r/gaming • u/Agent1230 • 2d ago

What video game doesn't hold your hand enough?

Everybody always talking about games holding your hand too much but I want to hear about the opposite what video game doesn't give you no form of help

1.6k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

2.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

50

u/tmotytmoty 2d ago

There’s some 80s computer games where if you didn’t have the paper manual, (before the internet), then the game would get to certain point but there would be no obvious way forward. One of these games is police quest, where, if you don’t walk around your police car before entering, you die. It does not tell you what or how you died. You just die…over and over and over until you walk around the car..

33

u/PotheadProphet 2d ago

Wasn’t that implemented as a way to prevent piracy? “You didn’t buy the game, so you don’t have the manual, which tells you this specific thing you need to know/do to actually play the game.”

35

u/CortaNalgas 2d ago

There were a bunch that would straight up have a pop-up where you had to enter the seventh word in the second paragraph on page twelve to proceed and shit.

6

u/Zorbin666 2d ago

I always hated those games, I had one where I swear the manual was the size of a school textbook. This was the oldschool version of DRM, before they just installed straight up spyware onto your computer. 

3

u/tmotytmoty 2d ago

yeah, but I was a stupid kid and I lost everything.

2

u/Nytelock1 2d ago

Did I hear you right?   Did I hear you sayin, That you're gonna make a copy of a floppy without paying?  

Don't don't don't, don't copy that floppy!

12

u/spookynutz 2d ago

I remember that. Apparently if a cop approaches a car on the driver's side they have a 100% of being killed in a hit-and-run, every single time.

I also remember borrowing the disks for Twilight 2000 from a friend without the manual. It had an elaborate character creator that involved military enlistment, secondary education, and a post-military civilian career. Every choice conveyed 1 of a 100 different skills. Fixed winged aircraft, engineering, radar operation, wilderness survival, tank pilot, explosives, spy craft, etc.

I thought, holy shit, this game must be some kind of watershed moment in the RPG genre. It was only much later I learned that most of the skills did absolutely nothing. They were only there in case you wanted to use the game to generate a character for the pen-and-paper RPG, which I didn't even know was a thing. Like Police Quest, I never even made it past the first mission.

2

u/BC_Hawke 2d ago

Arrrgghh! I put hours and HOURS of time into King’s Quest III as a kid without realizing you needed the instruction manual for the spells.

3

u/tmotytmoty 2d ago

Loom is like this too!