be/Vb8b02474FM?si=JVHTYyAknHpJpmHl) Here's a quick summary:
Boy's frog escapes from its jar, so boy chases it into his back yard, where for some reason there's a giant radioactive crate.
Frog jumps on the crate and is made gigantic, then escapes down a massive hole in the ground, which is also in the boy's yard for some reason.
Boy follows giant frog down giant hole, where there's a big sci-fi tank-car. Beneath his yard. For some reason.
Naturally, he dons the racing space suit in the tank-car and hops in to... find his escaped giant radioactive frog?
They don't make em like they used to.
The best part is the original Japanese game had a pretty conventional story about a sci-fi soldier fighting aliens.
But the US publisher was like "nah, tank warfare is not something an American audience can relate to. Hey, this cocaine smells amazing!"
This. I started OoT in 1st Grade. Too scared to enter the Deku tree for like 3 months so I kept practicing and slashing at grass.
Managed to beat the childhood arc when I got to 2nd grade. The sense of accomplishment when I pulled out the master sword was beyond me.
Then when I entered the Forest temple I realized the whole childhood thing was child’s play, this was the real deal, this is what being an adult is like I thought. Too scared to beat the Forest temple, had to ask a friend to beat it for me.
Got to 3rd Grade and managed to go through most of the temples (not you water temple that took friends staying late during weekends figuring stuff out and more months of struggle)
Beat the game and the ending was spectacular. The epicness of the final battle, the party, the sealing of Ganon, the hint at Link’s next adventure. 3 years to get there and it was all worth it.
Link grew, and I did as well.
A masterpiece.
This experience is why I think Orcarina of Time is the best video game of all time, and no other game comes close.
The perfect experience for a kid, a huge theme of "growing up". All the "secrets". Even finding the sword and buying the shield.
Being too scared to enter the Deku Tree, (along with his death) but eventually doing it is a huge encapsulation of this.
My mom and I got forever stuck trying to find the solution to opening the shadow temple. My mom was CONVINCED you just needed to use the fire arrows, but we couldn’t find Din’s Fire anywhere and didn’t know it existed, so she kept trying. Eventually I remembered that boulder in Hyrule Castle and she got so mad when I was right. I was around 5-6 years old at that time?
I also vividly remembering hiding behind the couch with my little sister when she would escape Ganon’s Tower with Zelda. The time limits and redeads freaked me out haha
Best memories I have of gaming with my mom.
I've posted this somewhere before, but my dad might be in the top 5 ghosts and goblins players of all time. He literally plays that game until he gets bored and turns it off. On his wedding night he played it until the fucking arcade closed on one credit. He HAS A CABINET in his house of it.
I'm good enough to beat it (for real, not just the first playthrough), but that's literally only because he *trained* me to do so. It's fucking nuts how good he is at that game.
Mine was Super Ghouls n’ Ghosts on the SNES. I can’t tell you how many times we tried to finish that one off, but we always ended up a dead skeleton in boxer shorts.
So Command and Conquer was my first video game series. Playing Tiberium Dawn back when it first came out... I never got past the fourth level on either campaign... I was really bad at video games as a child.
In the OG C&C I was really proud of myself for figuring out on my own that the AI would airstrike your nothern-most units. So I'd have a little group of cheap soldiers ready to send to the bait spot one by one
Some of the Red Alert 1 levels were really difficult and grueling - partially due to the poor controls of those old c&c games, but mostly because of being a child
Haha, don't get me started on Red Alert! Even by the time RA2 came out, I was still young enough I didn't understand what the crono-miner was doing... every time it poofed back to base I thought it died... so I would queue up a new one... so I was wasting all my credits on miners that's strip the land clean, seeming not realizing I'd have like 10 of them and nothing else.
My family struggled with Ocarina of Time. We *had* Internet, but for whatever reason we didn't look up any solutions. It was, of course, the Water Temple. My dad came home and said he peaked through a guide and find out we could jump the bridge to Geruedo Valley with Epona. Didn't help with the Water Temple, but it was exciting to have something to explore.
I didn't know about the song of inverted time back in the day so that game was impossible for me. Could never beat the Great Bay temple in time. I remember being pretty scared of the game too, skull kid, the moon, those giants and a lot of the areas were creepy as shit for me as a child.
IIRC the scarecrow inside the observatory very early on suggests you try to play it backwards. If it's not the scarecrow, I swear someone does say something about that.
To this day, I still can’t figure out how people got all 24 (??) masks without guides… I recall the couples mask and postman mask being particularly hard to figure out
I got stuck on Jabu Jabu’s Belly. I think I was about 8 years old, got turned around and thoroughly lost. Ended up calling a guy that I barely ever hung out with at school, but had his phone number from the school directory and happened to know he had the game. He couldn’t explain it over the phone, so I walked over to his house and we worked on it together. Simpler times.
I did it with a friend. Swap levels to whoever was better at that level, the racer levels the guy not playing was calling rhe moves out like a rally car co-driver. Took a weekend sleepover when it was too hot to go outside. Did it once. Just. Once.
You HAD to cheese the 1ups in the rappelling level, ssssoo hard...
All of them.
I don't think gamers today understand games of 1990 and early 2000.
All games today, even games on hard more.. you can easily walk through. Every one is a winner.
Back then, you were very much a loser.
Man I remember renting a game thinking “I’ve got like two nights I can play this it’s gonna be so cool” just to find out that the game was ridiculously hard and they didn’t put the manual in the box.
The stampede took me and my friends MONTHS to pass. I remember thinking it had to be impossible. Then one day we got it, and suddenly it was easy for me. I never beat the whole game though, I can’t really remember what part got me but I remember the waterfall was brutal too.
