Quick point on FAQs and Guides: for myself, I'm all for them and they don't ruin the fun.
I'm playing Uncharted 1 on Hard right now and collecting all the hidden treasures. What I do is print out a list of the hidden treasures and placements from
an online FAQ...and when I get to a chapter I give the list of treasures a cursory glance to see how many are in a given area.
If there's none. Woohoo. I don't use the FAQ at all. If there's three, one early and two late...I read what the name of the early one is...and try to find it on my own. I know I've got it if say, I've found a "Silver Turtle" and I can move on without reading anything more than the name "Silver Turtle."
In my view, this beats looking in every single corner over and over again and still not knowing if I'm done. I've spent too much of my gaming life doing that stuff...and, to be honest, I'm done with it.
It's exactly that kind of obstacle that makes for backlog and half-completed games, in my experience.
Another good example were the trials in FFX. With some of them, I just read up on the rules...and that was enough. With others, where I could tell it was going to be a royal pain, I basically followed the recipe step-by-step. If I feel like a gameplay component is a time waster, I don't care that much about getting help. And in my experience, a lot of older games do have gameplay elements that can end up being little more than time sinks if you don't know what you're doing. Fun? For me, not really anymore.
This is true even with some absolutely great JRPGs. With a 40+h time commitment and "trick questions" that affect how the game plays out, I have no problem using a guide.
For example, when I learned that my answer to a simple multiple choice question in Digital Devil Saga 1, which I was playing blind, meant that I had cheated myself of an optional gameplay element that would only arrive 50+ hours later in Digital Devil Saga 2...
I put down the game and stopped playing and it stayed in my backlog. I loved the game, the style...it's exactly up my alley, but that kind of stuff is why I now use FAQs and guides with no guilt at all.
I don't have three lifetimes to play it "wrong" on my first blind playthrough and then come back and answer the question the "right" way, if I ever figure out what happened in the first place!
In my view appropriate use of FAQs and guides relates directly to backlog and a more balanced, less perfectionist approach to gaming...this new approach is working for me.
