I have finally conquered a 15-year old computer game.

Cafe Society
1

Tonight is a momentous occasion. I finally beat Indiana Jones and the last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure. It has taken me half my life to do it, although admittedly I haven’t been playing it all that time. It has remained up 'til now as one of my biggest gaming failures. I don’t like to put time into a game and have nothing to show for it at the end, and this game has stumped me for far too long. Now, having put the frustration of never seeing the ending behind me, I can play it for all the alternative scenarios since I just played it straight through this time.

Also, I can go on to my Number One Biggest Gaming Disappointment of All Time: Hacker. I know how to get everywhere, I know all the passwords and all the necessary elements to make it to the end, but I can never get the entire document. I 'm beginning to think that the game cannot be beaten. A long time ago I solicited help on that game here and got nothing. I found a walkthrough, but it was wrong. Apparently nobody on the face of the Earth has beaten the game, and it’s 20-years old. I aspire to be the first.

So, anybody else have a game that they just couldn’t beat? Hints and tips are, of course, welcome here, preferably with spoiler tags, especially if it’s a newer game.

2

Impossible Mission for the C 64. Could not beat it to save my life, just kept running out of time.
Years after the fact I downloaded a C64 emulator and got the game again, and beat it the first try out. It was so rewarding!

Funny that you mention Hacker, something the other day had made me think of that game. I loved it, but also never solved it. I had that one on tape for my C64. God I feel so old sometimes.

3

I never could beat the old Nintendo version of Where in Time is Carmen San Diego. I loved that game. I caught every criminal. I rose to some ridiculous rank through sheer time spent gaming. The one and only time I ever actually got on Carmen’s trail I ran out of time. There was no other character it could have been and one bad guess sent me reeling and wasting time. I could have had her, but as the trail heats up one encounters these harmless little booby traps that serve only to eat up your time allotment. I could have got her.
Good Lord, I’d forgotten how bitter I was about that. Darn you, Airman Doors. Darn you to heck.

4

Elite for the Amiga.

5

gasp!

Stay a while. Stay FOREVER! (or, as misquoted by one of my mother’s friends who watched her husband play it: “Stay a while. Stay a long while!”)

I haven’t beat that yet! I have a new mission in life, and I want to accomplish that my this afternoon. Destroy him, my robots.

The only other game I can think of is Final Fantasy XII. Seriously. Everybody else I knew had it, I watched them play, but I kept avoiding some of the major plotlines, so I could play it one day. When one friend finished it, another friend would start over. I was so interested in it, I couldn’t wait. What system was it for? Playstation? Well, after a while, somebody “borrowed” my friends’ Playstation, and it never came back. Since I didn’t own a Playstation at the time, I needed the PC version. Only one problem: I didn’t have a PC, either. :stuck_out_tongue: However, I ended up getting one for Christmas one year, and one of the first things I did, nearly a year after everyone had played and beat the game, bought it for my PC. However, work started up again and I was too busy to play it. My little brother asked if he could play it so I lent it to him. No problem, I trust him. When he finishes, my then boyfriend asked if he could borrow it and play it. Okay. I couldn’t play it on his computer, because, as he put it, I couldn’t “hog [his] computer to play a big game like that.” Even though I lived there, and hadn’t once played the game. I asked if I could play it once in a while, and that was the response. I installed it once, figuring I could play it while he was at work, but when he noticed the icon on his desktop, he tore me a new one for “taking up too much space on [his computer]”. (I am not exactly what you would call computer illiterate and wasn’t then, either. He had more than enough room. Two weeks later, he felt like playing the game again, so he installed it for himself. I still wasn’t “allowed” to play it.)
I finally got it back while I was sneakily packing my bags to get the hell out of that house (not what it seems. Had he known I was packing, I would have gotten a bloody lip. Or much worse.)
So, finally, I bring the game home. By then, I was playing Everquest. So I gave the game to my brother, saying he could have it. He took it, played it again a few times. Then, as I was packing to move into a roommate’s house, he handed it back to me, and told me it was mine, and I really should play it, at least once.
So I moved in with roommate, thinking I’d have some free time to play my game! Woo! But no, roomie had other plans: to make me her own personal Cinderella! Even when I quit my job, and started looking for a new one, she had me scrubbing floors, walls, windows, taking care of her animals, plants, dishes - this place had to sparkle, top to bottom, or she would kick me the hell out. Even though I was paying board. And she was a filthy, messy person - no hyperbole involved. It took me all day and night to clean that damn house. (It was a trailer. In order to clean the floors and walls of one room, I had to move all of the furniture into the next room. The furniture had to be cleaned. The floors behind and under the furniture had to be clean. She owned a cat (plus my own cat), and a gigantic, shedding, black dog that was too big for the trailer and often knocked things over and chewed things up, which I was responsible for, somehow). Pride wouldn’t allow me to move back home with my parents until my mother begged me to come home. I had no pride left by then anyway.
Shortly after, I went on vacation out here to Seattle - which turned into a surprise marriage, and I haven’t left. My mother packed up some of my things and shipped them out to me. On top of the first package was FFXII. Good old little bro! Making sure I got it back.
It’s now in a pile of CDs on the desk. I haven’t played it yet. Maybe I should give it a try? :smiley:

Wow. I didn’t realise that FFVII was the story of my life. Well, at least since 1997.

