I have my old HP Pavillion with Windows XP still hooked up and it runs my old FMV games. I’ve played Ripper, both Phantasmagorias and some of the Gabriel Knight games on them. No DOSBox or anything like that, they ran okay on just normal XP.
Wow. I may have to dig out my old-ass laptop and find some WinXP to get that going. Thanks for letting me know, I only played it on an old Win95 machine or something and didn’t try again until Win7.
I did. 
Funny how I vividly remember the failed attempts to get past it, but I don’t remember how I ultimately figured out how to get past it.
I got stuck in Red Faction in that escort mission
turns out I broke the game script somehow.
There’s also all those mandatory flight missions in GTA Vice City where your greatest enemy are the controls of the RC helicopter and the dodo
This one was surprisingly easy. The hard one for me was touching all the butterflies for khimaris final weapon crest thingy. Never was able to get it, but I was able to get every other characters final weapon and unlock it.
I beat Riven without a FAQ.
One of my favorite moments in gaming.
OMG I just remembered one. In FF7 when you reach the temple of the ancients, I could not figure out that i needed to climb the vines. I eventually lent my playstation and the game to my friend and he somehow figured it out.
link’s awakening on gbc. 7th dungeon had a puzzle where you had to throw stones in holes in the ground to land on the floor below. when you got them all lined up properly they made a path you could walk over to reach the final part of the dungeon. of course, there were “trick holes” and some really hard to find stones(some stones that would be 3 floors above, and you have to through them down the right hole on each floor). if you fucked up and threw the stones down a trick hole, they would stay on that floor in a fucked up position and you would have to find a way to arrange them properly. now there was one certain trick hole that if you threw the stone down, it would reach an area that the player could not get to. no matter what. there was no way to reset the stones to the starting position so if you threw the stone down that hole, the only answer was restart the game. as a kid who had no knowledge of this, i wandered the 7th dungeon for months on end trying to get the stone and trying to find out where to go, until i eventually gave up.
The worst example for me is Dragon Warrior III for Game Boy Color. In the last boss’ throne room, you’re supposed to get to the basement, but there’s no entrance. And the way to get to the basement. . .is through 1 freaking tile you have to examine out an entire roomful of tiles. Once you do, a hidden stairway appears. And there’s no sign or line in a book telling you to examine the floor, and the whole “examining the floor” bit is not used throughout the entire game. So out of like 64 tiles or so, you’re supposed to randomly check the right one, and descend into the boss’ lair.
I mean, really Enix. That’s just a bit ridiculous.
I’m not sure what all this is but I think I get what you are trying to say:
The Eagle’s Tower is by far the worst dungeon in LA. “The riddle is solved when the pillars fall” meant that you had to destroy the pillars on the lower floors so that you can gain access to the higher ones (more particularly, the boss of the dungeon). I think there were 3-4 pillars, I do not remember.
The first couple of pillars were pretty straightforward. However, there was a pillar that required you to hook shot your way over a large gap of holes in order to reach it. The problem with this was that you had to somehow throw the marble that destroys pillars over there without it failing into one of the holes, or it would reset back to its original position (which can be pain in the ass). Now here is the tricky part, you needed kill some card enemies in the same room by matching their symbols AFTER you had thrown the marble that destroys pillars over the holes. This is because the treasure chest that the hook shot hooked too was the only way Link could fling himself over the holes without failing. But, if you did it BEFORE you killed the monsters hook shot couldn’t reach the treasure chest (because the marble would be in the way). This caused an infinite loop of hook shots hitting the marble to where Link couldn’t get over, causing the dungeon to become “unbeatable” and ultimately resulting in you raging/restarting the game.
Sometimes translation errors can leave you confused for a while.
eg. Arcade Version of Wonderboy in Monsterland.
Sphinx level.
Sphinx’s question is "What was my supper?"
The choices are “I don’t”, “eat” and “pizza”.
The clue at the bar was “A Chicken Lost Yesterday”.
The correct answer is… “eat”.
The clue at the bar was “Sphinx is on a diet”.
The correct answer is… “pizza”.
This is quite new school, but here’s mine:
MVC3, Dante shouted “get back!” I went to air throw him…and then my life disappeared. Thanks for that, Capcom.
Old School:
Sonic & Knuckles, that damned Egyptian pyramid stage, the 2ND ONE. How the hell do you beat that?!
Tomb Raider 2 for PS1. That entire game was incredibly difficult gameplay and guesswork. Spending days trying to find a way out of the opera house or spending days trying to jump a ludge, giving up and looking for other ways for another week and then figuring out that you indeed, just have to jump the ledge. (Dat shit was like a 1 frame link or something.) To this day I never finished it, even though it was probably my favourite PS1 game ever.
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POTTLE YOU PIECE OF SHIT I JUST SPENT ALL MY HARD EARNED GOLD UPGRADING ALL YOUR SHIT SO YOU CAN DIE LIKE A LITTLE BITCH!!!
Seriously fuck that game. Random encounters are like 90% boss battles in this game if u walk TWO steps in the wrong direction/area. Fucking almost broke my Sega CD fucking with this piece of shit game. Hey I got some new characters, too bad they start out at like level -1 and suck at everything that isn’t dying from one hit from the monsters weakest queef.
Playing SMT: Nocturne for the first time and getting your ass owned into oblivion by Matador. That was basically the “Welcome to the REAL Shin Megami Tensei, bitch” moment for most people who started getting into the series with Nocturne. Try it again, still get killed by stupid Red Capote which makes that bastard impossible to hit. Solution? Stack your buffs like a madman. And grind until you get a good healer demon. Oh, and if you stack too much, he’ll take it all away and you have to do it again.
That took at least 2 or 3 attempts on my part before I finally beat him without consulting a guide.
The frequency on the first Metal Gear Solid.
Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy, figuring out how to get past those instakill posts in Heliopolis. Man that was a stumper, you knew it was related to the big ass boulder but attacking the frail wood pieces holding it did nothing.
Solution
Spoiler
You ended up having to burn the wood by throwing a captured fire monster (which you don’t capture there if I remember correctly) at it, then the boulder would take out the power source of the posts. Then you needed to use a different captured monster to blow up all of the posts.
Figuring it out took a long damn time. Sphinx was a very under appreciated PS2 game with great puzzles though.
shit i cannot remember the exact part but it’s shining wisdom i think it was in the forest or some shit i got stuck, i think i even had to use a faq
All I can think of is Final Fantasy Adventure for Gameboy. At some point in the game you come across a weird ass riddle to open a dungeon, I forget what it was. The key was to walk around two rocks (or trees I think) in a figure-8 formation. And of course there was only one right way to figure-8, instead of the many other possible ways. I was stuck on that shit for years and this was before the Internet and GameFAQs. Hard to describe if you never played the game, but anyway I got a throat check waiting for whoever thought that bullshit up.
Startropics for NES had a section where you couldn’t get past it without knowing a 3 digit frequency code. The robot in your submarine needed the frequency to follow to get to the next level and the only way to get it was to either look it up (I didn’t have internet access at the time) or actually dab water on a piece of paper that came with the instruction manual and it would show you the frequency code. Let’s just say I didn’t have the manual for a good 6 months.