Summary
Taking physical handwritten notes, or even digital notes, is sort of a lost art in most modern video games. Back in the PS1 and PS2 era, taking notes was so normal for puzzles, codes, and whatnot that instruction manuals often included a page solely for notes.
Nowadays, with so much help from the actual game, the need to take notes has become less and less. However, there still exist games, past and present, that you’ll want to use notes for, or else you’ll have a much worse experience. In some cases, taking notes will be outright required.
Taking notes isn’t just for completing the game; doing tasks for achievements or 100 percent also counts.
8Call Of Duty Zombies
You’ll Need To Have These Easter Egg Steps Written Down
The popular Zombies mode in Call of Duty often contains a big Easter egg hidden within each map in nearly every COD Zombies title. They range drastically in complexity, and even the easy ones like Call of the Dead still require learning the steps and taking notes beforehand.
A large reason for this is that you’ll be playing with other people without the ability to pause, and it’s such a pain to look up a guide when zombies are still coming at you. Learn the steps beforehand and write them down. It’ll take up more of your free time but will save you in the long run. Forsome of the harder Easter eggs, like Attack of the Radioactive Thing, you’ll have to take notes or at least print out some sheets due to the complicated chemical mixing.
Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 has to be one of themost time-consuming achievement listsof the Xbox 360 era, even more so now, because you can no longer buy the swimsuit microtransactions to speed up the process. You’ll need to have a complete item collection for all nine girls. With this size, physical paper notes are a must, but the item list is so big that regular notes just won’t cut it.
Thankfully, there are handy dandy spreadsheets available for you to print out and checkboxes in as you play. This helps so much that it’s essentially mandatory for all achievement hunters going for the completion.
It shouldn’t be surprising that a retro-inspired horror game would require you to take notes, because these were the games you took notes on a lot back in the day. If you want to beat this game without any guides, you must take notes for various reasons. First, for people who have difficulty putting all the clues together, it’s a much easier process to write down all the key points of a puzzle before you start thinking about the solution.
Second, even for more mathematical puzzles, like the voltage one, you’ll still want to write down the wrong solutions so you can more easily assess the right one. Third, there are shapes you’ll have to recreate on a nine-digit keypad, and you’ll want to write those down or take a picture of them.
Remember in Ultima Underworld, where you could write down on the in-game map to mark stuff? When playing Metroid Prime, you’ll wish that existed in this game. A common issue in Metroid is that unreachable areas you can only access later aren’t highlighted on the map after discovering them.
You’re just supposed to remember they exist, but you won’t, at least not every single one of them. That’s why you should note down all these areas you’re clearly supposed to go to later once you have the appropriate upgrade. This is an absolute must if you’re going for 100 percent and not using a guide, and even for a casual playthrough, it’s far more enjoyable than just forgetting numerous spots.
4Fallout
You Don’t Want To Forget These Areas
Just like Metroid Prime, the Fallout games have another interesting dynamic when it comes to locked-off areas. There aretwo big perksthat’ll allow you to access nearly every room of the game: Lockpicking and Hacking. During the early portions, you definitely won’t be able to access expert or master-level locks or computers.
When you encounter one, note it down because you’ll want to return when your perks are higher ranked. There’s always something great behind those expert or master barriers, often item-wise, but sometimes you get awesome pieces of lore. It enhances the Fallout experience so much that unless you’re doing a challenge run, you must open all these if you come across them.
Out of the entire Silent Hill franchise, the third installment has themost difficult mind-bending puzzlesof them all. They’re so complex, especially in Hard mode. Like Signalis, you’ll need to write down all the key information the hints are giving you to then piece them all together because your brain probably can’t handle all this internally.
This is especially true when a lot of the puzzles are number combinations, and it’s not as easy as just matching them, as you often need to do something with the combination first before you get your final solution. The puzzles here are so complex that you must take notes to keep track unless you’re a genius.
The puzzle difficulty of Day of the Tentacle isn’t actually too bad, but the achievements are very missable. Not only do you have the standard missable achievements that require you to do certain obtuse things with the items, but there’s a handful of achievements that force you to combine two unrelated items for absolutely no reason.
It’s so bizarre, and you very well could have already used one of the items by the time you realize there’s an achievement for it. Because of this, achievement hunters should have the item combinations written down among other miscellaneous achievements. This way, it’s far less likely for you to miss something as opposed to looking at the achievement list every once in a while.
1Colossal Cave Adventure
Can’t Get Any More Old-School Than This
If there’s one genre that requires you to take notes over everything else, it would be text-based adventure games. You literally can’t see. Sure, there are visuals in Colossal Cave’s incredible remake, but not in the OG title. With how huge the game map is for the time, especially the two big mazes in there, you were required and outright expected to make your own maps and notes.
There was literally no other choice back in the day. This made you feel like an actual adventurer, and the satisfaction of finally beating this game cannot be compared to modern times, with how much the industry and technologies have changed.
