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Designing a good video game puzzle is hard. You want to force the players to stop and think, but not frustrate them to the point where they give up and go read a book instead. But as we've shown you before , sometimes developers just don't give a shit. Or maybe they hate us. That's how you wind up with ...

5 Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake's Owl

Konami

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Long before Metal Gear Solid set bold new standards in stealth gameplay and incomprehensible storylines, the original Metal Gear games were offering up sneaking and philosophizing in eight simple bits. The second game found Solid Snake infiltrating a military prison guarded by an elite Special Forces unit to rescue a kidnapped scientist, which is a pretty serious scenario for an era where saving a princess from a giant turtle was considered heavy-duty storytelling.

Konami

The game was a gritty Mario reboot, with Africa replacing the Mushroom Kingdom.

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Late in the game, you find yourself blocked by a laser fence. You can't pull off sweet acrobatic moves to get through it because there's a guard waiting on the other side, and also this is a game from 1990. So you consider your options.

There's got to be another, less obvious way inside. A hole in the wall you can sneak through, or a key card you can steal. Skulking around is Snake's bread and butter, so that would make sense. But no, you search and search and come up empty.

Konami

"No, I can't just jump the wall. It's inches taller than me."

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The only hint you can find is a kid who tells you that the gate shuts off at night. A prison that turns off its security features when it gets dark makes the designer of the Death Star look like a genius, but whatever, that's just video game logic. Maybe they're trying to save on their electric bills or something.

So you need to wait for night, but at no point in the game have you seen the time of day change. Maybe you have to find a location where you can sleep in safety? You've got no better ideas, so you start wandering aimlessly. Eventually, well away from the gate, you stumble across a lab that's housing a giant, inexplicably well-guarded egg.