Video game lessons learned the hard way

Doom the Roguelike:

• Different classes have different trait trees.
• As a Scout, taking Tough as Nails locks out all of the third-tier traits.
• Don't pull levers in the middle of large, open rooms. There's an extremely high chance they're acid or lava triggers.

Metal Gear Solid 3:

The guards my not want to challenge your Raikov disguise, but the dogs around the base will spot your lack of lip movement and chew you out.

Hah, wordplay!

The Legend of Zelda: Oracle Games:

• Those moments where you have to fly from one rotating magnetic block to another with the Magnetic Gloves are the bane of my existence, and there does not seem to be a reliable way of NOT falling at least once while trying to do those parts
• A more pleasant thing: if you kept using the Hero's Secret you get at the end of a linked game to start new games, secrets like for your Ring Collection can also be used in previously played files.
• Talking about the connectivity feature the Oracles games have is very confusing

edited 16th Sep '16 8:09:12 AM by Jaryl

Elemental Story:

• Sakuyahime's awakening ability is vital if damage reducing skills are not active when challenging the first floor of the water mirage tower. Survive the hard rock section and the minions of the final boss will self destruct, which will kill off club or sylph if they are hit by both of them. Survive that, the boss's attack power will skyrocket while the hard rock disappears.
• Zenobia's dark element grafting is not that much useful against the light mirage tower boss. Rebecca is useless unless ability card "hard rock reduction" of at least level 3 is used if Zenobia is brought along.
• Do not ever trigger the danger zone of Morgan La Fae. Not even Themis's barrier from her 2nd skill can save you. Athena's 3rd skill do help even during hard mode, but Zenobia's 2nd skill must be used at least once to ensure the fire element grafting grants extra damage.

Pokémon Alpha Sapphire: Unlike in classic Gen 3, the Elite Four took some major levels in badass while you were out playing the Delta Episode.

Until Dawn:

• Just because the therapist is a smarmy asshole doesn't mean your answers won't be important later.

Space Station 13

• Not EVERY player is devoted to doing their job.
• Pay attention to what fellow crew have to say, or else be caught in a deadly explosion.
• Do not trust wormholes; do not trust telecrystals.
• Janitor:
  • Always wear galoshes: these keep you from slipping on wherever you mopped. They're invaluable for mopping up cramped rooms.
  • Always carry a wet floor sign, juuuuuust in case you need to put one down.
  • Fill spray bottles with cleaner fluid, not water. Water alone won't clean blood off the floors.

adding on to that

• Always take the Janitor's bucket

• Always blame the Janitor for every major accident, if there's no clown.

• If you're botanist, fuck the chef, just make Rainbow and Death Weed and make a black market, and a Max Death Nettle to desiccate anyone who tries to uphold the law

• Space Lizards are Xenos and must be purged in the name of the Emperor

• You're basically another Executioner if you're a roboticist, you will ALWAYS have criminals delivered to be borged as happy slaves.

• Be sure to give your borgs broken bodies as to make them suffer as much as possible.

• Also insult and beat them, they can't fight back.

• Bemoan your bloody fate as it turns out the AI is rogue and they can in fact fight back.

Dishonored

• Do not underestimate the rats.

I can definitely agree with that.

All Telltale Games: Don't take your hand away from the keyboard just because you're in the middle of a conversation and you're not walking anywhere right now. Guaranteed a QTE will appear the second you do.

Pokémon Black 2 and White 2

• Aside from Opelucid City being frozen in ice, the neighboring Routes 9 and 11 are affected from this. It's really neat.

Stop!: Five Nights at Freddy's and Xenoblade are not recognized as "best-selling video game franchises".

Like PANTS but with more categories.

edited 21st Sep '16 12:50:16 AM by TroperNo9001

What game is Stop!?

The Crew:

• They weren't kidding when they said that the cops have extrasensory perception. Stay out of their vision radius, even if there's a building or bit of terrain in between you and the offending cop car.
• Where the game spawns you in isn't exactly where you quit the game. Be prepared for spawns in inopportune places.
• You can get rammed into oblivion by rubberbanding AI bots during co-op events.