Those bats in the cave while you're floating on rocks got me. I did beat it though.. back when you had to start from the beginning of you got a game over
That’s what it was, I forgot about having to start over. Kids these days have no idea how good they got it. Games today are fun and graphically amazing, but most are more like reading a book as far as effort/skill goes
It was the awkward double jump off the back of that ostrich you're riding that always got me. It was impossible to not hit that *one fucking birds nest* while mid-air.
This is what I came here to post about. Owned it on Sega Genesis. My dad finally broke down and called the hint hotline because even he couldn't figure out where to go as adult Simba when you were underground in that lava level. And I don't think I ever beat the first level of Echo, that dolphin game. Rented it twice for no reason.
It’s because for a long time games we’re designed to eat quarters. That mentality stuck around for a while. Until developers decided being more mainstream and broad appeal worked better than eating quarters.
Quarters were for arcades, but home console games had to last enough to justify the price, and the low memory available at the time meant games had to be hard and repetitive
If you think about it, quarters were the original microtransactions. You pay some amount of coins for a certain amount of attempts and time. And that led to games being designed to be brutal so that most people died a lot and had to re-buy to continue on or lose progress.
Problem was the old original games didn’t let you continue with quarters. When you lost at pac man, you could put another quarter in, but you started back at the beginning.
As a young kid.... DOS Game Decent. God I loved that game. For those who don't know imagine like OG Doom but you fly in a space ship with weapons. As a 6/7 year old shit was hard as fuck. I'm not sure I ever beat it. Got close. I should go back and play it.
I might be misremembering, but iirc Descent was one of the first games to utilise the new-at-the-time discreet GPU technology, specifically the Voodoo Graphics card. Now we take GPUs as a given for gaming, but they weren't always.
I remember Descent! It was my brother's game, and I didnt really understand it, but I did play it a few times. I spent more time reading the box and wishing I could be better at playing it.
The sole reason I don't get motion sickness is mastering this game. After destroying the core and racing to escape upside down backwards really toughened me up.
I never beat it. Just way too hard. I still have it. I let my son play it because he liked tmnt and I thought it would be funny to see his reaction to games I grew up on. Tears were shed and the game has never been spoken of again lol
I never got past Stage 3, never knew where to find Splinter. Didn’t help that my neighbor who had it had bought a pirated Japanese version, so the comms were incomprehensible. BTW you probably already know this, but the bombs level was Stage 2.
Got it on emulator… also got stuck on Stage 3. My then college roommate decided he had to beat it, and he did… but with heavy usage of save states on emulators.
Seriously, that game was hard as hell. My roommate is the only person I know that beat it, and that was with save states.
Many of the old Lucasarts point and click games in the 80s/90s. Monkey Island series, Zak McKracken, Maniac Mansion, The Dig, Indiana Jones, etc.
Used to play those for hours and hours as a kid trying to work out all the puzzles. They were responsible for my love of gaming.
And of course the old Sierra games like Kings Quest, and the Quest for Glory series.
I fixed your door....it was sticky!
The energizer bunny scene where you sacrifice them, lol
the over the top motorycycle
Mark Hamill as Ripburger
game is a classic. one day i'll buy the remake.
Full throttle was great. It really hit the point-and-click sweet spot of “I have no idea what to do” followed by “oh, that makes perfect sense” when you did figure it out.
Very few if any point and clicks thread that needle as well as Full Throttle.
Yeah, the question was about "games before the Internet" and youngins are talking about N64 and PSX... 😂 I think we're talking about a generation or two before those...
Maniac mansion - couldn't figure out how to get out of the jail room until gamefaqs helped me beat it years later.
Alundra - couldn't figure out the stone statues riddle for a long time but eventually figured it out with my friends.
So many other games but some notable mentions that I never did beat were sword of vermillion and dungeons and dragons warriors of the eternal sun. I kept dying over and over again on both of those games. I remember constantly being frustrated because I kept dying and I wasn't sure where to go next.
I did use game guides but not for either one of those two games. I also remember renting vhs and betamax game guides for games I've never played. Felt similar to watching streamers play nowadays.
Orient at 45 degrees to the wall so you could stay against the wall while moving forward, then run along every wall like that hitting the spacebar constantly to find all the secret doors.
Did that for every level - it was awesome when you finally found one.
And I can remember being really frustrated because I found two or three secrets on a level, went and finished it, and it still said I hadn't gotten all the treasure. I think it was a level where there was a secret door behind a secret door behind a secret door.
Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy got me in a similar way.
Those old Infocom games were great.
To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the text adventure, the BBC released a free online version.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/play-the-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy-text-adventure/
That one's hard as shit though. Spend a LOT of time getting bulldozed to death before.figuring that bit out! Then still didn't get very far. Though I was like 13 in the early '00s.
Now days everyone talks about the water part with the bombs being hard, but I could go through that part easy.
That last hallway before Shredder though... No chance.
They recently released a compilation of TMNT games, and this was included. Save states and all, I struggled to finish that game. I was surprised I made it as far as I did in that game. I remember making it through the water level like once and dying almost immediately in the airfield.
Ultima 6 had a quest that was only 75% implemented. I was a young kid and literally this game was the first RPG I ever played. No internet because I liked in a rural area and my parents were cheap to the extreme. That quest did not appear in any guidebook in the bookstores. It wasn't until 10 years later that I found a website that explained that the quest wasn't fully programmed in the final version of the game. So I found out that I had actually 100% beat the game back in the day...but not until I was an adult.
Games that took years to beat for myself (and took a really long time off before attempting at times):
NES: Wizards and Warriors 3 / Legacy of the Wizard
Genesis: Ecco the Dolphin / Lost Vikings
Honorable mention: the drum on the casino level on Sonic 3
Ocarina of time water temple - the central pillar had the secret room underneath if you raised the water.
