Video game lessons learned the hard way

Final Fantasy Tactics: The game has a tutorial available from the start menu.

USE IT

Pokemon Amie:

• Avoid this mode when you're riding down a very bumpy road unless you want to constantly be accidentally slapping your Pokemon in the face when the vehicle you're in hits a big bump. (For instance, The first thing I did with a Kangaskhan was slap her poor baby in the face when I only meant to pet it.)

On the one hand, that sucks and I'm sorry that it happened to you. On the other, that is HILARIOUS.

On the bright side, slapping them seems to not have any consequences!

Atleast anything that feeding them macaroons and a few pettings don't fix.

Bravely Default: If you have cool elemental weapons, don't use them unless the enemies you're attacking don't absorb said element!

All games, ever: When in doubt, find a save point. It doesn't matter if you're far away from the previous one. FIND IT.

• if possible, make multiple save files so you won't get stuck in a dungeon/chapter/section of a game there's no back tracking from.

All games, ever: Use the guides to look for rare items that cold easily be Lost Forever!

Tales Of The Abyss: Stock up on your healing items! Boss fights are sometimes wars of attrition.

edited 3rd Sep '15 4:19:12 PM by Misuki

All games, ever: You only get one chance to play through a game without knowing what's coming. Don't use a guide the first time around.

General:

Always watch where you're saving. I just saved over a 40+ hour file of clear data for Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories that was just waiting for post-game content to be 100% complete with a brand new file of Reverse/Rebirth.

Unless you're me, and still have fun anyways. I have zero concern over spoilers.

FTL Faster Than Light:

Unless you're focusing your build around it, a cloaking device isn't a good investment of your scrap. Better to get those last few points to engines or shields, and work on finding repair drones instead.

Shadowrun: Dragonfall (and presumably, the other SRR games as well):

• Pistols suck unless you dump lots of karma into unlocking the advanced pistol techniques. If you're using guns as a secondary weapon, go for a rifle or shotgun instead.
• Blitz's decking skills (i.e. what is SUPPOSED to make up for him being The Load when bullets and spells are flying) aren't all that great, actually. With half the missions in DF having mandatory decking sequences and the other half strongly encouraging you to bring a decker, just make the Player Character your crew's decker and tell Blitz to get lost.

edited 11th Sep '15 10:02:34 AM by Reflextion

Wario Land II:

Destroyed blocks don't come back.

Elite: Dangerous: Plan your journey through the galaxy, because the odds of running into a region of stars you cannot refuel at are much higher than you imagine.

Need for Speed: No Limits:

• Collision physics are still awful. Try not to hit traffic lest you join the hapless commuter several hundred metres up.
• So are ramp physics. Be careful with approach angles.
• Colliding with world objects or invisible boundary walls at a sufficient altitude and speed will instantly wreck your car.

Drift Spirits:

• If the network connection is slightly dicey during a boss event race, you will gain nothing from the race and have wasted fuel instead.

On a related note, holding Up as you jump from a standing position makes you go higher. I was completely baffled as to how I beat the game as a kid until I remembered that bit of the control scheme.

Also, you know how Wario ducks for a second when he lands from a jump? Pressing the Jump button at that moment also gives you a High Jump

Puzzle Craft 2:

• Everything except your workers and tools isn't carried over to the next village.

• Having three plants with rat immunity and three animals with wolf immunity will not make you invincible.

edited 12th Sep '15 8:37:59 AM by TroperNo9001

Dwarf Fortress:

• An export ban is only violated when the caravan you traded the banned items to leaves the map.
• Giving your hammerer a silver hammer will lead to casualties if s/he ever has to use it.
• The survivors make great training fodder for your medics if you have a staffed hospital before violating bans.

Dwarf Fortress

• Aquifers can be really bothersome.
• Using a volcanic crater as an obsidian chamber can be iffy with all the cave-ins.
• If a cave-in into a volcanic tube is used to explore the magma sea a bit, and you discover a magma pool to another cave, the caves are considered breached for the purposes of soil growing fungus.

As much as I hate to admit it...

