Dumb things you did in video games as a kid.

In Pokemon Yellow when I was around 4 years I went through the whole game using a Nidoqueen, Butterfree, and a underleveled Pikachu. And I beat the Elite 4 somehow! And now in the present I'm having trouble somehow with all the starters evolved and the legendary birds....

edited 23rd Oct '13 1:33:18 PM by Ukokira

In Half-Life 2, I never realised you could throw away the trash that guard asks you to in the beginning, I thought you couldn't avoid aggro-ing him and had to run like a fucker. I must have guessed it was a standard part of being welcomed to City 17.

Curse the ill fortune that led you to me.

Running around like a decapitated chicken in Zombies Ate My Neighbors.

i died a lot.

The Protomen enhanced my life.

I couldn't defeat Riku in the first Kingdom Hearts. That's not a spoiler or anything by the way...I couldn't defeat him on Destiny Island. The first thing in the game.

I don't know how I couldn't defeat him. I just don't know.

"Monsters are tragic beings. They are born too tall, too strong, too heavy. They are not evil by choice. That is their tragedy."

I would only play racing games to see the cars crashes.

I couldn't beat the first level of Super Mario 64 because I kept falling off the mountain every time I fought the boss.

I didn't pass Paper Mario (my first RPG) because I restarted the system when Bowser defeated me.

I never collected any of the Chaos Emeralds in the first two Sonic games.

Your Honor...

At least it's not the battle where the three kids gangrape you

I forgot to level grind in Star Ocean The Second Story.

the Hairyfanx boss fight was unwinnable. XD I ALSO managed to miss every optional party member except Precis.

edited 3rd Dec '13 1:18:21 PM by lalalei2001

The Protomen enhanced my life.

Pretty sure nobody beat him the first time on Destiny Islands. Also pretty sure nobody beat him on rematches without doing their first true grind and a fair bit of luck.

That battle is only a problem as long as Selphie is a factor. By herself, she goes down quick, with Tidus and Wakka thrown in you spend too much time dodging to get a hit in. But once she goes down, the other two telegraph so damn much that they are just a matter of doing the Tech XP thing.

On the subject of Kingdom Hearts: I never bothered with Tech XP way back when. Never learned, never really tried to learn. Granted I never owned the first game until 1.5, but playing Final Mix and looking back a decade, holy shit was I stupid.

edited 3rd Dec '13 1:24:46 PM by TheAirman

PSN ID: FateSeraph | Switch friendcode: SW-0145-8835-0610 Congratulations! She/They

- In Command and Conquer games, I only had one resource harvester. Ever.

- In Pokemon, I had a Blastoise and Lapras in the same team, not realizing the redundancy. I also heavily relied on the Missingno glitch. I was too lazy to level up and catch mons the hard way.

- In Counter-Strike, I didn't know I could buy weapons and ammo in the same round. Nor did I pay attention to recoil.

- I did not participate at all in the fifth generation of gaming consoles, despite being born in 1992.

edited 3rd Dec '13 1:33:55 PM by RainingMetal

The Revenge of Shinobi: I would consistently, consistently, mess up the waterfall in the second stage. I think I died more times on that stage than anywhere else in any video game ever, and that includes Prinny.

Phantasy Star II: I spent hours leveling in some corner of the map (shortly away from the start of the game) that I couldn't get past, because I hadn't thought to go look a bit to the southeast where the route to the next town and the dungeons was.

Super Hang On: I'd deliberately crash my bike just to watch my frame break, then sit on my ass repeatedly failing the course and getting money for it for hours just to grind cash, then build a new bike...and break my spankin' new frame again in the next race.

edited 3rd Dec '13 9:05:22 PM by Ramidel

That wasn't "as a kid" for me (I was 18 when I first played it), and I only first beat that battle a few months ago with KH 1.5

I don't count this as dumb, but I could not read at the time: I must have played the beginning of Pokemon Red dozens of times because I had not learned to save.

Also, my brother wiped my Crystal file because he wanted to play with a cyndaquil, 'the right way' (I always take the water starter). I was at the Elite Four.

edited 4th Dec '13 7:44:17 AM by Ninjaxenomorph

Me and my friend's collaborative webcomic: Forged Men

Oh boy. I was probably one of the worst Pokemon players in existence back in the day. Not that I'm anything special now, but it used to be bad.

1. Give my Pokes completely redundant movesets. Charizard would have something like this: Fire Blast, Flamethrower, Fire Spin, Hyper Beam (assuming I hadn't given it Cut! But that's a whole different matter...)

2. Give a Pokemon the strongest move regardless if it made sense or not. Golem with Fire Blast? Sure why not? That'll learn those pesky Grass-types... oh crap. As a side note: Hyper Beam for everyone!

3. Never, never, NEVER used status moves. This move doesn't cause damage? Complete waste of time! That's not even an exaggeration of my thought process.

4. I've got my Ghost-type and I'm ready to massacre Sabrina's gym. Son of a... That stupid cartoon lied to me!!!

5. To date I can still count on one hand the amount of times I've ever used an X-item.

6. Armbar

7. I still blame all the time I spent lazily chucking cloned Master Balls at everything on my incompetence in legitimately capturing Pokemon. I can still count on one hand the amount of Legendaries I've caught without using Master Balls.