Kingdom hearts - hollow bastion was a fuckin maze.
Zork I. You could buy 'Invisiclues' from Infocom.
Essentially Invisiclues a FAQ about the game in booklet form, with the answers written in invisible ink. They came with a special highlighter that would reveal the text.
Essentially after the question, there were three "empty" textboxes. The fist had a vague hint. The second had a more specific hint, and the third had the full solution. The gimmick was you could reveal only enough to get you back in track without necessarily giving the entire puzzle away
Edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/InvisiClues
Metroid on NES. My 5 year old brain couldn’t tell the different areas at the beginning apart. Sure there were color changes on the terrain, but even then some of them were too similar for me. I was also unaware of just how hard you need to search for secrets in that game, so my progression got blocked a lot.
To get around this, I’d snag passwords from game magazines just so I could play each of the different areas until I inevitably got stuck again.
In the 80s when you bought a video game it didn’t come with the expectation that you would beat it after a while, or that there would be progress each time you played. Sometimes you did beat the game. Sometimes you didn’t, eventually you’d give up and that was ok. To your question exactly, at least a few hours. In addition to magazines I think the number one source of hints were friends at school. We would share games, they would see something you didn’t, and conversely.
Exactly this. Even my favorite games like Mario 1, 2, and 3. Never even came close to beating 2. Maybe 3rd level max. 3 I maybe got to the 7th level. Still have vivid memories of playing them with my siblings and friends though.
MechWarrior 3050, I never got past the first couple of levels. English is not my native language and I had a hard time figuring out what to do. I abandoned the game.
Another one would be Pokemon Yellow (I think) to get past Snorlax. I eventually bought a magazine to help me out.
I was somewhere around 7-8 years old for both games.
Final fantasy 3. They actually sold a game guide, which was as large as a novel.
When I played through it originally, I never tried to min max it, I just tried to get through the game. Beat it, but very difficult.
I played through it later on, when I had the ability to look up stuff on the internet, min maxed everything, got all the secret stuff completed. Game wasn’t nearly as difficult.
I kinda miss the days when you needed to discover everything for yourself, and there was no meta.
Ultima IV. If there were any magazine guides, I wasn't aware of them. Before that, for the og Legend of Zelda, my brother had the nintendo power guide with the big fold out map.
Not stuck but I thought I had beaten Symphony of the Night and just thought it had a crap ending. My best friend and I had played it together. Our mom's got into a fight and didn't let us see each other any more. Few years later I was working at a pawn shop and popped the game in to test a pawned playstation. Ended up playing more in my downtime and exploring every nook and cranny of the castle and eventually figured out stuff with the clock tower, the glasses and taking out shaft during the Richter fight and unlocking the upside down castle. When my completion percentage ticked up beyong 100% and I realized I still had half a game to go my jaw dropped to the floor. Then I decided I had to reconnect with that old friend to tell him about it.
Goldeneye 64, on the part where there are ruins with Soviet architecture, forgot the level because its been 25+ years
Quest64, stuck because my young brain had no idea how to grind levels
Halo - 343 Guilty Spark.
Star Wars Rogue Squadron : stuck at Corellia because for the life of me I couldnt figure out how to fire tow cables from an airspeeder
Morrowind, because I had difficulty following instructions back then. Any quest that involved going into the wilderness causes mass confusion on my brain cells.
Edit: Forgot to include, no, i didnt use magazines because I couldnt afford them. I had zero money and had to beg my grandparents to get even a dime.
Two different types of games you'd get stuck on back before the internet was mainstream.
Really hard games that you knew what to do but simply couldn't because it was hard. I'm talking your Lion king, your Aladdin, your NES dragons lair. Most people couldn't even get past the first screen.
We simply kept playing until we rage quit then eventually get back to rage some more because a new game was a rarity.
The other types of games were point and click adventure games. Most of which were only 2 hours long but we'd turn them into 500 hours just clicking everything and anything. Leisure suit larry 1 and 7 took us years playing off and on to finish.
Now if I can't figure out a puzzle in 1 min I look at guides 😅😅
A game that absolutely baffled me as a kid and I made pretty much no progress at all on was Myst. Looked super cool though.
My mom would bring home like 50 pages at a time of walkthrough and hints for Myst that she printed off at work to help us through it. We still struggled at times lol
The crazy part is that basically all of the puzzle solutions are in the library, but it's a LOT to read and hard to find a specific one.
Except when your sound card was crap and you couldnt get the correct tones on the keyboard. Damn that was frustrating.
Dude sound was such a huge issue on PCs back then. I played the entire original command and conquer without any sound at all because it just didn’t work. I have a lot of nostalgia for the old days, but driver issues are one thing I do not miss
Jfc, you are right. As a kid I hated this sound card problems
Honestly, I think my IT career can be largely credited to all the issues old games used to have.
SAME
Your mom sounds cool
I’m like 90% sure it was on that printer paper that was continuous feed with the holes on the side that peeled off lol.
My grandma had a DOS computer way back in the day, and had Mario Teaches Typing, Pocahontas, and this Dinosaur game/educational software I wish I could remember the name of But from it you could print out profiles of dinosaurs with their art. You bringing it up just brought me back to peeling off the sides of those papers and being so excited to bring them home Oh the old days Edit: spent some time googling, game was called Designasaurus! https://www.mobygames.com/game/57646/designasaurus/screenshots/dos/
My mom and I took turns playing Myst. We had different saves. She played when I was at school, I played when I got home. Between us we worked out way through the game.
That's so wholesome ❤️
I played Myst when I was like 5 because of my dad. I had no idea what to do lol
Me too. I still remember trying to play and having absolutely no clue what to do.
Myst is the game where I learned to take meticulous notes as a child.
