Sonic 3 was my favorite video game for quite a while, so naturally I got more frustrated with it than any other Guide Dang It situation. When I found the article on TV Tropes, there was Sonic in the picture doing about the same thing as I was, stuck in that very same room as I got stuck in so very many times. The worst part was that I was too young then to know to use the internet to look for a guide.

I'm quite proud of myself for figuring out Sonic 3's Barrels of Doom without any help at all! No, really: After ten minutes of wondering what the hell I'm supposed to do (something I'm sure you all remember), I do the thing I usually do when stuck in a video game area: waggle the control stick all about in frustration (I'm playing on Sonic Mega Collection). Then, I notice that the barrel starts to bounce, and I realize what I have to do. All in only ten minutes!

I think that's the only reason anyone got through that part in the first place.

This troper has experienced several of these in the Legend of Zelda series. Particularly in Twilight Princess. How was I supposed to know to use the hawk on the monkey? And the entrance to the Lakebed Temple? ...Ugh. I had to use a walkthrough for both of those. Plus in Ocarina of Time, I had to look up a walkthrough to find out a: that you have to jump down into the web instead of burning it to get to the bottom floor of Inside the Deku Tree, and b: you have to clear the shooting range minigame in Castle Town to get the bomb bag (as opposed to buying it.)

This Troper and Zelda fan has had this happen to him at least once per Zelda game, at least before he became a frequenter of the internet. It all basically ended after I got online, BUT I have since came up with a scientific method to Zelda puzzles:

Basic Logic

Open Minded Item use

Playing through every Zelda game chronologically released before current one and be reminded of a simple yet easily forgotten dungeon/enemy/boss/item convention

Reading the Freaking Manual

Gamefaq

?!@#$%! <- either an exclamation of DUH! or something resembling a Hylian hero ordering a salad in a loud angry voice at a deku restaurant in his native tongue while simultaneously realizing he's only got a quarter of a heart left and what he has just done...

If still stuck, proceed to assume the foetal position... and cry.

This troper and his five friends once decided to pool their collective love of video games, story telling, character design, and computer programming to create our own game. Anyway we had another friend beta testing it and he got to the third mission where you are required to use a certain character. Said character has a very specific fighting style that relies on drawing cards from a deck and selecting which one is thrown as a projectile. Now the number of the card denotes power level(ace being highest) and the type denotes how it damages the enemy(diamonds slice so they're good against plants but horrible against rocks). Anyway he gets to the level and only then do we realize that we never really included instructions on how to use this character's weapon. Ten minutes later my friend Gandhi(it's a nickname) says: ->Gandhi(programer): Err...this could be a problem. ->Angel(Character and Weapon Designer): You think!!! ->Me(Story and Director): Let's not argue and focus on fixing this, okay?

Deuxhero:High School English, particularly the "symbolism". Does anyone actually figure this shit out on there own?

(insert snarky and anonymous comment about there verses their here.)

Oh god, someone else unable to read any sort of symbolic crappy "Deeper meaning" to books and stories nobody gives a shit about! FRIEND!

You fail to understand. It's not about finding the deeper meaning it's about taking your own ideas and forcing them on the text.

... book-rape?

"Versus".

Sad thing is, This Troper managed to actually get it, to the point that I would have gotten 100% on an assignment if my paper was a little less disjointed. Led to me interpreting one of the poems as a TakeThat against High School English.

What adds more salt to the wounds in this type of assignment is when you figure out a meaning, write as much detail as possible to prove that, yes, you read the work and, yes, you do understand it and, here, this is what you think the moral is, only to find out that you did wrong or get written off otherwise because apparently the instructor was looking for an entirely different meaning that you may not have thought meant anything in the first place. It's like if you read a book about an evil overlord who turns good when he fell in love with a light princess, only to be killed to save her, and you write that the deeper meaning is about true love and how it conquered all. However, what the instructor was looking for is never trust an evil overlord. They're evil.

