Folding two socks together so they stay together. Oh was it supposed to be about video games?..

For a while I just couldn’t play souls-likes. The enemy attacks were blatantly undodgeable. Like, even if you move at the maximum possible speed, in any direction, at the very start of an animation, you can’t get out of the way. Then I realized you’re not really supposed to get out of the way, you’re supposed to abuse the immunity frames from the roll to “dodge” straight through the attacks. Basically the opposite of what I had been doing.

So, a long time ago I got Little Big Adventure 2 a.k.a. Twinsen’s Odyssey.

This game has a “behaviour” feature that lets you switch between 4 modes : normal, stealthy, athletic and agressive. This has an impact on how the main character Twinsen moves and acts : normal walks and interacts, stealthy sneaks around, athletic runs and jumps, aggressive lets you punch stuff.

Note that all of those except athletic are unbearably slow, and the game requires quite a bit of jumping, so I quickly considered athletic the default one, only switching for something else briefly when I needed to do something specific.

In this game you get your second and last weapon, a sword, quite far into the game. It does a lot of damage, and it’s required to beat some enemies. But every time I’d try to use it, Twinsen would do a ridiculous backflip first, then do a jumping attack forward. It was very hard to hit a moving enemy that way, it required a lot of space and since I could barely control that move (tank controls by the way), there was a huge risk I’d get hit in the process.

I lost many times against a huge boss that was only vulnerable to the sword, eventually beat him with great difficulty and after that went through the rest of the game still trying to get the most out of that ridiculous weapon.

It took me another playthrough to understand that the way Twinsen used the sword depended on his behaviour. Only athletic did that double jump first, agressive in particular just let you hack stuff up immediately.

Episode 1 racer. I finished the game multiple times before realising that there was a turbo you could activate

Ratchet and clank 2\3 and ratchet gladiator

As a kid me and my cousin didnt see the point of strafing\locking on. Then years later on the hd collection i found the games so much easier and kept wondeing why untill it hit me that i never used strafe untill then

I found out a few days ago in Tekken 8 that you don’t need to hold back to block. You can just stand there and auto block mids and highs and crouch to block lows. It took me eight Tekkens to realize this if it was like this from the start.

I got a free fighting game on epic. Dnf Duels or something. One of the tutorials had a combination to block or counterattack, can’t remember, and I tried every which way I could think of yet nothing worked.
So finally, I got out of the game and uninstalled it.

The big moment was figuring out it’s not my job to find a way of fixing some company’s dumbass decisions. That it’s ok to say “this shit ain’t worth the hassle”.

What a horrible parry input!

This is basically what The Witness is all about, every fifteen minutes

All I can think of is a Donald Glover bit where he said he had a fear of someone just putting a gun on him and telling him to put his dick in his butt and came to realization he can just tuck underneath instead of trying to reach around his waist. So I’m incapacitated by laughter to think of my own times this has happened.

Parrying in Arkham Origins. It took me SIX. MONTHS before I finally understood how to beat Deathstroke 😬

I learned how to reflect the laser beams in Breath of the Wild when I fought Ganon.

Dodge Offset in Bayonetta. I played through 1&2 a couple times over before even becoming aware of it.

It’s a totally different game once you wrap your head around it. My opinion of Bayo 1 went way up as a result - Dodge Offset is the glue that holds the combat together and is the key differentiating feature from all other character action games.

Definitely shield dropping in smash bros melee. Seemed like an essentially impossibly difficult skill, and nearly made me stop playing because I don’t have the time to invest into that kind of tech skills just to be competitive. But then I had my eureka moment when I learned that you can get your shield up and not roll if you just have the stick to the right or left when you press shield in the first place. After that it’s just dropping the stick down one notch and you’re dropping like no tomorrow. Bit of practice to get the timing down and now I’ve unlocked an entirely new dimension of my play.

Yet another reason I cannot stop playing melee. Every time I think I’ve figured that game out, it reveals an entirely new level of depth that was invisible before I had the tech to see it.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & that goddamn barrel…

If you know, you know.