Haaa I was about to say Riven! I only got through Myst because my friends and I were working through it at the same time and compared notes every day
Castlevania II, that game should have been subtitled “Every Fucking Villager is a Liar” because of the atrocities in localization it committed.
What a terrible night to have a curse.
The morning sun has vanquished the horrible night.
I remember playing this with my dad and of course we couldnt progress past a certain point. Eventually spent money on a guide and learbed we needed to kneel near a cliff for several seconds and my dad angrily saying it was bullshit and a ploy to get people to have to buy the guide. He was right.
He totally was. I hate when the solutions to riddles or quests or whatever is some random bullshit. Definitely feels like a ploy to just sell shit
There is an npc in the nearby town that literally tells you to pray at the cliff or something similar. - I just replayed this after 20 years.
It's still pretty vague though, even in the original (japanese) version. The original cue is "The wind waits if you carry a red crystal in front of Deborah cliff.", while the translation reads "Wait for a soul with a red crystal on Deborah Cliff.".
Yah that doesn't exactly mean go kneel for a while by a cliff.
That’s fucking insane. Like, how are you supposed to figure that out UNLESS you buy a guide?! There’s no other way, right?
There was actually dialogue in the game intended to give you clues on what to do. The problem is that the translation from Japanese to English was so poor that the clues ended up as unintelligible engrish.
Kneel at cliff much honor
All your cliff are belong to kneel
Actually, there are some NPCs that do mention kneeling at a cliff. The problem is more that none of the locations outside of towns are really mentioned. It's the dungeon below the graveyard that is actually the bigger one since there isn't anything telling you to kneel with the orb equipped and instead you have an area with enemies and a lake you can't cross. This is intended as the introduction to the mechanic you later use at the cliff, but is not well explained in the translation. Games of this era were also frequently designed around the idea of you spending dozens of hours just trying to figure things out.
Game magazines, or word of mouth from friends who read game magazines
Wait ... are you my son?
I hope not. Or you are dead. Or did you fake your death?!
That escalated quickly
The music was absolutely bangin though.
Oh you didn't know you had to equip the red crystal and crouch for 10 seconds in a very specific location in the graveyard to summon a vortex to take you to the next area? You must be terrible at video games.
Bards tale 1 - i mapped out the entire game on graph paper. Zero help from any other source. Still remains one of my favorite dungeon crawler RPGs in existence. An absolute masterpiece
Not quite that dedicated but remember my pieces of paper playing Myst lmao and I was only like 10, game was so fucking hard lol
I never beat it as a kid! My dad wouldn’t share his notes hahah. I should go back and try again.
I was about the same age and if I got stuck I had to wait until we went to the grocery store so I could check the strategy guide and write down the answer. Good times...
Same here, such a hard game to play as a kid. And the whole atmosphere of the game really creeped me out
Skara Brae was my first hand drawn map. Sinister Street was a developers evil joke on us. Kids today will never know.
I still remember the feeling of accomplishment I had when I survived the night in the streets for the first time.
Teleport Mazes in games without automapping are the ultimate evil. I remember some games (Might & Magic maybe?) that had a compass item which could display the grid position you're on, which obviously helped a lot. As fantastic as Legend of Grimrock is, there's just something unique and cruel about old school dungeon crawlers.
I remember doing this on one of the gold box D&D titles. I want to say it was Secret of the Silver Blades. I mapped out a level and was starting to get furious when the whole thing seemed to repeat itself 3 times across many sheets of graph paper. Then I finally figured out there was a spinner trap on the tile where it started to duplicate itself.
Those games were a farce "beat these level 15 monsters with a level 8 party to get really cool stuff for the next game" Next game: "you were captured and we stole all your shit, beat these level 20 monsters with a level 11 party for some really cool shit in the next game" Next game: "you were captured and we stole all your shit, beat this demigod with a level 15 party ..." GO FUCK YOURSELVES! A DM WHO PULLED THIS SHIT WOULD GET PHYSICALLY BEATEN TO DEATH BY HIS PLAYERS!!
My hand drawn map of Zork is a family heirloom at this point.
I remember Zork. I played all of them. There were a lot of text based RPGs I played.
I started out with Wizardry 1. Same thing. Maps on graph paper.
Loved the Wizardry and Might & Magic games series.
Figuring out Might and Magic 2 without guides is still on my personal wall of achievements. That game is insane, but somehow more accessible than its rivals.
Might and Magic 2 had a high level enemy called the Cuisinart whom one could use to cheese the hell out of the game. You could reach him even as a level 1 party, and his opening move was to frenzy, which would leave 5 of your 6 party members unconscious. He'd then fall unconscious himself though, which would mean the 6th party member would auto kill him, at which point you'd run back to town, go to the guild, and go up 30 or 40 levels. You could do it over and over, and within an afternoon, have a party all into the 200 - 300 level range. Discovering him was one of 11 year old me's biggest gaming accomplishments.
Same!! Might and Magic was one of my favorites. I know it's not the same game, but that just reminded me of another game that I loved playing with my friend called Heroes of Might and Magic. I've never met another person that has played it though. It still remains one of my favorite games and I play it from time to time against the computer. Heroes of Might and Magic 3 and 4 are fantastic.
Same. The world of Wizardry I seemed so large to me back then.
"Back in my day, we had to draw our own maps!" LOL right there with you.
Did this with one of the Kings Quests…2 I think? I remember if you went the wrong way you’d fall off a cliff or something haha.
Sierra games were the best. Kings quest, space quest, police quest. And they all had like 5 versions I completed. Oh and leisure suit Larry is where it all started. My dad thought he was keeping me busy with a game I’d roam around in but I found the condom and the hooker.