6

As I have 1337 zkillz (or something like that) I’ve never had a game I couldn’t beat given enough time. There are a couple that I haven’t beaten yet.

Kingdom Hearts for ps2. The final boss seems like a jump of a couple of levels from where I am and I simply haven’t comitted the time to grind through and get the level ups.

.hack (whatever the last one is). I beat the final boss, but to get the real ending you have to slog through a massive dungeon. I spent about two hours on it with no real end in sight. One of these days when I think I’ve got about four hours to spend on nothing else, I’ll wrap it up.

7

I know you could get the entire document in Hacker, I’ve done that before. But then after that you just ran out of time. I’ve never seen a walkthrough on the net for that game either so I’m guessing that it just can’t be beat. We always thought that you had to take the documnet to Australia instead of DC but never got that far either.

I think that I’ll go back and try and play the old Indy games. I have them but never really played them.

8

Oh yeah, the C64 had some of the most daunting games. Took me about 10 years to beat Impossible Mission, 15 for the Zork trilogy and Deadline. Forget Suspended. I swear that game was made by and for Mensa members only.

And after 20 years, I STILL can’t beat Chimera. My robot keeps running out of food or water.

9

Oh yeah, and his horrible scream still scares the shit out of me every time too.

10

FFIV. I played it when it originally came out on SNES, and barely made it to the underground part (but I couldn’t beat the __________ King and Queen. Then I played it when it came out for Playstation on FF Chronicles, and made it to the final boss. I tried and tried to beat that damn boss, but I never could.

11

I have yet to beat “The Uninvited”.

To run it nowadays I have to cue up vMac (a Mac Plus emulator) and load Macintosh System 3.

I know there’s a passage in the damn maze that I have to get into (even though I don’t know specifically why) but I don’t know how to get past the teeming hordes of zombies that guards that passage in one place, or how to get past the barrier-stone that appears to lead to the same passage from the other end.

I know there’s a door I need to unlock that won’t unlock in any of the usual ways, it’s still my theory that the clues about three elements (gold, silver, and mercury?? something like that) must have something to do with that. Either that or the locked box that I also can’t get into.

Never caught that nasty little guy with the keyring either.

12

For me, it’s got to be In Search Of The Most Amazing Thing, published by Spinnaker (remember them?) in 1983. I even still have the manual floating around somewhere from when my mother checked it out of the library over two decades ago.

I tell myself that libraries stopped lending out software for other reasons than my inadvertent long-term borrowing of a manual.

13

I don’t game a whole lot–mostly because I get stuck, then I get aggravated, and then I find a walkthrough and feel like I’m cheating, so I lose interest. The only two games I’ve ever wanted to beat and been unable to were Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and more recently, Jack the Ripper. In both cases, there was a glitch somewhere, I think. I did everything right with Indy, but no matter what, the submarine just wouldn’t go to Atlantis. And with Jack the Ripper, I was supposed to find a camera right in my newspaper office’s front hall–it was never, ever, ever there, no matter how far back I went to retry it (even to the extent of going back about five hours of playing time to make it show up).

Both of these games currently sit on my little shelf of games I bought but never bothered to play, mocking me in their incompleteness.

And for those who aren’t already aware of it, UHS Hints has never failed me. Except when there was something wrong with my damn game. :mad:

14

I remeber that one. I think I finished it but for the life of me I don’t remember how it ended.

15

Hey! I used to play that too. I remember getting really pissed off whenever I had to wake up the ancient old guy, how they made you push the joystick just a little to wake him, or else you’d aggravate him and he’s send you away.

Sometimes if I was particularly frustrated with the game I’d wrench the joystick around on him. :smiley:

16

Elite can be conqured?

17

I’m still working on Pong.

18

Then I’m not so upset about my lack of getting through Pitfall.

It’s been what, like 24 years since I’ve had that game?

19

I got pretty far with it, but kept breaking too many joysticks. I wish it were still available. I think there is a new variant, X Universe or something, which I bought but it was so buggy I gave it away.

20

I remember reading about some woman who finished a Guardian crossword puzzle, after working on it for 30 some years. You might ask her for some help. She is nothing if not persistent.