I worked it out by myself!

Last night I was taking Hydroventure: Spin Cycle for a, er, rotate ( ). I was trying to beat the Abandoned Castle level and was quite close to the end. Then my brain went for a holiday; the last hurdle stumped me totally! Onto the Internet I went but could not find any kind of guide for the game.

Then, walking to work this morning, I thought of something I'd not tried. Lo and behold, not only did it work, it got me that level's puzzle piece!

So. The Internet is a terrible temptation when you're stuck on a game; has the thrill of working things out by yourself diminished since you were young? Or did we just rely on guides printed in magazines? What's your take?

I used to just give up on games if I was stuck like you were so the internet has allowed me to see the end of many more games. Though I do have the odd moment of inspiration I likely won't have again, like in Wario Land 3 when I didn't realise I could butt stomp the platforms to raise and lower them (I also didn't know how to butt stomp which didn't help)

Guides. Guides all the way. I remember the days of the good old Double Game Guide +, a wonderful thing. I 100%ed Metroid Prime with one of those beauties.

I mostly like to figure it out for myself but if a game has some sort of collectables & I'm missing a few I'll resort to a guide.

I'll try and figure it out for myself until I get frustrated (which isn't that long) then I'll hit up a guide

Things like collectibles (I'm looking at you Assassin's Creed) which are just nothing more than artificial game lengtheners get the guide treatment, but apart from that I try to abstain from using a guide at all. Although, like many others have said, that feeling of frustration at not advancing makes it all too easy to hop onto GameFAQs and cheat my way forward.

After ploughing through the first two-thirds of The Lost Future on the DS, I decided that I wasn't having as much fun as I should be because I was relying too heavily on online walkthroughs. Thus, I decided to go the last few hours alone. I was quite chuffed to do that, as there was some really tough puzzles near the end of that game.

Most of the time though, I just have to be economical with my time. I'm weighing up revisiting Skyward Sword with the aid of my spoiler-free official guide (£1 in GAME's sale!), as I can't be arsed with the fannying about that I find inevitably comes with a Zelda game. Why play for ten hours if you can get it done in five?

I'll generally work things out for myself, although if it boils down to too many variables and solving the problem is going to boil down to cycling through every possibility (such as some of the later puzzles in VLR), I'll get a guide.

But for most games today, the guide boils down to "shoot/punch the baddies more" and really there's no point in using one. Nobody gets lost in Call of Duty.

I'm ashamed to say this... before the internet, I'd happily spend hours and hours and hours and hours trying to finish a puzzle. I don't have the time now, so 15 minutes is usually my limit; having the web browser multi-tasking on the Wii U is even more tempting.

Ah yes. I usually like to retain my pride and work things out for myself, but like Phillips if I find being stuck is seriously ruining my enjoyment of the game I'll look for a walkthrough.

I think the last game that made me do that was Virtue's Last Reward, as some of the puzzles in that were seriously cryptic and illogical. Wasn't worth the time and effort I was putting in so a guide I used (well, I scoured the gameFAQs forums).

Jimbob wrote:

having the web browser multi-tasking on the Wii U is even more tempting.

God yes. That's making me even worse than I was before.

shanks wrote:

I'll try and figure it out for myself until I get frustrated (which isn't that long) then I'll hit up a guide

This is more or less my approach. As a nipper I rarely actually finished games, I'm afraid to say.

I'm terrible when it comes to using guides. I'll try everything I can think of, to the point of being almost driven to setting the game down through frustration, before eventually giving in and looking up the solution. I'll then beat myself up for being too dim to work out the solution.