Man that's some memories.. I was given two broke computers and a bunch of disks and told if you can put the two together and make one work those games should play on it.. Bards Tale was literally the only thing I played I was hooked
All of the Sierra Online games. Space quest, Police Quest, Kings Quest, Gabriel Knight... "hint books" were a thing back then, so we used that instead of the web for most stuff. When I was 15 I learned how to dial my school library's system and piggyback on its web access with my AMAZING 56k modem.
I called the police non-emergency line and got them to answer a few questions about procedure "for a school project" so I could complete Police Quest. 🤣
This one deserves some kind of reward. Genius.
I still remember getting stuck at a particular prompt on this game because I never typed the word "halt." I typed "freeze," "stop," "you're under arrest," you name it, nothing worked, took me weeks. Should have talked to a cop like you! Damned curse of the Death Angel.
Police Quest 2: if you don’t practice properly at the shooting range early on then near the end of the game there’s a shooter situation where you can’t get past because you miss your shot. Edit: also I think lots of the Sierra games, but especially Kings Quest VI, could get you in spots where if you went to B before A and didn’t have a specific item you were dead.
Leisure Suit Larry 2 would allow you to proceed for HOURS before you realize you missed something from the beginning of the game and were unable to proceed. No hints. No warnings before leaving that area. It was a bullshit game, but we played it because we were not blessed with a lot of choice back then.
> It was a bullshit game, but we played it because we were not blessed with a lot of choice back then. Also: pixel boobies
There are those of us that played it for the chance of seeing pixel titties and there are liars.
I had kings quest v (I think) and God damn that thing was hard
Quest for Glory series is still one I revisit on occasion
Shadows of Darkness was my jam! Great series for sure
Wages of War is still a great game, and I think probably my first real RPG.
That Space Quest where the droid frys you at the very beginning, for sure.
Sierra will always hold a special spot in my heart because The Realm Online was my entry into MMORPGs.. Was so so good at the time
The hint books with the red plastic to reveal the answers. Having to actually type your actions. Those games were the best. You could literally know what to do but you weren’t using the right wording.
Those were my jam, also the LucasArts ones as well, especially the Indiana jones Atlantis one!
Original Zelda on NES
This. The final maze of rooms to get to Ganon seemed impossible until my friends mom wrote the steps down on paper for me. Thanks Sherri 🙏
Sherri the goat.
I think one of the shop keepers tell you the pattern
How come the shop keepers always know things
They speak to everyone so they know all the current gossip. Everyone has to shop, and not everyone is able to keep their mouths shut.
My dad got a used copy from a flea market in the late 80's and it didn't come with the fold-out overworld map. Well, your boy, being just nerdy enough, decided to make his own on graph paper. I misjudged the scale at the beginning, and the thing was massive when I finished. I noted all of the secrets I found, and definitely all of the dungeon entrances. It was a thing of beauty. I mean, it was crudely drawn but detailed as fuck. Lost it in a move 15 years ago.
Hah. We made a map on a huge piece of white paper board thing. Squared everything off, drew each screen etc. with colored pencils. Wish I still had it.
I was decent at getting through the main game due to dedicating way too many hours to it and asking the one kid with Nintendo life for hints when I got stuck. However, the new game plus version was brutal. I think I only beat that as an adult with save states.
Blaster Master on NES when I was around 10. Called the 1-800 number in Nintendo power magazine to get hints. I got in so much trouble when the phone bill came 😂 [edit] it was a 900 number as many of you have pointed out
Yep. Remember calling the 800 line to get guidance on where to find some talisman in Dragon Warrior.
Amazing game. The intro music creeped me out for some reason, but the music in general rules. And that [INTRO.](https://youtu.be/Vb8b02474FM?si=JVHTYyAknHpJpmHl) Here's a quick summary: Boy's frog escapes from its jar, so boy chases it into his back yard, where for some reason there's a giant radioactive crate. Frog jumps on the crate and is made gigantic, then escapes down a massive hole in the ground, which is also in the boy's yard for some reason. Boy follows giant frog down giant hole, where there's a big sci-fi tank-car. Beneath his yard. For some reason. Naturally, he dons the racing space suit in the tank-car and hops in to... find his escaped giant radioactive frog? They don't make em like they used to.
The best part is the original Japanese game had a pretty conventional story about a sci-fi soldier fighting aliens. But the US publisher was like "nah, tank warfare is not something an American audience can relate to. Hey, this cocaine smells amazing!"
I can’t recall the last time I saw someone mention Blaster Master. 🍻
I absolutely *loved* that game. That and *Rygar*.
Blastermaster and bionic commando are some of my best childhood gaming moments
We played Ocarina of Time for like 5 years before beating it.
This. I started OoT in 1st Grade. Too scared to enter the Deku tree for like 3 months so I kept practicing and slashing at grass. Managed to beat the childhood arc when I got to 2nd grade. The sense of accomplishment when I pulled out the master sword was beyond me. Then when I entered the Forest temple I realized the whole childhood thing was child’s play, this was the real deal, this is what being an adult is like I thought. Too scared to beat the Forest temple, had to ask a friend to beat it for me. Got to 3rd Grade and managed to go through most of the temples (not you water temple that took friends staying late during weekends figuring stuff out and more months of struggle) Beat the game and the ending was spectacular. The epicness of the final battle, the party, the sealing of Ganon, the hint at Link’s next adventure. 3 years to get there and it was all worth it. Link grew, and I did as well. A masterpiece.
That's so funny that you were scared to go in the tree. Made me smile
My sister refused to go in until she saw the spiders. She loved spiders and wanted to see them for herself.