Armello

• Anyone with decent combat stats can win Kingslayer and steal the game.
  • Poppet killing the king counts as Kingslayer.
  • Check opponents items regularly — Poppet, armor stacking, any form of piercing are indications they are trying to do a "secure" Kingslayer by reducing randomness.
  • Any River or Thane players are always a huge threat to win this way
• Anyone can be carrying "extra moves" cards like Hot Rot Wine and Strategist, so it's best to keep them away from the palace before their turn starts.
• How to eject people should they be sitting on the palace tiles, the dirty ways:
  • Nuke them to death with spells
  • Give them evade via Wyld's Warning, then attack them (or let the guards attack them, if it's almost daytime)
  • Cast Banish on them.
• Poisoning the palace attacker is worthless in preventing victory — if they kill the king and live, then die of poison afterwards, they still win (But should the attacker and the king both live, the poison will do ridiculous damage when the attacker retreats.)

edited 22nd Sep '16 12:08:11 AM by Malco

Persona 3 Portable

• Your party doesn't get tired mid-Tartarus-crawl anymore. This is great for grinding, but when you want to get tired (so you can take advantage of the nurse's office Courage gain or to get the medicine for that Elizabeth request), it's a tad frustrating. You have to wait until Mitsuru/Fuuka tells you that you're tired before you can leave.

Until Dawn

• Remember that you're in a horror movie. When being stalked by a monster that imitates voices, don't follow strange voices. And don't open rattling hatches.

...did I learn nothing from The Evil Dead?

Final Fantasy 4, and by proxy, JRPG titles in general:

Doesn't matter how many years worth of experience you've got. Toad status still sucks, and if you lacked foresight/didn't level grind your medic quite far enough to learn a spell to recover from the status, you will be afflicted with it at the worst possible time.

Knights of the Old Republic "1"

• Needing Security skill is a pain if you like varying your party, and don't like lugging around certain annoying party members (YMMV) like Mission or T3-M4 to every area that involves a military or research base of any sort.
  • The player character can do it himself and be the lockpicker. This requires starting as a scoundrel.
• Zaalbar is surprisingly one of the best for Computer Use skill.
• Skill points in various characters may be better off placed in Treat Injury instead of Awareness.
• IMO it is not worth trying to make a "Pistol Jedi" player character. Not because it sucks, but Bastila exists, and her stats are decent for it.
• Putting on the Sith Uniform breaks a lot of cutscenes. Not just technically, but also there will be some unintentional hilarity involved. (After all, yer not supposed to have it after a certain point in the game, and the game stops acknowledging its existence after that.)
• The game used to run poorly with screen tearing and frequent crashes on my fairly recent NVIDIA video card. The reason? The game was so old, the video card settings have its processing given to the integrated graphics by default! A minor tweak later, (you lazy-bones video card!!) and the game ran smooth as butter.

edited 25th Sep '16 11:27:50 PM by Malco

If you plan to install any mobile games, make sure that you have enough spare phone memory for initial downloads and subsequent updates. Android 5.0 users, do not upgrade to 6.0 or you'll lose ability to move apps to SD card.

Until Dawn:

• The characters aren't safe until the credits start.

Puzzle of Empires:

Don't give up even when facing opponents with better generals. Good strategy will help.

Space Station 13

• Mechanic
  • MechComp is very complicated. Like, high-level Redstone engineering complicated.
  • And also as a side note, you should make sure you know the basic uses of things like wrenches and screwdrivers before you hop into a role where they're your bread and butter.
• Janitor
  • Mischievous players are more than capable of knocking you off your BITCHIN' RIDE (in Goonstation's case, the Buff-R-Matic) and hijacking it for themselves.
  • Do not attempt to clean the station while the vandal in question is still... well, vandalizing.
  • Likewise, if someone's vomiting a lot take them to Medbay before you go back to mop up the mess they made.
  • Being lazy and telling everyone over the voice channel to just walk instead of run is, for some unknown reason, not an excuse for not using Wet Floor Signs or refusing to dry the floor every time you mop.

Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, and by proxy basically every game ever that takes place in real time (meaning, not like most JRPG titles): stuck against That One Boss? Attempting to Level Grind (and/or cash grind with the intent of brute-forcing your way through with a shitload of recovery items) can only get you so far (and even that's under the assumption that the game in question is one that will allow you to do that).

Eventually, you're just going to have to actually start getting better at playing the damn game! (in this case, pay more attention to the boss's patterns and do a better job of reacting to them quickly enough to NOT get a Giant Enemy Crab pincer to the face, because getting GEC pincers to the face is surprisingly counterproductive.)

edited 27th Sep '16 12:02:43 AM by EvaUnit01