No Easy Solutions
Games of the 90s were hard. It gets re-emphasized all the time, but for good reason. Re-releases of classic point-and-click adventures like Grim Fandango and The Longest Journey highlight how inane silly some of the puzzles were. Hopefully you had a hard-copy of a strategy guide, or else you were guaranteed to miss more than half of the game’s hidden secrets.
Everyone who played Myst loathes the insanity of the Selenitic Age of Myst, with its endlessly winding catacombs that were almost impossible to traverse. Who knew how to actually do Chocobo breeding in Final Fantasy VII? Don’t even pretend you knew how to solve the piano puzzle from Silent Hill!
Without an easy resource like GameFAQs, and without an internet full of gamers who have delved into the depths of every game and uncovered every secret before uploading them to YouTube, games were monumental feats and accomplishments, true enigmas of difficulty and confusion that no amount of pounding away at keys could solve. Only dedication, skill, and perhaps a little bit of luck, would get you to the end of Super Mario World or discover the secret to beating Psycho Mantis in Metal Gear Solid.