Non-game example for This Troper where he re-started his computer at one point. What happened next was that it said "System32/CONFIG/SYSTEM" was missing for no reason. Turns out he was attempting to noot from a disk that had said file missing, *WHAM, WHAM, WHAM, WHAM, WHAM, WHAM, WHAM, WHAM, WHAM, WHAM, WHAM, WHAM, WHAM, WHAM, WHAM, WHAM, WHAM,*

On a bit of the same not, He was trying to get Red Alert 3 to Install, It would not read the Disc (It was a DVD Drive too) and kept making Grinding noise, His Explorer Crashed so He restarted.

You have the gift of not seeing what isn't there. Seriously, compare the symbolism to the better WildMassGuessing.

This troper's college professor did this - Because he was under the delusion that "Learning is its own reward" (and somehow hasn't learned that for most people, this is not true), put content that was not ''even covered in lecture, lab, or even on the study guide'' on the exam and this made up a ''sizeable'' portion of it. Absolutely ''nobody'' would have thought to look ahead seeing as the syllabus did not say we would cover this stuff until at least a week ''after'' the Exam, so literally the ''entire class'' got 60% or lower. And yet he ''still'' couldn't figure out that learning isn't its own reward.

This happened to my dad once, in biochemistry, except the reason for everyone getting a low grade was that this teacher was old and almost ready to retire. The next semester was spent at home studying. He aced the next test in 20 minutes.

Where's Black Hat Guy when you need him?

Rubix cubes anyone?

This troper was in a video game class in a college once, and created one hell of a ThatOneBoss, Primordius. The game was in RPG format. Most of your characters have around 300 hp, with the mage having 200. Primordius will happily spam Curse, which deals heavy damage and adds on poison, confuse, and dark. Yeah. He also spends his time using Tera Breaker, which deals enough damage to each character to reduce them to 1 hp, which he always follows up with Grand Cross, auto-KO. Another lethal attack is HellFire, which deals heavy dark damage, which the best armor in the game is weak to.He also has 5000 hp, when at most you will be doing 50-100 damage, maybe 130 from your tank. The trick to him? Use UselessUsefulSpell Vanish, which I even put the little message on the Vanish spell ''makes someone invisible, and spells do less damage, but is pointless, do not use''.

This troper once didn't know that Lothering would be destroyed in his first playthrough of DragonAge. As such, I had to go through the game without Leliana and Sten.

To be fair, Sten is considered to be a terrible character and Leliana is redundant if you play a Rogue.

Micluses. They're the reason 99% of this troper's ''RaidenFighters'' runs end in restarts rather than {{Game Over}}s.

I'm pretty sure the first time I ever had to use GameFAQs (well, extensively) was for Majora's Mask back in 2000.

For This Troper, it was what the page picture is of - the Barrel of Doom from Sonic 3. ''I wasted 2 or 3 weeks on that thing!'' The only thing I had used the site for before that was some help with ''FinalFantasy 1'', so I'm glad I thought of it or I'd STILL be stuck.

RPG Maker game This Troper is working on qualifies. Certain interactions will lead to other interactions, and picking the wrong action (including in a flashback that would seem to have little effect) can screw you later. For example, there is an optional boss who is the Sage of Water. She is a very difficult boss, using status inflicting attacks and a nasty whip. However, if you choose to have your kid self leave the Baby Naga alone in the flash back instead of trying to beat her with a stick, then she will happily greet you and even start hitting on the main character. Seeing as how you can battle her before the first proper dungeon, this can be the difference between recruiting her in the late game due to difficulty or having a powerful ally that will steamroll some early enemies

The MagicalMysteryDoors maze on the final planet in ''Rad Gravity''. Even the Nintendo help line told us to cheat and use the Teleport Beacon to glitch through the walls.

This troper also once rented ''Mystery Quest'' without a manual, and couldn't figure out how to make a certain jump in the first castle. It was not until GameFAQs that I learned that you could run by tapping the fire button.