Dawn of War: Dark Crusade. Regardless of which faction you're playing as, do not even ATTEMPT Hyperion Peaks on Hard difficulty without editing the game files.

For those who wonder what kind of mission would possibly make a veteran RTS player seriously consider cheating... Hyperion Peaks is the most FUCKING SADISTIC mission I've ever seen in an RTS. Oh, it's perfectly doable on Easy, quite difficult on Medium. On Hard?

Nintendo Hard does not even BEGIN to describe it.

It is the absolute bane of an RTS player: a mission without you having a base. There are a couple of those in C&C, so you'd expect that you have to commando your way through with cunning to eliminate a target, or just sweep the map of light enemy resistance, or accomplish the first objective and get reinforcements, right?

WRONG. DEAD. FUCKING. WRONG.

The enemy has three fully-built bases, all churning out endgame units within 3-4 minutes from the start. Oh, and each base is a separate AI player, meaning that each has its own population cap, so you are fighting three-on-one. Oh, and due to the way DoW plays, each player has infinite resources, so you cannot starve them out. Nor can you attack them from behind, as the map is set up in such a way that each base can only be attacked from a single, central area; no matter which one of them you go after, the other two will immediately attack you from behind. Oh, and due to the way the AI is scripted, each AI player only attacks if it individually has an army larger than yours - except if you attack any of them, in which case all three attack at once.

And no, you don't get any reinforcements either. And no, you cannot autoresolve-savescum the mission either.

Sounds like the first mission against the Iron Legion in Battalion Wars. You have a small cadre of troops balanced against every possible threat. Including a squad of six anti-air rocket launcher men and a Battlestation. The enemy's ground forces are heavy, but finite. Their air forces? You will get brief respites from helicopter gunships, but they will keep coming no matter how many your rocketeers blow to Hell, and unless you use positioning just right, they'll usually do more damage to your troops than the healthups they drop will heal. So you basically have to pick up health and then boogie out to the next fight as quickly as possible. Endgame? You have to destroy a massive statue of an enemy leader, while still under gunship assault. So you need enough soldiers at the end to fend off the gunships AND blow up a statue.

I have won it two or three times, but it's a brutal slog that took me well over ten tries to beat the first time, and I only won it because the song I was playing at the time got me zoned in.

Not in the mission I Angrish'd about above. Here, the enemy's forces are very much infinite until you kill all their production structures.

I managed to get through the mission by editing the game files so that the four tanks I get for the mission are invulnerable. Even with invulnerable tanks, it still took me over an hour, during which my tanks were under constant attack with not even a half-second respite. That's how many fucking orks were in the way: they were literally training faster than twice the normally allowed number of tanks (which hard-counter most infantry) could kill them and at one point, the entire visible area around my tanks was literally covered to the brim with enemy troops.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that I most likely scored a thousand kills in that bloodbath. Without cheating, you'd be lucky to gut one base before your forces are wiped out, much less all three. You simply don't have enough firepower to kill them all.

edited 22nd Sep '15 11:42:35 AM by amitakartok

Shovel Knight: Plague of Shadows

• You still don't lose money from jumping into the Troupple Pond... but you're still technically dying, so you lose any extra health gained from drinking Health Tonics.
• Unlike Mario or Smash, you ARE presumed dead the instant you touch the edge of a bottomless pit. You aren't allowed to dip in and burst back onto a platform.
• Remember to buy different casings, powders and fuses for your bombs. An otherwise troublesome enemy can be easily dealt with using the right combination~

edited 23rd Sep '15 9:28:42 AM by NesClassic

My favorite bomb? Compound powder, Float casing and either Long or Standard fuse. Can be used to attack low or high without having to swap cases. And I like the extra bang the Compound powder gives.

Oh, on a lesson related note:

• Keep track of which Arcana you have set at the moment. Had a few times I fell due to having one instead of the other active...

edited 24th Sep '15 12:18:06 AM by Geist-Fox

Planetside 1

• You want to see true sadists, creeps, stalkers, and sociopaths? Look no further than this game's hackers. They want you to have no fun while they laugh at your expense. I hate to use the word "evil", but such a word describes some of these people. They're utterly heartless. And they can get away with it for no trouble.