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

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

Heroes of the Storm: Alexstrasza in dragon form actually isn't any tankier at all (even if she looks it) and wins fights by aggressively backlining no matter what

DnD (yeah the tabletop): The game really gets broken by Spellcasters once you understand that even if their damage is better than martial characters, the most powerful spells are generally AoE crowd control (Entangle, Web and Hypnotic Pattern) or story-warping RP spells. Also of note: the martial builds for Bard and Warlock are full casters that can still do almost everything a regular martial can do. An important part of mastering the game is realising how horrendously imbalanced it is

Dwarf Fortress: This is literally the core gameplay loop for the first 200 hours

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.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & that goddamn barrel..

If you know, you know.

I played the remastered Spyro trilogy recently (great games) and it took me about half of the first game to work out how the gem chests work. You hit them and the gem shoots out the top, which you then have to grab before it returns in order to unlock the chest. For a while I thought you just had to ground pound the chest at the right angle to get it to open and I couldn't work out why it didn't always work.

After realising the correct way I felt pretty dumb lol.

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".

Tried to get into fighting games on a keyboard, could not perform any motion input after an hour of trying, not even a quartercircle. Finally looked it up online and realized you're supposed to drag your finger across the keys, not tap them. Really embarassing

Put like 20hrs into Borderlands 2, really wanted to like the game but I kept getting my teeth smashed in even though I watched guides, used a meta build, tried different characters etc. Then I tried multiplayer with some friends & observed one of them stop progressing to farm some unremarkable zone. After a while she got a specific legendary weapon and proceeded to instantly destroy everything for the next hour+. Finally realized I was approaching the game like it was a narrative FPS when in reality it's an ARPG.

Not me but a friend

We were playing a mil sim game sniping from 1.5km into the objective. I was spotting for my group and while discussing targets and ranging we found out that our best sniper had no idea how to range or use mildots.... the guy who was hitting moving targets at 1.5 kilometers would scope the target then aim upwards and look at the trees then fire... And connect... We told him how to adjust the scope after.

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.

Don't even start me on MGR parrying. I beat the entire game without once learning to parry. I did it by accident like once or twice but couldn't replicate it.

The second Monsoon fight took hours.

I am addicted to this feeling of revelation. There is nothing like it. Now I collect old networking equipment and try to get it to work in ways I never thought it could to get my fix.

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

It wasnt until the shinra tower in FF7 that I figured out how to slot materia.

Kung Fu on NES, the magician. The arcade version was normal sized and you just had to kick his ass. The NES edition he was tiny, and you could only hurt him with a crouch and punch. When you have to take turns with your brother, and it takes several tries to make it that far, it seemed like the greatest victory to finally figure it out.

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 knew I wasn't getting the parry right in Revengance either. Thanks for the tip, I'll redownload that game.

Rocket league. I'm still not very good but I've had a lot of those moments as far as the controls. I used to see my friend and it just looked like button smashing magic. It's actually not that hard tho

i played through half of the first subnautica before crafting a base or vehicles

Roll jumping in Jak & Daxter. There was a whole area of Sandover Village that was inaccessible without it and I killed at least an hour failing to double-jump-spin over to it 🤬

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

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

What a horrible parry input!

Same moment as you, I swear it was either the game or someone else said you have to learn it or you'll have a bad time.

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.

When I first tried guitar hero, for some reason I thought I should strum using the side of my thumb. I'd have this swollen bump (there's a word for this but it escapes me) where I made contact and thought I just needed to get used to it to get past that. It made sense to me because I knew there was toughening of the fingers involved in playing a real guitar (never mind that it had nothing to do with strumming).

I was doing double strumming and practicing for expert level that way.

When I realized I could instead use my thumb pad to strum down and finger pad to strum up, it was game changer. You treat it like it's a pick. Duh.

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.

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