In Sonic 3 there is a carnival level. At a certain point in the game there's this spin bouncing platform you need to move to get past. Many hours/days spent trying to get past that part.

Year later, in college I was thinking back on it and I looked it up, turns out it should have been much easier. Seeing your comment made me look it back up. Apparently it's called "the barrel of doom" and well known.

Before discovering GameFaqs, some games just ended at a certain part because you were lost.

This reminds me of my playthrough of Arx Fatalis, some years after the game came out. This game is a sort-of love letter to Ultima Underworld and kind-of seems to take place in the same universe as the later game Dark Messiah of Might and Magic.

Anyway, I occasionally looked up hints when I got stuck and sometimes really needed them. Towards the end of the game there is a sequence where a werewolf is hunting you and you're forced to a spot where you seemingly must make a very difficult jump over a pit to escape. I couldn't make the jump after tons of tries and the guide had no other hints other than that you had to do so to progress.

Finally I piled some gold bricks I'd been carrying in my inventory forever that had seemingly no purpose on the very ridge of the pit and used them to get just enough of a boost to barely make the jump over the pit. It was weird it even worked.

Later I found out if you ran with vsync off it screwed up your characters momentum in the game and that was why the jump was impossible for me.

Amusingly, when first playing through A Link To the Past on its remake for the GBA, I distinctly remember getting stuck before the seventh dungeon, which ultimately requires you to find the statue in the dark world that corresponds to the rooster statue in Kakariko.

GameFAQs also taught me that it was possible to glitch out of bounds and traverse a specific path through the game's memory in order to access the new dungeon that you were only supposed to be able to enter if you completed the remake-exclusive multiplayer mode.

The final boss in link’s awakening is a multi-stage shadow thing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZu01qH2f0c) with the final one being the arm flail thing. I managed to beat it with sword beams (meaning never getting hit through all the stages, because sword beams only works at full health).

Apparently you’re supposed to use arrows on it, but when I had initially tried, they had kept bouncing off. So only bombs and sword beams seemed to work. It took me a few weeks and many tries, but finally I got-gud and eventually did it. Sometime after I learned arrows do work.

I beat it in a weekend without a guide.

And GameFAQs was a glorious thing in my days; I would print out pages as a kid.

I had a similar thing happen with Link's Awakening, but I had the DX version for the GBC and I was probably 8-10 when I got it. I explored every nook and cranny of that game, but was stuck in the seventh dungeon because the only way to progress was to find a hidden, bombable section of wall. As far as I know there is no hint that it's there. I had already gone through the whole dungeon poking every square inch of wall with my sword listening for the hollow plink, but I missed this section.

I only got back to it on the multi-state drive at the end of summer to my second year of college, when I borrowed my parent's Blackberry to look up the answer on gamefaqs. Then I breezed through the eighth dungeon and beat the game after a decade of not playing it at all.

My kids have no idea how good they have it with parents who understand “hold on, I just need to make it to the next save!”

I think the ubiquity of gameplay videos really takes something away from the experience. I feel like it puts you in a different mindspace when you're "unspoiled" and seeing everything for the first time. And having to experiment, discover, and make progress through only your own brainpower is like, better for your brain in some way I feel, than it is to go running to a guide to give you the answer every time you can't figure out what to do in 30 seconds.

I learned arcade games in the early 1980's mostly by watching someone else play. When a new game showed up, I would typically watch people play for at least a couple hours before putting a quarter up. I wasn't rich.

Yeah but consider that videos don't have the sheer swagger of a 1.4mb blob of text on GameFAQs headed by a lovingly rendered piece of ascii art.

Because you’re playing a souls game and you can only take so much suffering?

Many games these days assume that you will. Minecraft was until recently a prime example.

Of course you know why! Good on you for resisting, though.

For me it strongly depends on the game. A self-contained narrative game or a puzzle game? No, figuring it out from what's in the game is the point. A sandbox game, especially a small early-access one with a nonexistant/incorrect/broken tutorial? Hell yeah. Also competitive RTS and FPS games. PVE FPS and platformers it's not so useful to do so until you're already somewhat OK at the game and you want to do something like speedrunning it.