Guide Dang It/First Person Shooter

• Team Fortress 2. Downloading the game by itself...a hardcopy. Then tell me what you get as a manual. That's right...it doesn't even tell you how to play the game!
  • The manual linked on Steam is an owning and operating manual for a sentry...
  • The game recently added a tutorial, though it's less of a "How To Do This" and more of a "Do This"
    • Not to mention the tutorial videos, which shows you the ropes of specific game modes once you join a server for the first time.
  • They also recently made Team Fortress 2 wiki their official, Valve-sponsored (no more ads) wiki, so you can consider that the manual.
  • The game has generic FPS controls, which can be referenced and changed through the options. If you have ever touched an FPS, you should know how to do everything except call for a Medic.
    • And if you haven't, it's a Guide Dang It. Especially if it's your first video game.
    • Originally, it was impossible to buy Team Fortress 2 as a separate product and it used the same controls as the games that it was bundled with, so there was a guide originally. It doesn't change the fact the controls could always be referenced in game.
• Near the end of Pathways into Darkness, there's a teleporter maze, where all the rooms look exactly the same, square with a teleporter on each wall. There is nothing in the frickin' game that remotely hints at the path. Many other Guide Dang Its were also present, including the bomb code if you don't have the manual, the suffocation room; hint:use an item that speeds up time, the gauntlet of invincible green Oozes (a soldier who died from snakebite hints that they avoided him while devouring his teammates), the Violet Crystal(which is at the center of the randomly-generated Labyrinth), and opening the exit door, for which you needed to take the health-draining Artifact of Doom out of its box.
• Even the official Halo 3 strategy guide won't tell you how to get the Skulls (at the behest of Bungie). While most of the Skulls are just inconvenient to track down, the "IWHBYD Skull" requires jumping through glowing rings in an order that plays the Halo theme, which is hinted at nowhere in the game, and then going back to the body of Truth.
  • It was actually first found out by cracking open the game code by some tech-savvy person.
  • The IWHBYD skull in Halo 2 is a guide-dang-it to get as well.
• Because of Sturgeon's Law, Game Mods can sometimes suffer from this. One example is Eternal Doom MAP20: Silures, a puzzle level, which has a spectacular Guide Dang It moment near the end: To open the path leading to the exit, you must activate a specific tree like a switch, with no indication that this is even possible.
  • This is also true of the otherwise-excellent Alien Vendetta. On the first map, no less.
• 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 Demonic Spiders at the end of Alpha Labs Sector 2 on higher difficulty levels.
  • Of course, it doesn't help that id's games are notoriously resistant to Alt-Tabbing, meaning it becomes necessary to actually shut the game down in order to get the code.
  • Not so much of a problem if you bought the game on Steam. At least there you can bring up the Steam overlay and use that to visit external web sites... except then you have to put up with the overlay trying to kill itself every five seconds, which might end up with it refusing to come up at all and the player having to shut the game down anyway.
    • This is made rather bearable because it's a fairly mild example. Unlike some examples which are virtually impossible to know about even WITH help, you CAN indeed find the answer out on your own (and- relative to this trope- fairly easily) by brute-forcing the lock (entering in every combination possible until you get the right one). Which still rather sucks because you are stuck manually going through exactly 10,000 possibilities in a Paranoia Fuel-rich environment, but it isn't as bad all things considered. It helps a lot that If you manipulate the numbers one-by-one, go from lowest to highest, and change numbers from right to left before changing the one on the far left- which is rather counterintuitive since you enter the numbers from left-to-right, it is # 304. Or 0508 to give the answer away as a reward to those who have been this far to appreciate my suffering. Don't tell. Needless to say, I hope you have fast, precise fingers and a LOT of patience. That this is a fairly EASY example (as you actually CAN open it without special preparation beforehand and get plenty of chances) should tell you something about this trope.
• Metroid Prime. Artifact of Spirit. 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. There's a secret door hidden behind a square of wall. No scan icon, no markings on the map, nothing.
  • 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.
• Also, the mining cannon in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, which alternated between a mining laser and a vacuum beam while Space Pirates dropped in and tried to kill you. The cutscene did show the laser alternating between two modes (where the only difference that could be seen was between green and purple beams, big deal), but how was anyone supposed to know to wait for the beam to switch over to "purple mode" (the vacuum) before killing the last Space Pirate?
• The Marathon series had some obscure secrets, but in the original, if you wanted to get the Flamethrower at an early level, you had to walk into a random corner of a maze to activate an invisible, soundless trigger to lower an elevator, sprint back to the starting point, fall down the shaft, grab the flamethrower and sprint back to the elevator before it reset. Failure to do so will trap you in the hole, with a terminal that says nothing more than 'And here you are, stuck in a hole. We could have done a lot together!'.
  • One of the most ridiculously difficult secrets of all time was the Deprivation Chamber, where you had to open an unmarked secret door, jump down a shaft,perform an amazingly complex Grenade Jumping maneuver to get up the shaft to a teleporter, and find your way through a completely-unhinted-at teleporter maze to find a secret terminal message.
• Golden Eye 1997 falls under this in the Egyptian level. One of your objectives is to retrieve the Golden Gun. However, if you try approaching it directly, bullet proof glass seals it and indestructible gun turrets appear and tear you to shreds. The solution? You're supposed to walk across the floor in a certain path in order to get the gun without setting off the trap. The kicker? There is nothing in the game that even remotely hints at the solution! Even if you were to do the All Guns cheat and complete the other objective, you still need to go and collect the Golden Gun.
• Getting access to many of the secret areas from Painkiller is a Guide Dang It moment. Requiring taking a Leap of Faith or exploiting the jump physics to reach otherwise unreachable areas, with the game not giving you any hints about where and when to do either to reach a secret area. Most times its better to leave well enough alone except to unlock the final difficulty requires earning collectible card powerups for meeting specific requirements when completing a level. Some levels require either finding all secret areas, or looting the contents of said secret areas to meet the card requirements.
  • To provide an example: One of the later levels in the game, City on Water, specifically requires you to find all its secrets to get the card powerup, and the level itself has some of the most devious secrets in the entire game, including rolling a specific barrel down to the starting point to reveal a jump pad and using it to jump up to the top of a tower, jumping over the water and doing a full turn to get inside a small alcove, and abusing jump physics to hop over the rooftops.
• 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.
• Star Wars: Jedi Knights II and III are almost always this--levels are huge and insanely complex, with inexperienced players inevitably doomed to suffer hours of running around in circles before finding out that a tiny button hidden behind a broken window or an inconspicuous console needs to be interacted with in order to continue.
• The first two 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.
• Quake II has many secrets hidden behind nondescript walls that must be shot, with no hints whatsoever. A bane to those looking for the Last Lousy Point.
• Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath: The very useful Sniper Wasps don't become available until about halfway through the game, but you can't use them at all unless you have the Binoculars, which can only be bought in the first town and didn't seem very important at the time.
• Deus Ex Invisible War. The special weapons. Most are in out of the way areas you wouldn't otherwise think about, including a sewer, the bedroom of an apartment dweller, under some junk in an antique store, and a utility hallway. The worst though, is the Hellfire Boltcaster, which is hidden in a small room only accessible by jumping over to a small ledge in an area you don't have much inclination to be in anyway (it frigging off one faction to the point of sending assassins if you complete the objective there.)
• Either a Guide Dang It or a fond memory, the loot in Thief the Dark Project 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.