i think a lot about several games from my childhood that i had a very confusing time with, particularly doom 2 and metroid
as a kid i was very bad at videogames for two reasons: one is because i had no confidence that I could complete them, and so I didn't make a serious effort to do so, and thus just replayed the same first few levels of every game i had, lackluster-ly, over and over and over, quitting after a few failures and coming back later and doing it again. The other reason is that I very often thought I was playing them wrong.
doom had no jumping (which was weird since it was not an engine limitation, they just didn't put that in) but doom 2 introduced a number of "fake jumps", where you have to run at the edge of a ledge at full speed, clear a gap, and land on another.
i was pretty sure this is what i was supposed to do in these situations, but it felt incorrect. I had never seen a speedrun or heard of an "exploit" before but I still understood the concept: this was clearly not "intended" behavior. you're basically exploiting a bug in the physics system: when you leave the ledge, you instantly begin falling, but if you do it at full speed, you make it to the other side in time for the stair-climbing code to register it as a stair and pop you up onto the ledge. who would design a game where you have to glitch out the physics to progress?
well, as it turns out, id did. this is exactly how you're supposed to do it. even worse, they sometimes did it like i show above - with two completely un-parallel edges. this feels COMPLETELY wrong.
if you're playing a mid 2000s third person game and you're trying to find your way through a room, you know that you aren't supposed to climb on the random rubble.mdls. yes, you CAN jump on them, and they lift you a little bit, but those are at best decoration, and at worst invisible walls meant to cordon off non-play areas. you are never, ever supposed to use the rubble.mdl to get anywhere, and in fact, it's usually a clear sign that you're trying to go the wrong way.
even before the ps4-era phenomenon of putting a big obvious colored line on the edge of every ledge you can grapple, games made it very clear what was climbable. it was always crates, 100% of the time, so that you'd never be asking the question "is this a valid way up." we all learned that box = maybe climbable, not-box = never climbable.
so when doom 2 put me in a situation where i couldn't escape this little nook any other way than "run at the corner of this ledge, and if you hit peak speed AND hit the pixel-wide tip of the corner, you might make it onto that other ledge that looks vaguely higher up", and I tried that, and it worked, I walked away wondering if I'd missed the right solution.
Metroid (NES) had the same effect, except it was the whole game. I actually played it only after reading half the Nintendo Power walkthrough for Super Metroid about 30 times, so I sort of expected certain things to show up and sorta knew what to do with them; I knew I could bomb through floors, I knew I could freeze the bug that looks like a croissant and use it as a platform. But those are pretty broad strokes, pretty conventional techniques for a videogame.
Metroid goes on to expect you to bomb your way through the floor of one of those pointless transition-between-areas rooms and deliberately fall through the fake lava in the bottom, and then after exploring the space beneath, you're supposed to find a hidden ledge behind the lava to let yourself climb back up.
If you then try that trick again a few screens later, you get trapped in a useless pit with no platforms, and the only way to climb back up is to blow up a bunch of respawning blocks to make yourself a ladder. The blocks are aligned against one wall, and you have to jump out of the wall cavity, change direction midair, blow up some blocks, land back where you started, then jump again and furiously fire at the wall so you can try to make a space to land in. If you take too long to jump, the blocks respawn and start killing you.
This, again, felt so wrong. It didn't feel like something anyone would put in a videogame and expect me to actually do. I was obviously missing something, obviously not solving this puzzle the right way. Yeah, I found out that I COULD climb up that way, and I found out that I could use bombs to hop myself up in the air to get into little cavities, and I found out that I could bomb my way very very slowly through enormous hidden tunnels that I stumbled on, and all of that felt like "no no no no, this isn't how videogames work, you're missing an item or something. you're wasting your time. you'll get to the end of all this and just be stuck, or have to go back."
Little did I know at age 12 that I was actually making great progress. I picked up at least three powerups, and had I just pushed on a little further, I'd have made it to at least one of the sub bosses. I probably could have finished Metroid if I just understood that everything I was doing was actually the right thing
End of story, no moral
Man, I bet you would love Marathon.
Remember kids, friends don't let friends play Marathon. (Without a guide.)
