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Comment by valiant55 | Hacker News Reader

I got stuck at the age of 6 in Link's Awakening for the OG Gameboy. I convinced my mom to let me call the tip hotline so I knew how to progress.

I was stuck just before the seventh? dungeon where you need to revive the rooster to fly over the pit to the entrance. I had the revival song and level two bracelet but for the life of me couldn't figure out what to do next. After about 5 questions where I answered yes to all of them the gentleman on the line directed me to the town satue.

I remember my mind being blow when I discovered GameFAQs.

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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.

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.

I figured that one out only by luck (I got bored and decided to spin dash), and only after multiple lives lost due to running out the clock.

I don’t think it’s even supposed to be that hard, but the way the platform bounces down if you jump on it gives you the entirely wrong idea as to the solution.

That and the fact that it gates progress entirely using a mechanic that had, up to that point, never really been introduced -- you might have noticed it on accident, but the whole design of the game (go fast from left to right, jumping sometimes) and, as you mentioned, the fact that it bounces when you jump on it, lead you to have no idea how to solve it correctly.

My spicy take is this: that particular obstacle is not "they upped the difficulty", but is instead "they designed this poorly."

Well sonic games are… weird. The actual experience of playing them blind is frankly very poor. You want to go fast but you’re constantly stopping because it’s too difficult to play smoothly without prior knowledge of the level. The levels aren’t designed to be particularly challenging to complete; they’re designed to be challenging to master and complete “quickly”.

Most of what we think of for evaluating levels is from the ethos of mario. Which is probably the right call as most people don’t want to play platformers levels multiple times.

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.

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.

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.

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