Topic: Checking guides for collectibles/secrets & Guilt

I've been obsessing about this and thought I'd ask your opinion.

Here's the deal: do you find it cheating (or spoiling yourself/the game, etcetera) to check guides
or walkthroughs to find a specific secret or collectible for a game, that is, after searching for it yourself?

I frequently find myself completely stumped in searching for a secret exit in NSMB or plenty of stuff
in Donkey Coung Tropical Freeze, with that feeling that I searched literally everywhere and tried everything.
So, when I just look it up and get it (which, in my favor, might not be necessarily easy) am I "doing it wrong"?

@SeaCocumber Inside yourself look, for only there the answer will you find (and maybe a secret exit if you're lucky ).

If finding it yourself is your one and only priority, then persevere you must. But for me there has to be a cutoff point where it's not worth the aggro and holding up the rest of my backlog for.

The only game I've utilized a guide on to just beat it was the original Metroid. Other than that, I've only used them for certain post game collectables, or timed side quests.

No shame in using guides though. As long as you're having fun playing/completing a game, no matter what you're doing to make it fun, you're playing it the right way.

I wouldn't count it as cheating to look up specific collectibles, but it depends on the game whether or not I do it. For open world games like GTA where it would take forever for one user to find everything, then I'll usually consult a guide for collectables. For games made up of smaller levels like a lot of platformers, then I'll rarely consult a guide for secrets until I've spent a very long time looking for it.

No guilt at all. No such thing as a "wrong way" of enjoying a game.

Cheating at an online game?

Didn't think about that one, I rarely (never) play online.

@RR529 same here, recently got around to beating it. I've really come to enjoy it, but that was partly due to using a map to know which rooms were actually not decoys. (And defeating Kraid since he was just a huge pain for me).

I actually have no idea how people were able to beat Metroid before the internet. I gave it a try, but couldn't find any bosses or many useful items until I eventually started following a guide.

I think as long as looking at a guide or something makes the game more fun, that's all that matters. (And I'm DEFINITELY guilty of doing this more than once or twice )

EDIT: Oh, and Metroid II (the original) is a chore without a map. Once I got one, I actually enjoyed the game.

Me either, but it was the first thing to come to mind as a wrong way to play a game

Personally, I didn't find it that bad.

I use guides fairly often, and feel no guilt whatsoever. It's all about enjoying yourself- after all, isn't that why we play games in the first place? To have fun?

I have a lot more fun when I'm not missing tons of secrets. Doesn't bother me if I used a guide or not. I don't do it for every game, but JRPG's especially are prime for walkthroughs. I'm playing Lost Odyssey right now (Final Fantasy creator's magnum opus on X1 via BC), and Idk what I'd do without guides. And yes, I said guides. I've got 2 separate walkthroughs open on my iPad, and the official game guide sprawled out on my lap (had to hunt that sucker down on eBay just to find one new for less than $50).

It makes the game fun. Especially in games like this- if you miss a key item (like the antidote brooch) it causes a chain reaction where you then fail to learn the skill anti-poison, and then get your butt handed to you at the next boss. Miss that yellow band, don't get negate paralysis, then waste angel plume after angel plume reviving your allies as they get paralyzed and pummeled by a 60ft alien magic worm. No thanks... I'll take my guide.

And games like DKC Tropical Freeze- sure, you may not need it to progress without a lot of hassle but, it's just fun to 100%, and it's almost a little mini puzzle game of itself reading the guide and figuring out how to get all the letters and pieces.... just, a much easier, less stressful one than wasting banana coins on Squawks and repeating levels 4-5 times (personally, for DKC, I do a guide-free playthrough first, then go back with a guide afterwards and plug the missing links I missed the first time around, although I still prefer to find KONG letters myself in my first playthrough- if I miss KONG I'll replay the level to get all 4, that way I open all K temples the first time around and only focus on puzzle pieces on my 100% post-game run through)

yeah, I'm about the same. I had to look up walkthorughs very few times. It's funny how I don't
feel that "guilt" at all when I check for timed side quests and even how to get good endings and such.

That's good advice... to know when to just look it up, as I could miss out on playing whole games while mindlessly wandering around for something I might end up not finding.

Miyamoto commented that games full of bizarrely accessed secrets and such - like the first Zelda - were never intended to be played alone, but rather by players sharing their knowledge and helping each other. Dark Souls allegadly tries to rescue that with the messages left by players on the floor that tell you which random segment of wall to hit in order to find that special weapon

Oh that's something I find very anxiogenic in RPG games in general. That feeling that anything I do will lock out an area and stop me from making 5 side quests, getting 12 key items and missing out on 12 alternative good endings. I like it when a game has a wiki and is divided by chapters, so that there's someway to check what I can miss without having to read through a lot of stuff I could have figured out myself.

Ultimately, the main issue for me is probably finding stress or frustration in what was supposed to be fun and all

As someone who started playing video games long before Al Gore invented the internet, i see guides and maps as basically just the modern equivalent to what we did back then ... if you didn't know how to beat a boss or find an item, you asked someone for tips or strategies, and if you were lost in a game like Metroid or Zelda, you hand-drew your own maps.

Now i simply don't have the time or inclination to do that sort of thing (not to mention if i tried asking kids on the playground for tips, i'd likely be getting a visit from Chris Hansen ), so guides and FAQs and the like serve the role that all those handwritten notes and maps once did.

Yeah it depends on the game, for me personally I find enjoyment of being thrown into a game with no help, but with a game like Metroid as others have mentioned, it's practically impossible with no tips or guides whatsoever. Eventually it can just be frustrating to start the same game over and over and you don't want that to ruin your enjoyment of the game — most important thing of course is that you enjoy the game, guides or no guides.

I'll admit, sometimes I am so clueless with a game I need a guide to walk me through every step, and other times I have just found useful things here and there through the internet that give a slight edge. For example, finding out about holy water in Castlevania NES saved me loads of frustration, though it is sort of a cheap method that left me feeling unsatisfied. But remember, some retro games are cheap, and I think it's ok to use cheap methods back.

Another important thing to remember is that, you can always play the same game without guides later. If you need guides to get you through beating Metroid (again an example) that's all fine, but if you feel unsatisfied you can 'take the training wheels off' so to speak. Practice until you have mastered that game and know every inch of it, or set higher goals/challenges for yourself like a no-death run.

There are some games, Mario being an obvious example, where there is plenty of content hidden away without really ever giving you any clues that it's there, and if you don't refer to a guide you might never realise the content of there, let alone how to access it. I'd never heard of Champions Road in Mario games until I started coming to this site two years ago.