DAMN.. i peeked into the walkthrough once again!!!
 

How does it feel?
i hate walkthroughs as they spoil the fun of the game... but sometimes i ought to, or else the money i paid for the game will go down the drain .

i came from a generation who couldnt get their hands on one easily ,either you have to order it or call the hint line and ask for ... a hint.
nowaday walkthroughs are everywhere on the Net .. one click and you solved the whole game .. and i know myself some people who use walkthrough from the start and and others who would never by any chance give a peek into them.
for me using a walkthrough is just like my team winning a Fifa game tournament when someone else's plays for me....

i was playing today SQ2 the remake and i had to use the walkthrough twice:pan:, and i felt so bad after it as i already played this game more than 20 years ago and finished it without any help or any hint!.. then i thought i am not the adventurer i used to be for sure.
sometimes i give myself 3 chances through the whole game to use the walkthrough and sometimes i get so stubborn and decide not to use it whatever it takes.

anyways does it feel bad for other adventure players to use them too as it for me or i am just too making a hassle out of nothing!

Yeah, I hate it when you try so hard to solve a puzzle then finally decide to check the walkthrough. Then the solution turns out to be this obvious thing that you missed so easily.

I am terrible... once I've checked it once I keep going back each time I get the slightest bit stuck... I just can't help myself!

Got that T shirt ;( Just finished Still Life and would you believe I had to download a bloody game save to get past the lazer puzzle :\

Using a walkthrough hurts the most if it turns out to be an obvious thing you missed (like Oscar said), but sometimes the solution makes me elicit a "huh?". Then I don't mind that I used one... :D

Although I much prefer to check if the Universal Hint System has a walkthrough. Then I'm just getting a slight nudge instead of a solution...
...if I can manage to stop clicking "next hint"... :frown:

How odd. I didn't know anyone had a problem with it. :devil:

:D:pan:
Cracking !!

For me, I use walkthroughs whenever I get stuck, because I play for enjoyment and story, and the puzzles are secondary for me. If I'm stuck, I get really frustrated and it stops being enjoyable.

That said, I've been trying to use it less lately, and at least use Universal Hint System for a step in the right direction. (In RPGs, though, I hate not looking because I miss a side-quest that I can't go back and do! :( )

Are you me??? :crazy:

I usually wait to check a UHS hint or w/t until I've slept at least one night after getting stuck. Sometimes I see things in a different light the next day! :D
I actually think that Barrow Hill was the only game I played without getting help from either hints, w/ts or friends. http://serve.mysmiley.net/confused/confused0024.gif

Torin's Passage is mine (that I've finished on my own)!

And some others more recent, but that was my first. It felt great.

But my worst experience when it comes to walkthroughs was when I played Discworld 2. When I finally gave up and peeked in a walkthrough, I found that I was to talk to a person that wasn't where he should be. I had for a long time tried to solve a puzzle that was unsolvable due to a bug! That incident made me lose quite a bit of trust in games, which of course is very important for adventure games. Without trust, the walkthrough is never far away.

Well, maybe the female equivalent of you. :P

Me too. Most of my early adventures were Sierra with all their dead ends and random deaths, and still managed to finish them. These days I get stuck on the simplest of games... :frown:

Trumgottist has it exactly right. This is a problem of trust.

Designers win my trust by writing puzzles that always make sense in hindsight. When I'm sure that a reasonable answer must exist, I'll keep trying. If I'm stuck, it's because there's a gap in my thinking, not in which pixel I happened to notice. In these cases, answers may come to me on the bus or the train or overnight in a flash of beautiful clarity.

That "aha!" moment, when I'm walking down the street and an answer hits me, is one of the great pleasures of adventure gaming. My favorite 'aha' moment was finding the last ending of the text adventure Slouching towards Bedlam, and a walkthrough would have completely ruined it.

But if a game loses my trust even once, with just one really bad puzzle, I'm more likely to get hints later on. When it comes to puzzles, an early stinker can be disastrous. Gabriel Knight 3 will never live down that One Stupid Puzzle early on.