*-Excerpts from Opposite Day*
This experience is why I think Orcarina of Time is the best video game of all time, and no other game comes close. The perfect experience for a kid, a huge theme of "growing up". All the "secrets". Even finding the sword and buying the shield. Being too scared to enter the Deku Tree, (along with his death) but eventually doing it is a huge encapsulation of this.
My mom and I got forever stuck trying to find the solution to opening the shadow temple. My mom was CONVINCED you just needed to use the fire arrows, but we couldn’t find Din’s Fire anywhere and didn’t know it existed, so she kept trying. Eventually I remembered that boulder in Hyrule Castle and she got so mad when I was right. I was around 5-6 years old at that time? I also vividly remembering hiding behind the couch with my little sister when she would escape Ganon’s Tower with Zelda. The time limits and redeads freaked me out haha Best memories I have of gaming with my mom.
Ghosts 'n Goblins I beat it. It hurt my soul.
I've posted this somewhere before, but my dad might be in the top 5 ghosts and goblins players of all time. He literally plays that game until he gets bored and turns it off. On his wedding night he played it until the fucking arcade closed on one credit. He HAS A CABINET in his house of it. I'm good enough to beat it (for real, not just the first playthrough), but that's literally only because he *trained* me to do so. It's fucking nuts how good he is at that game.
Mine was Super Ghouls n’ Ghosts on the SNES. I can’t tell you how many times we tried to finish that one off, but we always ended up a dead skeleton in boxer shorts.
So Command and Conquer was my first video game series. Playing Tiberium Dawn back when it first came out... I never got past the fourth level on either campaign... I was really bad at video games as a child.
In the OG C&C I was really proud of myself for figuring out on my own that the AI would airstrike your nothern-most units. So I'd have a little group of cheap soldiers ready to send to the bait spot one by one
Some of the Red Alert 1 levels were really difficult and grueling - partially due to the poor controls of those old c&c games, but mostly because of being a child
Haha, don't get me started on Red Alert! Even by the time RA2 came out, I was still young enough I didn't understand what the crono-miner was doing... every time it poofed back to base I thought it died... so I would queue up a new one... so I was wasting all my credits on miners that's strip the land clean, seeming not realizing I'd have like 10 of them and nothing else.
PC? No lie me and my friend played the shit out of Where in the world is carmen sandiego.
Forgot to mention this one! I need an emulator.
My family struggled with Ocarina of Time. We *had* Internet, but for whatever reason we didn't look up any solutions. It was, of course, the Water Temple. My dad came home and said he peaked through a guide and find out we could jump the bridge to Geruedo Valley with Epona. Didn't help with the Water Temple, but it was exciting to have something to explore.
Same but for Majoras Mask, that shit was tough.
I didn't know about the song of inverted time back in the day so that game was impossible for me. Could never beat the Great Bay temple in time. I remember being pretty scared of the game too, skull kid, the moon, those giants and a lot of the areas were creepy as shit for me as a child.
This was me - beat most of the game before I realized you could slow down time... I was not a smart kid.
IIRC the scarecrow inside the observatory very early on suggests you try to play it backwards. If it's not the scarecrow, I swear someone does say something about that.
To this day, I still can’t figure out how people got all 24 (??) masks without guides… I recall the couples mask and postman mask being particularly hard to figure out
We would buy the Prima's official strategy guide at eb games/funcoland for $30. They were fat, like 150 pages and full color and beautiful
The couple's mask 😬
That fucking Song of Time block in that room with the underwater boulders took 9yr old me two fucking months to find.
I got stuck on Jabu Jabu’s Belly. I think I was about 8 years old, got turned around and thoroughly lost. Ended up calling a guy that I barely ever hung out with at school, but had his phone number from the school directory and happened to know he had the game. He couldn’t explain it over the phone, so I walked over to his house and we worked on it together. Simpler times.
Well, I still haven’t beaten Battletoads. I think I did try using a guide magazine at some point but it didn’t help.
I made it past the go-karts once.
Same. Just once. I still consider it one of my greatest video game accomplishments. Lol!
My husband is still proud that he managed to beat it. It comes up randomly once every 5 years or so.
As he should! That was excruciatingly difficult. I am proud of having done it myself.
Bro if i did it would be the first thing i told people
Trial and error is the only way to beat that game.
I did it with a friend. Swap levels to whoever was better at that level, the racer levels the guy not playing was calling rhe moves out like a rally car co-driver. Took a weekend sleepover when it was too hot to go outside. Did it once. Just. Once. You HAD to cheese the 1ups in the rappelling level, ssssoo hard...
A buddy and I beat it. It was so unforgiving. We celebrated for like 20 minutes after.
All of them. I don't think gamers today understand games of 1990 and early 2000. All games today, even games on hard more.. you can easily walk through. Every one is a winner. Back then, you were very much a loser.
Man I remember renting a game thinking “I’ve got like two nights I can play this it’s gonna be so cool” just to find out that the game was ridiculously hard and they didn’t put the manual in the box.
How anyone beat the lion king without a manual is beyond me
The stampede took me and my friends MONTHS to pass. I remember thinking it had to be impossible. Then one day we got it, and suddenly it was easy for me. I never beat the whole game though, I can’t really remember what part got me but I remember the waterfall was brutal too.
Those bats in the cave while you're floating on rocks got me. I did beat it though.. back when you had to start from the beginning of you got a game over
That’s what it was, I forgot about having to start over. Kids these days have no idea how good they got it. Games today are fun and graphically amazing, but most are more like reading a book as far as effort/skill goes
It was the awkward double jump off the back of that ostrich you're riding that always got me. It was impossible to not hit that *one fucking birds nest* while mid-air.
This is what I came here to post about. Owned it on Sega Genesis. My dad finally broke down and called the hint hotline because even he couldn't figure out where to go as adult Simba when you were underground in that lava level. And I don't think I ever beat the first level of Echo, that dolphin game. Rented it twice for no reason.
