[Adventurere No.1]

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, 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!

[Oscar]

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.

[skeeter_93]

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!

[Harleyhog]

Originally Posted by skeeter_93

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

[TimovieMan]

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...

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"...

[aimless]

Originally Posted by Harleyhog

Just finished Still Life and would you believe I had to download a bloody game save to get past the lazer puzzle

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

[Adventurere No.1]

Originally Posted by Harleyhog

Got that T shirt Just finished Still Life

Cracking !!

[Fantasysci5]

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! )

[TimovieMan]

Originally Posted by Fantasysci5

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???

[Jelena]

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!
I actually think that Barrow Hill was the only game I played without getting help from either hints, w/ts or friends.

[Trumgottist]

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.

[Fantasysci5]

Originally Posted by TimovieMan

Are you me???

Well, maybe the female equivalent of you.

[Siddhi]

Originally Posted by Adventurere No.1

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!..

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...

[WitchOfDoubt]

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.

[Adventurere No.1]

Originally Posted by WitchOfDoubt

Reading a walkthrough for an adventure game is like skipping to the last page of an old-school mystery novel.

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

[Harleyhog]

Originally Posted by aimless

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

It's Just Me Then.....

[ozzie]

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.

[Manhunter71]

Originally Posted by Harleyhog

It's Just Me Then.....

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

[tsa]

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.

[moonbucket]

Originally Posted by Jelena

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!
I actually think that Barrow Hill was the only game I played without getting help from either hints, w/ts or friends.

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!