I once had a math problem, and it seemed like a standard pattern problem where you had to find the next few terms. The numbers given, in order, were 1, 2, 6, 10, 4, 5, 9, 3. The solution? From the book, "the numbers are arranged first according to the numbers of letters in the name of the number, and then in numerical order." So it's basically one (1), two (2), ten (10), four (4), etc. And the next three numbers were 7, 8, 40. GuideDangIt does not even begin to describe the absurdity of that problem, and it was so bad that out of our class, which had quite a few geniuses (including myself), only one of us figured it out, and the rest needed it to be spelled out for us. Needless to say, our teacher won't have future students doing that problem.

In {{Persona 4}}, This Troper was GenreSavvy enough to realize that killing Namatame was a one-way-ticket to Nonstandard Game Overville (or worse). Unfortunately, he chose the wrong dialogue option objecting because it was murder, not because of any lingering doubts, and so still got the BadEnding.

After the Titiboo segment in ''{{Mother 3}}'', I continued on while wondering when [[spoiler:Kumatora]] would come back. I noticed that the boss battles were really difficult, but didn't think much beyond cursing the developers. It wasn't till I received an item meant for that character and saw the gap in the party during a cutscene that I consulted a guide. Turns out they were in an undisclosed location near the factory, waiting for me to come all that time. There was NO indication at any time that they were a) waiting there b) that I'd have to go and fetch them; previously the characters railroaded themselves in and out of your party. By that time, they were ten levels lower than the rest of the party.

ThisTroper happened to be big into Koei's Musou/Warriors games in the PS2 days, but only two unlockables gave him much trouble. In DynastyWarriors 4 Xtreme Legends, we have Yuan Shao's level 11 weapon. The issue with it lies in that in order to acquire it not only for you need his level 10 weapon first and to play it on the highest difficulty in a stage with an impossibly powerful boss...But it also requires you to never fall victim to a near-uncontrollable event in battle: the morale of your horribly-outmatched allies falling at any point disqualifies you from acquiring the weapon. Now changing pace a bit...SamuraiWarriors 2, the fourth weapon for Honda Tadakatsu. It required killing five enemy officers rapidly, so naturally ThisTroper decided to grind for a beefed up version of Tadakatsu's third weapon to make it easier. The problem arose when it turns out the weapon was so strong it allowed me to slay the officers so fast that the game's event system didn't register them properly. It turns out it required you sitting around the corpse for a few seconds until the event ticker confirmed you just killed Generic Edo Period Officer #3 before you could move on and kill Generic Edo Period Officer #2. Neither of these instances were helped by any guides of any sort actually failing to mention these criteria, most guides being mere translations of inaccurate criteria from Japanese(and at times even Chinese) sites. Yeah...

Just to be fair, what the impossibly powerful boss in [=DW4XL=] was? Yan Baihu riding Shadow Runner, a horse that riders cannot be dismounted from unless they're killed or hit by boulders from scripted events(which didn't occur in said stage). While on a horse, all characters are impossible to stagger, are immune to being frozen, and fire just extinguishes itself before significant damage. This meant Baihu was free to attack pretty much any time and his status as a "boss" officer made his attacks cancel out many of yours(in addition to dealing a crapload of damage. Still easier to defeat than fulfill the requirements of getting Yuan Shao's ultimate weapon!