8. One Hit KO moves are just the coolest! Fissure forever!

9. Level griding? Who's got the time or patience for that? Time to clone some Rare Candy.

Stay a while and listen to the tragic story of me as a young gamer. On the Sega Genesis:

Super Hang-on:
The fact that you figured that out could be an achievemnt in and of itself compared to me: I didn't even figure out the money/upgrade system in the first place, which is why I hardly played any of the Original Mode.

Wonder Boy in Monster World: This one is probably in the other extreme; this S.O.B.◊ for whatever reason left me traumatized and unable to face boss enemies in most games with them for a long time afterwards. That guy also happens to be the first boss, so very little progress was made in that game.

The Revenge of Shinobi: Easy mode is quite dissonant from the other two modes, since it gives you 9 lives to start with. I still had to spend a continue to reach the level that takes place inside a factory◊. Watching it on attract mode also left me scared, so I never really progressed past that.

Air Diver: it's basically After Burner if it were in first person. The first game to drive me to tears, I didn't figure out some controls, like doing loop-de-loops, which are required to advance in boss battles - they consist of a dogfight followed by a High Altitude Battle against a big fancy mech. Almost every time I got to the dogfight part, the enemy fighter would get behind and destroy me every time. By a stroke of luck and spare lives, I managed to advance to the next phase, where I was blown away almost immediately. And that was after a lot of attempts to even survive the rest of the level.

On the PC:

Screamer 2: Not a Genesis game, but a DOS game; a simple arcade rally racing game that became one hell of an ordeal in my hands because I could not figure out countersteering to reduce loss of speed when cornering. Result: haven't seen any of the game's unlockables, which require you to beat 4 increasingly longer cups. I never beat the 3rd in my youth.

First Person Shooters of the 1990s: My experience in all of those games would consist of lowering the difficulty to minimum, toggling on piles of cheats and roaming aimlessly around levels. With all sense of progression being totally destroyed.

In gaming, more broadly:

I would turn down the game's difficulty to a minimum whenever I could, and on top of that I would also cheat as much as I could, whenever I could. The above example with FPS games is just one way I did so. Furthermore, the first thing I even used internet access for was...to look for cheats in video games. Before that, I would get them from printed magazines.

And with this history of removing challenge and progression and turning video games into toys, no wonder I grew up to be a horrible gamer. I hadn't achieved anything meaningful until I was almost an adult. Anyone who has trumped me in sheer stupidity and incompetence? That will be difficult.

edited 4th Dec '13 2:11:48 PM by AngelG55th

1-4 remind me a lot of my and my brother's playstyle. Including teaching Cut to Charxxxxx.

edited 5th Dec '13 7:34:02 AM by Medinoc

"And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die."

My first Charizard had Slash, Fire Spin, Cut, and Seismic Toss.

The Protomen enhanced my life.

Seismic Toss was in my Blastoise's move set. I remember it being awesome.

Me and my friend's collaborative webcomic: Forged Men

I think the reason i put it in was because of the animation and sound effects.

The Protomen enhanced my life.

Monotyping my pokemon's movepools (i.e. giving water Pokemon only water type moves).

I still do that more often than not. Don't really see how it's a dumb move, though, since Same Type Attack Bonus. (does not compete against other players)

It limits your monster the ability to deal with opposite types. If they lack any flexibility they become too vulnerable. Furthermore, in many it is just redundant. You really don't need two damage moves of the same type. You can't use them at the same time, so might as well just use the stronger one.

Speaking in Pokémon, I also used to do the same mistake of always using offensive moves. The funny part is that I actually tested that out. My Charmander started with a non offensive move, so I experimented with it a bit, to see if it made any difference. I found that it was always better to just use Scratch/Ember every time than to mix with Growl. My mistake, of course, was assuming that these small experiments in low level battles were still valid latter on.

Also, I would always keep using the pokémons I got in the start. So my final team was still full of early week things, such as Buterfree and Pidgeot. My Water Pokémon was the most recent one and only because I was forced to have it (surf is important).

How many people have mentioned "In Pokemon, I had all four moves to be attack moves."?

Because now I realized that one only really needs one spammable attack and three buff/debuffs moves, or one spammable, one emergency and two supports.

Sapphire was the first Pokemon game I owned, although I was with the franchise from its conception...

I relied way too heavily on my starter back then. Basically I ended up maining my Treecko throughout the entire game and ended up having to grind like hell to get past Flannery and Winona's gyms. By the time I reached the Elite 4 my Sceptile was in his late 60s, with the rest of my team hideously under-leveled.

For comparison, my next highest-leveled Pokemon was Gardevoir, at level 33.

This is why I take the time to level grind between gyms nowadays.

edited 5th Dec '13 11:44:42 AM by Midna

3. Never, never, NEVER used status moves. This move doesn't cause damage? Complete waste of time!

As in including the legitimately useful ones such as Thunder Wave, or just the genuine wastes of time such as Growl? Because that's how I still threat those moves in the latter case today.

edited 5th Dec '13 11:48:09 AM by RainingMetal

Yeah, Thunder Wave would have been on the "Do not use" list. I sold that TM off the second I could.

The only time I'd use a status move would be a sleep move on a grass type I also had Solar Beam on. Read this as Parasect with Spore and Solar Beam.