Have you ever played through a game and completely missed a game play feature?

[Con Carne]

Mass Effect 3 uses Select on the 360 pad to quicksave.

Yup. A friend of mine who has nearly completed the game didn't know about that feature and I learned it within my first 5hrs of game play.

 

[mayney93]

i played through Skyrim nearly without releasing there was a sprint button, it made getting to places ... quicker, believe it or not

 

[Composer]

In tf2,
you can airblast ANY projectile
that means baseballs AND arrows!
even mid air stickies!
i thought it was only rockets and pills and by that time I had 200 hours logged!

 

[Eamar]

I played through the Halo 3 campaign multiple times without using a single grenade. Sounds stupid, but it just never occurred to me :/

And it was embarrassing how many hours/days/weeks/months I'd sunk into WoW before I discovered auto run >.<

CAPTCHA: come clean. Spooky...

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

First time I played Resident Evil 4, I walked everywhere. I was after I defeated the final boss that I realized that I could run.

I was about to say that. I realized that I could run when I was looking at some gameplay videos on YouTube on how to escape from Regenerators without any ammo.

 

[-Ezio-]

i havnt. but a friend of mine... well i'll just post the conversation

we were discussing Dead Space 2

James says:
"they fixed the wandering around aimlessly bit"
James says:
"gave you an objective locator"
Ezio says:
"..."
James says:
"Please don't tell me that was in the first."
Ezio says:
"you click the thumbstick and a laser points to your objective"

just one of the many stupid things he's said that i've collected for blackmail purposes.

regarding winnie the pooh movie:

James says:
"I can't wait until Pooh comes out"

 

[IamLEAM1983]

You can carjack people normally in Saints Row: The Third.

I spent the entirety of my first playthrough kicking the shit out of windshields, literally jumping inside cars.

 

[illas]

The first couple of levels of Ikaruga I completed without knowing how to switch polarities. It was difficult...

This earns you more "gamer-respect" than I can possibly hope to convey. Is level 2 even possible without switching polarities?

OT: In TF2 you used to be able to "inspect" team-mates and it would tell you whether they were on your team or a disguised Spy.

 

[gritch]

For the longest time I had no idea you could pick up and move around objects without putting them into your inventory in Oblivion. Not that it's a core part of the game though.

 

[A Satanic Panda]

snape snape severus snape

OT: I played through Metro: 2033 without knowing you could buy or upgrade your weapons..I played my whole first playthrough with the shitty weapons you pick up, and a sack full of moneyz

Apparently you can also buy new armor... In Skyrim it took me 80 hours to figure out I could use perks. Seriously it blew my mind. Now I can actually kill stuff!

 

[Omechron]

I was a pretty good distance into the "stop messing around and get ready for the final boss" bit of Final Fantasy 8 when I finally figured out how to trigger limit breaks. Apparently you have to let your characters sit at like 20% health and not heal them which is a thing I basically never did.

 

[ACM_Shadow]

playing Star Wars Republic Commando, got through half the game when i found i couldn't run past an object..... i had missed the jump key for the first half of the game.

 

[mrblakemiller]

I almost never give my squad orders in any of the Mass Effect games. So, do deliberate skips count?

Oh, also, I'm notorious for never using grenades in FPS's. I always figure I'll need them for later, and later never comes, no matter how many times I must restart.

 

[SuperfastJellyfish]

Sprinting in Skyrim, I even tried the proper key, the problem is that that key is Alt. Alt on windows 7 is basically the "Yeah, fuck you" key if you press it with any other key, such as W.

 

[Warachia]

His example was: "I'm replaying Mass Effect 1 and I just learned that the vehicle has a canon and Right Bumper allows you to use abilities"

Same here, I beat that game three times before accidentally pressing the button to use the cannon.

 

[Daemonate]

I wonder...

how many of these actually improved the fun or quality of the playthrough?

 

[Faux Furry]

Never before have I felt like such a conformist square as I do now after reading through most of the entries in this thread. All in all,I might as well be another brick in the wall or Tetris tiles,as it were, which vanishes without a trace after it neatly connects with a suitable sequence of adjacent tiles. I always RTFM is one is available (GameFAQs make a handy replacement when one isn't) or go through the tutorials so I know how to use all of the abilities that any character that I select is capable of.

Now, if by 'missed' you mean 'stubbornly ignore because one has a more effective method for dealing with in-game problems', then I would say Rage Racer's drifting. I found it to be more effective to just lay off of the gas then make a turn using the momentum that the car built up alone to make those hard turns. I don't know how well drifting would have worked if I had bothered to master it but I got 1st place in all of the races against the A.I. so it didn't matter.

ReCaptcha is bringing up 'one hit wonder'. That makes me wonder if anyone hadn't figured out that, in any side-scrolling Sonic the hedgehog game, they can collect the rings that Sonic drops after he is hit so he doesn't have to be one of those.

 

[Doneeee]

Woah I just now figured out you could do a quick turn in silent hill, this would've been so useful to know earlier.

 

[Mr.Pandah]

How does nobody know about so many basic features in these games...? For nearly all of these posts, the game literally tells you how to do all of this stuff. And as far as sprint...nobody checks the control menu for certain things when the game starts? I can't say this has ever happened to me before to be honest. Still interesting to read about all of this though.

 

[aeroblaster]

Mr.Pandah, you'd be surprised at how many people don't read the manual and just skip forward to the action.