This troper's Agricultural law class has pretty much scared me the fuck away from ever going into Law School. (Other than the fact that it's expensive and I'd have to go into debt to do so anyways.) So the first two "projects" were okay because they were essays and we were actually told what we were supposed to do and were actually given resources to look up. The other two? Well for starters; we were strangely given Project 3 where we had to do some kind of math problem that ''WAS NOT FULLY EXPLAINED'' and the other one we ''weren't even TOLD'' whether or not this was a project and half of us didn't know if we had to sum up a guest lecture (And he thankfully gave us a list of stuff to consult, ie statutes, but apparently ''we weren't supposed to use this!'') When I asked for help on the math problem one he told me "Remember what we talked about in class" and "ReadTheFreakingManual". Dude; my sister's an education major and sometimes the reason people are flipping ''ASKING'' about stuff you talked about in class was ''they weren't freaking THERE'' - Chances are you talked about it when I was ''sick''. Oh, and as for the ReadTheFreakingManual bit? The chapter he told me to download from the website was ''nonexistent''. Checked the list numerous times...no chapter. Not hidden in any of the other chapters, That's right...I had inadequate information to complete the project ''and'' was told to download a chapter that ''WASN'T THERE''. So you can bet when evaluations come, I'm going to downrate the ''hell'' out of that class and call man out. I know, you're a Vietnam Vet and all, you really went through a lot, you actually didn't grade us as Law School Students, but please...don't give us projects without enough information in the sheets. I'm not trying to pull the "My tuition pays your salary" card, but it ''really'' makes us students feel cheated when you don't give us adequate information and are vanishing from your office when we need help.

I was stymied by the parrot delivery sidequest in ''ProfessorLaytonAndTheUnwoundFuture'' (in which you're given a parrot that hops around mindlessly and you have to use ropes to get it to land on a platform). Most of the puzzles rely on absurd trick shots, and you have no way of really predicting in advance which way the parrot will bounce when it hits an obstacle. Given the choice between using a guide or connecting every dot to every other dot and seeing what happens, I went with the guide for most of these.

Similarly, I usually head straight for the guides for the final bonus block puzzle in each game. Not because I don't want to try figuring it out for myself, but because sometimes I want to do something ''else'' with the DS besides that puzzle. If the games had a "save puzzle state" option so I could pick up and put down the puzzle whenever I wanted, as if it were a real physical slidy-puzzle-thing, I might be more inclined to keep at it on my own...

This troper wrote the guide to ''Carmen Sandiego: Secret of the Stolen Drums'' and later did a video walkthrough of the game. What drove this troper nuts was that the game manual mentions an alternate ending could be unlocked if you collected all 450 amulets in the game. The problem? I wrote my guide based on the PS2 version, which only has 449 amulets, something that drove me ABSOLUTELY nuts for a good six years of my life. It wasn't until I found and played the GameCube version of the game where I finally found out where the 450th amulet was. Oh, and the alternate ending the game manual mentioned? can only be seen if you set the in-game text from English to French in the GameCube version, and the only thing that's changed is that the main character has his head bandaged in one minor scene. This "alternate" ending, and I use that term loosely, doesn't even exist in the PS2 version when I later examined the game DVD in my computer, making the game manual [[BlatantLies a lying bastard.]] Given that the amulets in the game can very easily become LostForever, this was a case of where the person who wrote the guide could've used a guide herself to find all 450 amulets.

GuideDangIt isn't always video games. I've found a GuideDangIt in a Colors of the Wind for band. The second verse is cut off part way through and goes straight to the bridge. Try figuring that out without listening to the accompanying CD.

All the secrets in CaveStory. Where do I get the little guy again?

Turn the wayback dial to 1996, maybe '97. I was a teenager with no Internet access playing through ''Yoshi's Island'' for the first time. I was stuck at ThatOneBoss at the end of World 3 for longer than all the other bosses put together, possibly longer than the whole rest of ''the game'' put together. I'd pelt him with eggs until I died, and I died ''a lot''. I played 3-8 over and over, day after day. As I played it more and more I could last longer and longer, but that awful Piranha Plant still wouldn't die, no matter how many hits it took. But I was stupidly stubborn and kept wasting my life (it was spring break IIRC) fighting the boss over and over. The battle music would be stuck in my head day and night. Every so often I'd get a hunch and think I'd found the trick to beating him, but these leaps of intuition would only get me killed. I even thought that maybe the boss was an unbeatable decoy and I had to find a different path through the level. I'm not sure how, but finally I came to the epiphany that his one weak spot was his friggin' belly button! How much sense does that make?!? Once I knew that, I defeated him easily. This might not really be relevant to GuideDangIt, since I figured it out without a guide, but a guide sure would've helped!

