I died and ran out of quarters at the beginning of world 1-2, so it’s not “most.” The first time I played Super Mario Brothers I had no idea you could hit the ?-blocks for coins and upgrades.
My husband and I made it to the last CD (DVD?) of Final Fantasy 8 without bothering to learn the junction system or improve/upgrade our characters and equipment at all (I don’t remember how it works now, which is why I’m being vague). We promptly got our asses kicked by Ultimecia in the final series of battles, and by that point we were beyond the point-of-no-return and didn’t have a game saved before crossing that point. So we started over, and actually bothered to pay attention to how the game worked, and did fairly well.
Not on computer, but on PS3 – Red Dead Redemption. I played through the whole story mode before I figured out the “paint your targets” function in Dead-Eye. You press R3 to activate dead-eye and then point and press R1 at each target; pressing R2 takes you out of dead-eye and performs the multiple shots.
I was pressing R3 and then just pressing R2 to shoot once. So when I wanted to dead-eye multiple targets I was R3-R2-R3-R2-R3-R2-ing all the way through.
It wasn’t until I got to the Sharpshooting Skill level thingies where you have to kill two different species of animals in one dead-eye that I figured it out.
It’s nice to know I wasn’t the only one who failed to notice this, though I basically finished the game before I learned how to use it. I remember being perplexed with the “Pip-Boy light interferes with your stealth” stuff I kept on reading - I thought it meant when I use Pip-Boy at all, enemies might see me but never noticed that in practice. I had so high gamma values on that it wasn’t much of a bother for me though.
It’s Diablo II. I know this because mine is on Titan Quest: I didn’t know there was a town portal button. 
I had gotten two characters most of the way through the first act, 10-15 hours in, before I noticed a button on the quickbar and moused over it. The problem was at the very beginning of the game, the NPC who explains the teleporter says something like “those who have the portal stone can travel instantly to any portal from wherever they are”, so I assumed it would be the reward for some early quest. He didn’t say I already had this before I clicked on him.
:smack: I’ve been doing the Ctrl-Alt-Del, pick Task Manager thing this whole time.
I’m terrible about this, actually - I love Bioware’s RPGs for the story development, combat, and chance to role-play by actually making meaningful in-game plot choices - but I couldn’t really care less about fiddling with character stats. I auto-level every time, rarely upgrade weapons, and so on.
Me as well. A tooltip does appear in the tutorial, but I think it often gets interrupted by dialogue and such if you go too fast. I noticed the “did you know” during loading, and eventually figured it out through careful googling. Holding “tab” is rather unintuitive.
Nothing major, and it wasn’t most of the way, but in Red Faction: Guerilla, I didn’t know about most of the collectibles. I accidentally blew up a crate while blowing up a building, and so got the “1 out of X EDF Supply Crates Destroyed.” Propaganda and such are also not immediately obvious.
Er… Apparently me too. (In my case, I’ve used windows in several of its forms since 3.1 to today without knowing about that)
Me too. I had read somewhere that it had a light and kind of forgot. then one day I held tab for too long and on popped the light. I’d done most of the game by that point.
Although I have to say it doesn’t impact the ability to play the game hugely.
Not a game, but I found out two things on my ipod/iphone (I have both) recently.
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How to take screenshots (hold the home key and press the ‘power’ key at the top) your screen will flash white for a second and the screenshot will be saved to your ‘camera roll’
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How to use google street view in google maps app. (It is FAR from obvious): Drop a pin. If the pin happens to be in an area with street view available it will have an extra little button on it. Click that button for street view.
I found out number 2 by seeing someone else do it on youtube.
I wonder how many neat little features of ios4 I still don’t know about.
I played Diablo 1 all the way to Diablo without spells or weapons. I had no idea how the skill, weapon or spell system worked, so I had some crappy bow on my thief and no armor. If I couldn’t kill something, I would just trap it on a river or wall until I found the next set of stairs. If I died, I would just abandon the corpse and go a different direction. My entire inventory was full of red potions. I remember enjoying it anyway. However, since I couldn’t kill Diablo, I joined a network game to see what other people where doing, and some guy with an armageddon staff trashed diablo in like 30 seconds.
When I was a kid, I had the game Red Baron, which was a WWI flying sim. I don’t actually know if this feature existed in the game, but years later, I found out that it was pretty standard in other flight sims, so I assume RB had it too: a “time compression” feature to speed up the game and allow you to fly missions in a reasonable amount of time. I can’t even guess how many hours I wasted flying recon missions over France in real-time.
Pretty sure there was a similar thing going on in Shadows over Camelot. I can’t imagine, now, that having the player wait upwards of an hour for his knights to walk from one village to another was a conscious design decision.
Stretching into the mists of time here, but…
Galactic empires - when you attack a planet with your fleet I didn’t realise there was a “launch missile” function which could be used to destroy the gun emplacements which frequently were all that defended it. I would just move my ships over to attack them knowing that I’d probably lose a few each time. After learning how to launch missiles I didn’t lose ships any more.
Similarly playing my first Sierra game, Kings Quest 3, I didn’t know you could save and load games. I had to restart from scratch a lot of times before I worked that one out.
Got through 90% of Fallout 3 before I discovered I could hotkey my arsenal. Going into the Pipboy three or four times mid combat got pretty old.
You can hotkey your stimpacks too. Turned out very useful.
:smack: to both. Going into the Pip-boy drives me loco.
Not really a computer game, but I’ve had my MacBook Pro for over a year now and I just learned that you can take a screenshot with shift+command+3. You can also can select a portion of your screen to take a picture of with shift+command+4. Turned out to be surprisingly helpful on more than one occasion.
You can do this?!?! My only complaint with the game is that the UI was terrible because every single action had to go through the pip-boy! ARG!
Ever used any versions of Windows before Vista? Because that’s been a command since…? WinNT?
-Joe