Video-game related post (sorry, Nancy!)

This morning I've been ruminating upon the subject of walk-throughs/strategy guides for video games. For my readers who play video games (all both of you), I am curious as to your thoughts on the matter.

I don't like to read through a strategy guide before I play the game, or play the game with the guide open before me. That detracts from the enjoyment of the game for me; part of the fun is not knowing what enemy is around the next corner, or that a trap door is directly in my path. I like exploring and trying to defeat bosses on my own, like it would be if I were really the character in the game. It wouldn't be fun for me, for example, to read along and play the game like: go here, do this, press X three times, talk to Character ABC but ignore the others, now press Square, go here, then press Circle. That isn't fun to me, nor is knowing exactly what's going to happen before it happens, e.g., to be reading along and think, "Oh, I see that there is going to be a basilisk hiding in those rocks to the west; I must equip a tourmaline ring to negate poison." That kinda takes the challenge (and the fun) out of things.

But I'm not anti-strategy guide. Many gaming purists regard using walk-throughs/strategy guides as cheating, which I don't for a number of reasons. Way back in the day of FFVII, I had to resort to using a map because, although I was quite clear upon the point that I needed to go (for example) to Mount Corel or Mideel, I was spending so much time wandering around in search of those places that I was becoming insanely over-leveled, and it was getting to the point that enemies weren't challenging - so I printed off a map not to cheat so much as to preserve the fun factor. With Silent Hill 2 and 3, I played through each game once on my own, then used walk-throughs so I would know what to do differently in order to obtain the alternate endings.

Then, there are those times when I get totally stuck. I've tried every attack and magic that I have, and still can't damage a boss. I've tried every path that appears, but I've been in the same dungeon for hours. I need to consult a walk-through to learn that (a) I can't hurt him, I'm supposed to run away; (b) the character that can hurt him hasn't joined the party yet, keep playing elsewhere and come back later; (c) this one section of wall in a random place that looks just like every other inch of wall can be damaged by a grenade, so throw one; or (d) don't heal damage and once Random Character A's health gets dangerously low, a new NPC will swoop in to save the day and rescue everyone from the dungeon. Otherwise, I'd keep trying (and failing) until I eventually gave up in frustration - non-intuitive or arbitrary game decisions flummox me far more than a difficult boss or a challenging puzzle. (I might mention Metal Gear Solid and the controller port switch, but I'm not bitter. Really.)

There have been many times that I've needed a walk-through because (and I don't want this to sound like I'm blaming the game designers - I realize it's my problem, but I don't know another way to phrase this) what I need to do to advance the game is (a) completely opposite to how the narrative appears to be pointing me, or (b) something that would have never, ever, in a hundred million years have ever occurred to me to do/try/go, or (c) something so completely arbitrary that it is easily missed. I don't need twenty neon arrows pointing to a door that all say "Go This Way!", "Head Here Next!" but if every. single. person. I talk to in the village is lamenting the direwolf in the mountains that keeps killing their children - call me crazy, call me kooky - I'm going to assume my next step is to go into the mountains to fight and kill the direwolf, not board my airship, go back to an area I finished 6 areas ago and find out that new quests have opened up that I suddenly need to complete. That sort of thing irks me; I'm all for open gameplay and a variety of ways to go/quest/play, but there are a plethora of arbitrary plot points/actions/quests that I truly wonder how anyone ever discovered, if not for consulting a strategy guide.

Walk-throughs have been invaluable to me when it comes to puzzles. Of course, even though it happens to me all the time, I can't think of a real example so I'll use a fictitious one, but the thing is - and if I may digress a moment, I am very curious if this is a male/female thing; not being sexist, but science has proven that there are real differences in the way male brains and female brains operate, so I honestly wonder if it's because I'm a girl or because of the game - anyway...say there is a puzzle where the floor panels are different colours, and they need to be in X pattern to do this, and Y pattern to do that. I do not miss the fact that the mysterious painting in the ruined wing of the castle had a floor that looked this way, or that the drawing shown to me by the mysterious stranger had a design that looked like this, and it hasn't escaped my notice that the ruined tower in which I find myself looks like both those drawings and has a floor kinda, but not exactly as depicted. So I totally get that I'm supposed to change the floor panels in the tower to look this way to go to this new level and like this to go to that new level. The logic puzzle/brain-twister part of the equation has never been my problem - say that every time I step onto a floor panel it turns from Colour X to Colour Y, but also that step causes adjacent panels to turn to Colour Z. Well, it's never been that hard for me to figure out where to step/how to move/in what order to step on panels to turn the whole floor red, or the whole floor blue, or the whole floor white. What is difficult for me is figuring out how to get the panels to change in the first place! I will try stepping on them, hitting them with every different magick I have, I will wander everywhere, endlessly, and not find a lever, or a switch, or a wheel, or ANYTHING that will make the floor panels change. I know I'm supposed to change them, I know to what they're to be changed, I understand that I have to change them to get to a new area, I can figure out the (if you will) Rubic's Cube part of the puzzle, but I have no idea how to activate the changing. I can't tell you how often that problem (or the analogue of that problem) has happened to me. I know exactly what I'm supposed to do, I even understand the solution, but I can't get the floor panels to change colour, make the character pick up the books so as to rearrange the tomes in correct order, find anything that will dam/stem/redirect the flow of water so that flooded areas are dry...etc. to infinity.

With some of the more mind-numbingly huge games I play, when I've reached a save point/finished an area/finished a quest, I like to read the walk-through up to that point to make sure I haven't missed anything, or that if I have, I can go back and do it without wasting 15 hours of gameplay in order to backtrack. I value walk-throughs for that aspect of playing - I don't want to find out, mere minutes from the final boss, that I can only kill him with a sword I was supposed to find in Area #2, 35 hours of gameplay ago, that I somehow managed to miss (usually despite the fact that said sword is widely regarded as unmissable, and you're not supposed to be able to leave the area without finding it - I manage this sort of thing often).

But as the man says, "ay, there's the rub!" When double-checking my progress up to a certain point, I often discover that there are whole large swaths of the game that I have missed, that nothing in the narrative pointed me towards, and therefore that I would have completely missed if I hadn't happened to be consulting a walk-through. When that happens, I incline towards using a walk-through despite the detraction from the enjoyment of the game that I wrote about earlier - because I hate to play a game and find out that I missed big huge hunks of it! Still, I don't like the 'dumbing down' that reading ahead sorta forces upon me, so generally, I don't. But when I happen upon facts and sidequests and issues, in the aforementioned 'checking to see what I might have missed', it makes me wonder if I'm 'missing out' by not using/consulting or sticking to the walk-through more assiduously. ????

So - like I wrote, calling on all both of my gaming readers to weigh in on this: do you use walk-throughs? Why or why not? How and in what circumstances?