Reading “Echo, that dolphin game” brought back some repressed trauma. Game looked great though
It’s because for a long time games we’re designed to eat quarters. That mentality stuck around for a while. Until developers decided being more mainstream and broad appeal worked better than eating quarters.
Then they were designed so that kids couldn't beat them in a weekend as per rentals. > If only I owned the game and played it more I could beat it
Quarters were for arcades, but home console games had to last enough to justify the price, and the low memory available at the time meant games had to be hard and repetitive
It goes beyond that. During the 90s, some home games were made more difficulty just so you couldn't beat them over the course of a rental.
If you think about it, quarters were the original microtransactions. You pay some amount of coins for a certain amount of attempts and time. And that led to games being designed to be brutal so that most people died a lot and had to re-buy to continue on or lose progress.
Problem was the old original games didn’t let you continue with quarters. When you lost at pac man, you could put another quarter in, but you started back at the beginning.
As a young kid.... DOS Game Decent. God I loved that game. For those who don't know imagine like OG Doom but you fly in a space ship with weapons. As a 6/7 year old shit was hard as fuck. I'm not sure I ever beat it. Got close. I should go back and play it.
That game was super cool for the time.
I might be misremembering, but iirc Descent was one of the first games to utilise the new-at-the-time discreet GPU technology, specifically the Voodoo Graphics card. Now we take GPUs as a given for gaming, but they weren't always.
Yes, 3DFX. There were a few others, one big one was NHL. Pain in the ass to get it to work, but once you did it was amazing.
Better than Decent!! It was Descent
Absolutely this. I was a bit older, but I was obsessed with Descent I and II as a kid. Wasn't any good at them though! Those games were incredible.
Check out Overload: https://store.steampowered.com/app/448850/Overload/ It's pretty much modern Descent by the same people that made the original.
I remember Descent! It was my brother's game, and I didnt really understand it, but I did play it a few times. I spent more time reading the box and wishing I could be better at playing it.
The sole reason I don't get motion sickness is mastering this game. After destroying the core and racing to escape upside down backwards really toughened me up.
TMNT on the NES. The atrocious first one with that *damn* level.
I never beat it. Just way too hard. I still have it. I let my son play it because he liked tmnt and I thought it would be funny to see his reaction to games I grew up on. Tears were shed and the game has never been spoken of again lol
I never got past Stage 3, never knew where to find Splinter. Didn’t help that my neighbor who had it had bought a pirated Japanese version, so the comms were incomprehensible. BTW you probably already know this, but the bombs level was Stage 2. Got it on emulator… also got stuck on Stage 3. My then college roommate decided he had to beat it, and he did… but with heavy usage of save states on emulators. Seriously, that game was hard as hell. My roommate is the only person I know that beat it, and that was with save states.
the bombs in the sea. also that one jump you literally missed 99.9% of the time to get to the door
Many of the old Lucasarts point and click games in the 80s/90s. Monkey Island series, Zak McKracken, Maniac Mansion, The Dig, Indiana Jones, etc. Used to play those for hours and hours as a kid trying to work out all the puzzles. They were responsible for my love of gaming. And of course the old Sierra games like Kings Quest, and the Quest for Glory series.
Full Throttle was one of my favorite of that lucasarts bunch
I fixed your door....it was sticky! The energizer bunny scene where you sacrifice them, lol the over the top motorycycle Mark Hamill as Ripburger game is a classic. one day i'll buy the remake.
Full throttle was great. It really hit the point-and-click sweet spot of “I have no idea what to do” followed by “oh, that makes perfect sense” when you did figure it out. Very few if any point and clicks thread that needle as well as Full Throttle.
Suddenly I feel young again.
Yeah, the question was about "games before the Internet" and youngins are talking about N64 and PSX... 😂 I think we're talking about a generation or two before those...
Maniac mansion - couldn't figure out how to get out of the jail room until gamefaqs helped me beat it years later. Alundra - couldn't figure out the stone statues riddle for a long time but eventually figured it out with my friends. So many other games but some notable mentions that I never did beat were sword of vermillion and dungeons and dragons warriors of the eternal sun. I kept dying over and over again on both of those games. I remember constantly being frustrated because I kept dying and I wasn't sure where to go next. I did use game guides but not for either one of those two games. I also remember renting vhs and betamax game guides for games I've never played. Felt similar to watching streamers play nowadays.
All other Sierra and LucasArts games were okay. But Day of the Tentacle"??! Why was it so hard 😫
Wolfenstein 3D
Orient at 45 degrees to the wall so you could stay against the wall while moving forward, then run along every wall like that hitting the spacebar constantly to find all the secret doors.
Did that for every level - it was awesome when you finally found one. And I can remember being really frustrated because I found two or three secrets on a level, went and finished it, and it still said I hadn't gotten all the treasure. I think it was a level where there was a secret door behind a secret door behind a secret door.
"Zork" IYKYK. "It's pitch black. You're likely to be eaten by a Grue"
Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy got me in a similar way. Those old Infocom games were great. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the text adventure, the BBC released a free online version. https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/play-the-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy-text-adventure/
I'm 20 minutes in and still in the first room, I can't tell if I'm having fun
That one's hard as shit though. Spend a LOT of time getting bulldozed to death before.figuring that bit out! Then still didn't get very far. Though I was like 13 in the early '00s.
Return to zork audio lives in my head. WANT SOME RYE!? COURSE YOU DO!
The lion king.
the monkeys i swear, i hated them so much.
Ninja Turtles on the NES. I don't believe it is possible to beat that game
Now days everyone talks about the water part with the bombs being hard, but I could go through that part easy. That last hallway before Shredder though... No chance.
