History GuideDangIt / FirstPersonShooter

* In Payday2, the last day of the Big Oil mission is practically impossible without reading a FAQ first. You reach a basement full of similar machines, and you have to determine which one is a working fusion engine based on what's scribbled on some chalkboards, computer monitors, and very small notepads in the room. And if your texture settings are too low, they're unreadable. TrialAndError gameplay usually doesn't work - there are dozens of possibilities, you move at a snail's pace while carrying them, you can only try one at a time, huge numbers of enemies come at you in an area with little cover if you didn't do a perfect stealth run, and the game won't let you finish the mission until you find the right one, even though other missions allow for incomplete successes.

** The manual linked on Steam is an owning and operating manual for a sentry...

* ''VideoGame/{{Half-Life 2}}: Episode Two'' gives us the Hunter. It is ''very'' resilient to damage from most types of weapons, but has a crippling weakness to stuff launched by your gravity gun. The game never even hints at this, which is rather jarring considering how good Valve normally is at guiding the player towards these kind of discoveries; possibly, they assumed the player would just naturally try to fight it with the Gravity Gun [[WreakingHavoc for the sake of trying to fight it with the Gravity Gun]]. It doesn't help that the finale of the game requires you to kill them in droves during a BossRush.

** Finally, there's headmistress Helga herself. Shoot her, and she simply cartwheels away. Disc her, and she just flops on her back and insults her. Neither does any damage whatsoever. How, HOW do you kill her? Answer: '''You don't.''' Just disc her until she's as far back as she can go, shoot her to get her in front of the chair, and disc her one more time. This will knock her into the chair and reveal her...or rather his...true form, which can be killed. [[MarathonBoss Hope you're not low on tokens at this point.]]

** Finally, there's headmistress Helga herself. Shoot her, and she simply cartwheels away. Disc her, and she just flops on her back and insults her. Neither does any damage whatseover. How, HOW do you kill her? Answer: '''You don't.''' Just disc her until she's as far back as she can go, shoot her to get her in front of the chair, and disc her one more time. This will knock her into the chair and reveal her...or rather his...true form, which can be killed. [[MarathonBoss Hope you're not low on tokens at this point.]]

** Finally, there's headmistress Helga herself. Shoot her, and she simply cartwheels away. Disc her, and she just flops on her back and insults her. Neither does any damage whatseover. How, HOW do you kill her? Answer: '''You don't.''' Just disc her until she's as far back as she can go, shoot her to get her in front of the chair, and disc her one more time. This will knock her into the chair and reveal her...or rather his...true form, which can be killed. [[MarathonBossBattle Hope you're not low on tokens at this point.]]

* ''[[VideoGame/HalfLife2 Half Life 2: Episode 2]]'' gives us the Hunter. It is ''very'' resilient to damage from most types of weapons, but has a crippling weakness to stuff launched by your gravity gun. The game never even hints at this, which is rather jarring considering how good Valve normally is at guiding the player towards these kind of discoveries. It doesn't help that the finale of the game requires you to kill them in droves during a BossRush.

* ''Left4Dead'' and its sequel when it comes to playing as the zombies in VS mode. Newbies are shown the controls, but are rarely told how to actually use the special infected properly. Hunters can do a lot of damage to a survivor but experienced players know that Hunters are better in picking off a lone survivor or a survivor that is distracted while a newbie may try to pull a LeeroyJenkins and pounce right away regardless on who is nearby. Boomers are made to cause surprise attacks by popping out of cover and puking, but newbies aren't exactly told this and may make the mistake of rushing at the survivors in the open, not realizing the Boomer can die in a single bullet.

** This game isn't quite so bad as most though because unlike most later FPSen, it includes a map (possible thanks to the 2D level design), which shows doors, and can be upgraded with a powerup to show unexplored areas as well.

* ''MetroidPrime''. Artifact of Spirit. The game tells you to seek the unseen entrance at the top of a certain room. The entrance you want is actually two or three platforms down in the room, hidden behind a completely normal square of wall. However, at the top is a Morph Ball tunnel that leads to a Power Bomb expansion. Combined with the misleading hint, this makes the hidden door way too hard to find. Just to add to that, the X-Ray Visor (which is what most people will think of when they hear 'unseen entrance') doesn't work well for seeing the hidden door.

* ''Metroid Prime 2: Echoes'' and the Sky Temple Key collection. It's like the Chozo Artifacts, but even more irritating. You will occasionally find blue-clothed Luminoth corpses in Light Aether whose scan data contains a log of their final moments. When you find one of these, you go to the corresponding room in Dark Aether, equip the Dark Visor, and look for an enemy called a Flying Ing Cache. Destroying the Flying Ing Cache will drop the key. Now for the problems: You don't get the Dark Visor until two-thirds of the way through the game, so by that point you've probably forgotten about the Luminoth scans. Several of the Flying Ing Caches are in rooms infested with [[BeefGate the Ingstorm]], so you can't even access those until you get the Light Suit. And putting the whole puzzle together is a ''hellish'' leap of logic, even after finding all the clues.