SenshiSun back again, this time to talk about a GuideDangIt in her online course. In a practice test required by the teacher, one of the questions had three blanks and four answers. Sounds easy, right? Well, the blanks were in list form. This troper got 1/3. She had an idea as to how the forms worked and figured that the system would only accept one answer when any of the three would do. After an algabrac style explanation to the teacher, I get a message saying that now a correct answer could go in any spot. So I saved four classes from this trope.

This troper found all 3 Phoenix Wright games to be GuideDangIt games. She's not bad at them, but there are so many instances where a certain piece of evidence SHOULD prove something if the case was real, but there's apparently another piece that works better or a correct piece of evidence should be presented on another statement.

Geez, this is part of why I don't play WoW anymore. Guilds make you watch boss videos before you even attempt to defeat the boss! If I wanted to have to watch something to get what I pay for, I'd watch HBO, not WoW guides. I wish we had a community where we still have a strong trial-and-error tradition.

Relationships, anyone?

This troper had the hardest time figuring out why that guard wouldn't let you into Saffron city in Pokemon Blue. She even tried restarting the game ad picking Squirtle, for some reason thinking it would fill a cup of water or something stupid. Finally, at the age of seven, she finally purchased a guide book, which told me he wanted water. Water? Well, without buying the book and the fact that in 1998, and being seven I had no clue how to work the internet to find out, HOW was I supposed to know that??

When this troper had an Amiga 500, he received an RPG called BlackCrypt as a present. One day, this troper was playing Black Crypt and reached a room with two alcoves, each of them containing a water flask, and a sign with the word "HCTIWS". This troper picked up the water flasks and spent days looking for a hidden switch, with no success. As he was thoroughly stuck, he became convinced that there was nothing else in the game because the developers just did not feel like creating the other levels, despite the presence of their maps on the manual. This made him so mad that he actually took the original floppies of the game and formatted them to get rid of the game! Only years later, reading a guide on a website, he discovered that there was no hidden switch, but he was supposed to SWITCH the contents of the alcoves. However, he never regretted to format the game diskettes, because by doing so he got rid of a game that only made him angry and gained four disks to store the [=AMOS=] programs and Deluxe Paint pictures he made.

Waaay back when I first played ''MediEvil'', I kept getting stuck in Castle Peregrine, when Dan has to escape within about two minutes. I could see the exit (marked by Zarok's green energy trail) yet I could not figure out how to get through it. At that time, I had no internet access so it was months upon months until after some goofy maneuvering...all I had to do was jump onto the nearby catapult.

This troper lampshaded this when he was literally five years old. His parents yell at him for trying to climb the tree out back because it's against the rules to climb trees. I then proceeded to ask how I was supposed to know it was against the rules because nobody ever said it was. Especially since I was allowed to climb another tree on the exact same property with no problem, so what about ''that'' tree was so bad? I got yelled at for talking back, and this has also happened whenever my parents changed the rules around without telling us. "But if you changed the rules and didn't tell us, how are ''we'' supposed to know?"

Back in the '90s, this troper had a ''GamePlayers'' Magazine strategy guide that featured, among other things, ''SuperMarioBros3''. The guide mentioned the location of the first warp whistle. It even mentioned that to get it, Mario needs to drop through a white block and run behind the level exit. Unfortunately, it didn't specify ''how'' to drop through the block--and holding down on the D-pad for several seconds is hardly obvious.

First time through the 2008 Prince of Persia, I healed the land, sealed the evil back in its can, watched the credits roll, and then found myself in a small patch of desert, surrounded by unscalable cliffs and bottomless chasms too wide to jump, with no idea what I was supposed to do next. For some reason, it never occurred to me to attempt to unleash the sealed evil and destroy the world in order to get the ending...