How often do you seek out help when stuck in a game?

Something that has always bothered me when gaming is having to seek out help. I'm not a fan of FPS, or RTS games as I simply don't have the skills to play these. My favorite genres are RPGs, Puzzle, Adventure and Strategy(non RT). I'm fairly good at these but still in most of these types of games it's easy to get stuck on something at some point. Especially Adventure games and puzzles. Yet they are still my favourites by far. When playing old school RPGs and adventure games I will inevitably get stuck on something at some point, either a puzzle I can't solve or a path I missed. In RPGs it might be a monster that can only be defeated with a specific weapon or strategy.

Still I always feel bad at looking up healp in a forum or walkthrough. Always feels like failure to me.

Question is how often do you look up help for a game. And when you do look for help how long do you try to puzzle it out yourself before asking or reading a FAQ? Hours, days, weeks??

I usually get stuck on something on every game or every 2nd game and need to look something small up. Usually I try to puzzle it out for 5 or 6 hours. Sometimes several days.

never, If my fellow man created it, I can dominate it.

never, If my fellow man created it, I can dominate it.

samuraiguns

What about some of the good old classic adventure games and platformers that featured insane logic. For example plenty of oldshcool adventure games needed you to use some completely illogical combination of objects to solve a puzzle. You could spend a year trying out all the combinations before finding out that the way to open the lock is to smear it with peanut butter, sing a lullaby, eat some cheese, then turn the knob counterclockwise :D Then there are games like Simmon's quest where you have to kneel down in certain locations and use a random item to progress. There is no hint of what to do there.

The one that stuck me most recently was Dragon Quest IV (a FANTASTIC game by the way) where there is a mountain blocking a passageway. The only way to get past this is to use one of the weapons (the lava stick) as a tool which melts the mountain. It would have taken me weeks to figure that out by trial and error.

Games like Uncharted, I use hint if I stuck to long.

If their is no hint I just continue to play the game. That could take hours but it is worth it.

I only get help the collect all the collectables in the game.

If I really like a game I won't use hints at all unless it is absolutely a last resort (which means at least a day or two of being stuck and trying every possible solution I can think of before resorting to faqs). For example when I played Uncharted 2 I tried and tried to find every treasure, and played through some levels 6 times and more just looking for treasure, but after several days of treasure hunting I eventually gave up and looked up the last couple of treasure locations.

On the other hand, if I am playing a game that I don't really care about much, for example a game that has an interesting story but terrible controls, and I just want to see how the thing ends, I will sometimes look for help even if I am not stuck or having any problems, just so I can find ways to get to the end of the game faster. An example would be Silent Hill Homecoming – I came up to a boss fight where it was obvious what I had to do to defeat him, but the way I was doing it seemed to be going too slow, so I looked at a gamefaq just to see if there was a super fast way to do it so that I could get through the unfun part as fast as possible and get back to seeing how the storyline played out.