** The game recently added a tutorial, though it's less of a "How To Do This" and more of a "Do This"

** They also recently made ''VideoGame/TeamFortress2'' wiki their official, Valve-sponsored (no more ads) wiki, so you can consider that the manual.

* ''Metroid Prime 2: Echoes'' and the Sky Temple Key collection. It's like the Chozo Artifacts, but even more irritating. You will occasionally find Luminoth corpses in Light Aether whose scan data contains a log of their final moments. When you find one of these, you go to the corresponding room in Dark Aether, equip the Dark Visor, and look for an enemy called a Flying Ing Cache. Destroying the Flying Ing Cache will drop the key. Now for the problems: You don't get the Dark Visor until two-thirds of the way through the game, so by that point you've probably forgotten about the Luminoth scans. Several of the Flying Ing Caches are in rooms infested with [[BeefGate the Ingstorm]], so you can't even access those until you get the Light Suit. And putting the whole puzzle together is a ''hellish'' leap of logic, even after finding all the clues.

* ''Metroid Prime 2: Echoes'' and the Sky Temple Key collection. It's like the Chozo Artifacts, but even more irritating. You will occasionally find Luminoth corpses in Light Aether whose scan data contains a log of their final moments. When you find one of these, you go to the corresponding room in Dark Aether, equip the Dark Visor, and look for an enemy called a Flying Ing Cache. Destroying the Flying Ing Cache will drop the key. Do this nine times.

* ''MetroidPrime''. Artifact of Spirit. The game tells you to seek the unseen entrance at the top of a certain room. The entrance you want is actually two or three platforms down in the room, hidden behind a square of wall. However, at the top is a hidden Morph Ball tunnel, that leads to a Power Bomb expansion. Combined with the misleading hint, this makes the hidden door way too easy to miss, and it doesn't help that you can only see the hidden door with the Thermal Visor equipped.
** There's a Morph Ball tunnel to an expansion which is hidden behind a bush in "Training Chamber Access". A perfectly ordinary bush, which you have passed dozens of. No indication that there's a passage behind it whatsoever. If you're trying to get 100% completion, there is virtually no chance that you will find it unless you've taken to checking every single wall in the game very closely, or you habitually roll around in the Morph Ball and just happened to hit that one bush.

* Either a Guide Dang It or a fond memory, the loot in ThiefTheDarkProject and its sequel could be fiendishly hard to find. For example, in the first mission of the second game, there are three coins hidden on a trompe l'oeil ledge in a stairway. You can't see the ledge moving up the stairway, and unless you have ninja eyes, you won't glimpse it coming down either, since the staircase is dark. The only way to get them is to move halfway up, stop midway, and turn around.

* ''MetroidPrime''. Artifact of Spirit. [[BlatantLies Seek the unseen entrance at the top.]] First of all, it's two platforms down from the top. Second, this hints at the X-ray visor; the Thermal Visor is much more effective. [[spoiler:There's a secret door hidden behind a square of wall. No scan icon, no markings on the map, nothing.]]

* In ''{{Doom}} 3'', there are two special storage cabinets sent from a company called "Martian Buddy" that contain free stuff for personnel, and the codes to them are nowhere in the game. To find the code, ''you actually have to go to the website www.martianbuddy.com''. One of these allows you to obtain the chaingun early, big help for clearing out the DemonicSpiders at the end of Alpha Labs Sector 2 on higher difficulty levels.

* ''{{Doom}} II'' has map 19, "The Citadel". In order to find a necessary key, you have to open a specific discolored wall in a generic corridor. Yep, you need to find a well-hidden secret area to finish the level.

* The first two ''{{VideoGame/Turok}}'' games had a strong tendency towards this sort of thing, since the keys required to access later levels were often hidden ridiculously well. The Chronosceptre fragment on the third level of the original is a case in point; after a very difficult jumping section, the player has to climb down a series of platforms that don't appear to go anywhere and make a jump to an area they can barely see.

* Either a Guide Dang It or a [[YourMileageMayVary fond memory]], the loot in ThiefTheDarkProject and its sequel could be fiendishly hard to find. For example, in the first mission of the second game, there are three coins hidden on a trompe l'oeil ledge in a stairway. You can't see the ledge moving up the stairway, and unless you have ninja eyes, you won't glimpse it coming down either, since the staircase is dark. The only way to get them is to move halfway up, stop midway, and turn around.