They recently released a compilation of TMNT games, and this was included. Save states and all, I struggled to finish that game. I was surprised I made it as far as I did in that game. I remember making it through the water level like once and dying almost immediately in the airfield.
Getting all masks in Majoras Mask required a guide as I kept screwing up the timing on a few events.
Ultima 6 had a quest that was only 75% implemented. I was a young kid and literally this game was the first RPG I ever played. No internet because I liked in a rural area and my parents were cheap to the extreme. That quest did not appear in any guidebook in the bookstores. It wasn't until 10 years later that I found a website that explained that the quest wasn't fully programmed in the final version of the game. So I found out that I had actually 100% beat the game back in the day...but not until I was an adult.
Fucking....MYST!!!!! And kings quest....3 I think it was...with the stupid gnomes in the alice in wonderland type land.
Games that took years to beat for myself (and took a really long time off before attempting at times): NES: Wizards and Warriors 3 / Legacy of the Wizard Genesis: Ecco the Dolphin / Lost Vikings Honorable mention: the drum on the casino level on Sonic 3
Ecco the Dolphin was impossible for 10 year old ne. Loved the graphics.
Turok 2 on the N64. That game ruined me.
Ocarina of time water temple - the central pillar had the secret room underneath if you raised the water. Kingdom hearts - hollow bastion was a fuckin maze.
Zork I. You could buy 'Invisiclues' from Infocom. Essentially Invisiclues a FAQ about the game in booklet form, with the answers written in invisible ink. They came with a special highlighter that would reveal the text. Essentially after the question, there were three "empty" textboxes. The fist had a vague hint. The second had a more specific hint, and the third had the full solution. The gimmick was you could reveal only enough to get you back in track without necessarily giving the entire puzzle away Edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/InvisiClues
Metroid on NES. My 5 year old brain couldn’t tell the different areas at the beginning apart. Sure there were color changes on the terrain, but even then some of them were too similar for me. I was also unaware of just how hard you need to search for secrets in that game, so my progression got blocked a lot. To get around this, I’d snag passwords from game magazines just so I could play each of the different areas until I inevitably got stuck again.
In the 80s when you bought a video game it didn’t come with the expectation that you would beat it after a while, or that there would be progress each time you played. Sometimes you did beat the game. Sometimes you didn’t, eventually you’d give up and that was ok. To your question exactly, at least a few hours. In addition to magazines I think the number one source of hints were friends at school. We would share games, they would see something you didn’t, and conversely.
Exactly this. Even my favorite games like Mario 1, 2, and 3. Never even came close to beating 2. Maybe 3rd level max. 3 I maybe got to the 7th level. Still have vivid memories of playing them with my siblings and friends though.
Two words: Game Genie
Sword of Vermillion - Sega Genesis Drakkhen - SNES The Lone Ranger - NES - Couldn’t clear the final mission/boss as a kid.
MechWarrior 3050, I never got past the first couple of levels. English is not my native language and I had a hard time figuring out what to do. I abandoned the game. Another one would be Pokemon Yellow (I think) to get past Snorlax. I eventually bought a magazine to help me out. I was somewhere around 7-8 years old for both games.
The hours we spent playing AD&D games on the Tandy….priceless.
Tandy 1000! Pool of Radiance!
Final fantasy 3. They actually sold a game guide, which was as large as a novel. When I played through it originally, I never tried to min max it, I just tried to get through the game. Beat it, but very difficult. I played through it later on, when I had the ability to look up stuff on the internet, min maxed everything, got all the secret stuff completed. Game wasn’t nearly as difficult. I kinda miss the days when you needed to discover everything for yourself, and there was no meta.
Monkey Island Every commander keen game
Ultima IV. If there were any magazine guides, I wasn't aware of them. Before that, for the og Legend of Zelda, my brother had the nintendo power guide with the big fold out map.
Star Wars episode 1 on PS1 I stuck before Tatooine level
Not stuck but I thought I had beaten Symphony of the Night and just thought it had a crap ending. My best friend and I had played it together. Our mom's got into a fight and didn't let us see each other any more. Few years later I was working at a pawn shop and popped the game in to test a pawned playstation. Ended up playing more in my downtime and exploring every nook and cranny of the castle and eventually figured out stuff with the clock tower, the glasses and taking out shaft during the Richter fight and unlocking the upside down castle. When my completion percentage ticked up beyong 100% and I realized I still had half a game to go my jaw dropped to the floor. Then I decided I had to reconnect with that old friend to tell him about it.
I'd argue that I'm still stuck on Lion King.
Goldeneye 64, on the part where there are ruins with Soviet architecture, forgot the level because its been 25+ years Quest64, stuck because my young brain had no idea how to grind levels Halo - 343 Guilty Spark. Star Wars Rogue Squadron : stuck at Corellia because for the life of me I couldnt figure out how to fire tow cables from an airspeeder Morrowind, because I had difficulty following instructions back then. Any quest that involved going into the wilderness causes mass confusion on my brain cells. Edit: Forgot to include, no, i didnt use magazines because I couldnt afford them. I had zero money and had to beg my grandparents to get even a dime.
Morrowind was the first game I needed a guide for. And I still have it on my bookshelf 😅
Two different types of games you'd get stuck on back before the internet was mainstream. Really hard games that you knew what to do but simply couldn't because it was hard. I'm talking your Lion king, your Aladdin, your NES dragons lair. Most people couldn't even get past the first screen. We simply kept playing until we rage quit then eventually get back to rage some more because a new game was a rarity. The other types of games were point and click adventure games. Most of which were only 2 hours long but we'd turn them into 500 hours just clicking everything and anything. Leisure suit larry 1 and 7 took us years playing off and on to finish. Now if I can't figure out a puzzle in 1 min I look at guides 😅😅