This logic goes TRIPLE if it's possible to be locked out of victory by missing a pixel early in the game.

Reading a walkthrough for an adventure game is like skipping to the last page of an old-school mystery novel. The game can still be entertaining on many levels, but it's not a battle of wits anymore.

Agreeeee BIG time!! It couldnt have been explained better without this Example ... cuz that is what adventuring all about ;surprises and twists and turns ...

It's Just Me Then.....:\

The first adventure I solved without a walkthrough was Dreamfall. Before that I would always use one in some measure.
Heck, from the start I played with a walkthrough on my side. A shame really, since my first adventure games were some of the best the genre had to offer, like the first Monkey Island and the two Indiana Jones adventures. There was a magazine in Germany called Bestseller Games and every month it featured another old game. Many of them were by LucasArts. Every magazine contained a walkthrough for the game it came with, so of course I peeked into it from the very beginning.
I think in recent times I developed the patience to play through adventures without ruining the experience for me. I solved both Blackwell Deception and Deponia without a walkthrough. It did help that both of them were really well designed games. I peeked once for Book of Unwritten Tales: Die Vieh Chroniken, but, as it turned out, it was for a rather badly designed puzzle anyway. You had to draw a still life of some fruits in a bowl, I think, and the conditions for solving the puzzle seemed rather arbitrary, so arbitrary that none of the walkthroughs I was able to find were of much help. It wasn't much fun, either way.

Nah, it's not just you - I remember having to download a save game too for Still Life I believe.

The same thing happened with Nibiru:Age of Secrets. That really annoying coloured ball puzzle where you had to move different circles to line up all the colours correctly
What makes it so bad was that there were maybe 4 or 5 circles you had to complete in order to get the correct display of coloured balls, and you didnt know until the end if you had made a mistake somewhere along the way.
I looked at a walkthrough first and spent 15 minutes writing down word for word what was supposed to be the correct sequence - only to find out that something had gone wrong and I had to start again. So - I checked another walkthrough and did the same thing, only to get another error.

Eventually I resorted to a save game, but it's annoying that it had to resort to that in the first place.

I remember playing Monkey Island back in the day (on the Amiga I think), and while those puzzles were totally illogical, after a bit of guessing and playing around with the inventory, you could usually get the right result

How guilty I feel after using a walkthrough depends on the game, the puzzle, and how long I have tried to solve it myself. Some games are boring or annoying. Some puzzles are just there because an adventure game has to have puzzles; they don't serve any purpose and just hold up the game. In such cases I don't mind using a walkthrough. But some puzzles are well integrated in the game and a logical part of it. And if I refer to a walkthrough for one of those I usually feel guilty afterwards because the solution is usually obvious, or I missed some object that is lying around somewhere.

That's exactly how I play - for some reason you become blinded by the puzzle, yet your brain left alone can often decipher it for you in the background.

UHS is a great resource as opposed to full blown walkthroughs if the solution continues to evade to the point of frustration!

The first time i used a walkthrough was the one that shipped in the booklet of granny's garden on the bbc computer. I cried for ages I felt so bad.
I still get a bit upset with myself sometimes these days but I've come across so many occasions where the puzzle is simply so obtuse that I can forgive myself for looking up the answer.

just to make myself feel better! for a certain title (Still Life 2) ... REALLY is there anyone in anyways in the world can finish without peeking (and maybe hell much) into it's walkthrough?!

I see the walkthrough as a "friend" and not as an "enemy". It's there to help, not to spoil the fun. It is a "tool" for adventure gamers. It can enlighten you if there are bugs in the games and you can't proceed because of that. Also when a riddle is "sick" just because it's designer had an argument with his wife last night, the walkthrough might be the solution to that.

I used to only use UHS, but I found sometimes none of the links helped me because of the particular place i was stuck... I had to open several to work out where I was...

And I often find UHS spoils things because the questions you see reveal parts of the story you haven't played yet.

I feel little guilt about using a walkthrough. I just want to see what happens next in the story. That's the main reason I play adventure games. :P I do feel stupid sometimes when the solution ends up being so obvious. I don't feel stupid when the puzzles are illogical to begin with. I try to use UHS when I can though.

Yes, I'd say that's one problem that UHS has. I hate when trying to look for an answer or hint to a specific puzzle, and it has headings for other parts that give the next part away. xD Thanks UHS, I didn't know I would get to go to Australia, thanks for ruining it for me. :P

That can happen in 'ordinary' w/ts as well. Specially if there's a non linear story. The writer of the w/t has played the game, thus written the w/t in a different order than from what you've played it. And when reading the w/t you get information you don't want.

The best way to use a walkthrough (I personally prefer the UHS hints) is to type Ctrl + F and then type the word you're looking for (the name of the object/thing/location you're stuck with) in Find box. In that way you don't have to read too many lines full of spoilers.

Exactly...


Going to Australia is good though! I'll buy you a lamington :D But I know exactly what you mean...


I scroll very quickly with my eyes scrunched up til I come to the first thing that seems unfamiliar and then hit close quickly...

I had to use a walkthrough for the Sirre Games, partly because of their very inventive way of killing your character, partly because I'm colorblind and donot have that great an ear when it comes to music. And in nearly all of Sierra's games, there are musical and color puzzles.

Also, some games have ridicilous puzzles like some in Broken Sword 1 and 2 and some other games. I also am not that good with puzzles that requires mathematichal thinking like the one in the garden in Black Mirror 1. Here you need to work out how the pressure work etc. - I use a walkthrough for this.

Other puzzles seems logical enough and I can get by by thinking logically about them or use my intuition or trial and error.

The puzzles in Secret Files: Tunguska makes sense as does the puzzles in Rihanna: Curse of the four branches.

In Shivers 2, I had gotten rather far in the game, but couldn't litterally crack the safe open. I just couldn't figure out which way to move the dial on the safe.
I looked and looked at the walk-through, but it couldn't help me either....

I think that a UHS-style system is an excellent move, ESPECIALLY when there are fake questions included to reduce the spoiler risk.

That said, the very best possibility is when a game includes gradual, contextual hints. Some modern text adventures have UHS-style hint menus that only show topics that are currently relevant, and I know that the Telltale games also have some hinting built in.

For me if I look in the walkthourgh once, then it's over! I always say "this time I won't look" and for the most part I don't, but if I am tempted and do it once, then it's over! I can't stop using it!

No guilt about using walkthroughs for me.

As has been mentioned , it is a help , not a hinderance. Adventure games are meant to be fun , not frustrating if you get stuck. The point of a game is to advance and see what it offers along the way.

Use it sparingly if you can but a walkthrough is there to help.

I use walkthrough only when I'm really stuck. I'm quite new in adv genre, but I'm already noticing how experience is building up and I need to use those less every time.
When I use wt, i dont feel its cheating. Games for me are fun and if some puzzle is rather maddening (not logical, not explained what to do etc), then wt (or preferably some kind of hint system) can save the experience by allowing me to continue.

All that said, I just started to do something I never thought I would - playing an adventure with walkthrough. The game is "The Moment of Silence"! The reason is not puzzles (although I've already encountered stupid pixel huntings of finding accessible areas and objects) but the speed of game! Really - getting from point to another takes so much time that I can't afford myself to visit places 5 times looking the next "click".
Maybe I'm spoiled. Maybe I'm too impatient. But i really cant understand why gamemakers wanted players to waste so much time just watching mediocre running animation. For crying out loud - just from the edge of the park to own floor takes 40 seconds!!!
The inclusion on hotspot viewer and character "teleporting" would have improved that game for me sooo much.

i agree big time with the case of "The Moment of Silence" this game seemed for me like Riven in rd person perspective:D ... but i tried as much as i can through the whole game to kill my temptations and give a peek into the walkthrough, but with no doubt and with no regrets, later ,i did :D...! the code interpretation for the elevators , and setting :frusty:of the parabolic dishes at end ...