Believing, even if a bit, in a company like Bethesda. I was still hoping for improvements following Fallout 3, for something to look forward to... And then Fallout 4 came to be.
Never again will I take anything seriously from this studio. What's more disturbing is they have a cult following, ready to defend them until the end of times.
In the words of Vaas Montenegro: "Did I ever tell you the definition of insanity?"

Or there's games like SaGa Frontier and its sequel, which got bad reviews but which I ended up enjoying.

(Note that these two games are actually not that similar; it's conceivable that one could enjoy one but dislike the other.)

I don't know about worst mistakes but I have a few memorable ones.

Most recent was in Solasta Crown of the Magister. Light and darkvision play a big part in this game, some monsters (those with superior darkvision) get bonuses against you in the dark and penalties if they are illuminated. I was aware of this and hadn't had too much trouble thus far. I honestly actually really liked the mechanic even if not everyone did.

Now to the mistake.

There is this castle full of undead because of course there is... Well it was a bit rough but not unduly and I had noticed boarded up windows which I kept breaking and letting light stream in. Everything was going ok then I opened a door and walked into a vampire boss. I figured hey no worries I see plenty of windows lets do this. I broke the windows no light absolutely nothing.... Thus began fighing a vampire boss and two low level vamps in the dark with a torch and the light spell on my mace. It went pretty badly especially as I had used a lot of my spells and abilities before hand and literally stumbled into the fight by accident. Even better she healed in the dark and could drain health from us and her followers. Could also cast a darkness ability over us which made our light spell and torches useless. It ended how you would expect. I reloaded and came back with a few more abilities available after a short rest.

Windows still wouldn't let in any light. Light spells, torches, and good old sentient fire orb it is. It was a tough but between us and the fire orb we won eventually. It was pretty close a few times. Dwarf fighter and fire orb kept her distracted. The other fighter a spell blade ran around giving the minions a hard time and keeping them away from the priest and pure wizard. Who pelted the boss with ranged spells. Moved out of the darkness when she cast it. Had a bit more room to work with off the stair case. We won. I got ready to start a long rest and was mentally compiling a bug report about the windows since many other players were saying to use them.
Enter the mistake:
According to rest menu it was several hours after sundown. My dumbass had decided to pick a fight with a vampire at night.
After the long rest. the windows were letting in light again. Yay... Lesson learned yes time does make a difference in this game and I will pay more attention in the future.

Mistake 2 is my most memorable goof in gaming and happened back in Baldur's Gate 2 Throne of Bhaal back when it came out. I was a kid who liked fantasy games and knew pretty much nothing about DND or its rules. I was figuring it out as I went. So Watcher's Keep had been fun so far and I had been doing fairly well. I found some stairs going down and as I had it drilled into my skull by various mistakes in the first game I saved. Those games had me so paranoid I saved before opening any door or going up or down any stairs or exiting a map. (frack you random bandit ambush at lvl 2) Crept down the stairs before we got to the bottom a fireball shot and pretty much murdered us. I wasn't sure at first if it was a trap I failed to notice or something at the bottom of the stairs. After a reload I made it to the bottom to a dragon. Excited but also nervous it was my first dragon which promptly murdered us again. Ok 3rd try. Put some buffs on and went down the stairs. Made it! All our weapons and spells just keep bouncing off, doing little to no damage. Freaking out because it can apparently cast spells on top of everything else. Most of my party are dead, my mage has one spell left. I panic cast it. Polymorph other, I honestly expected it to fail. The dragon was turned into a squirrel and it was glorious.

Victory! Right? That is what I thought. I mean sure the "the squirrel" was still immune to my weapons. But it didn't seem to be able to do anything. So I thought well I will just walk over and take the treasure. The "squirrel" then shot out a fireball killing all remaining party members. I sat there in shock staring at the game over screen for almost 2 minutes. I was murdered by a squirrel. I reloaded and read the spell description more closely and learned my mistake "still has all abilities" I wondered what the point of the spell was then. My party walked out of the keep to continue the main quest and forget this embarassing encounter from our memories.

Lessons learned that day: Make sure to read throughly. Reread it again just to be sure. Patience is a virtue and you can always come back and try again later. Squirrels suck.

My problem with TPS was the same as you described, ie loot being useless too soon and generally feeling unrewarded for playing when the playing itself felt like a grind. I hate spongy enemies in FPS games and TPS enemies were like that, especially the bosses. IIRC I quit the game the first time after reaching that female commander in a mech bossfight due to her being spongy and me running out of health and ammo. I then tried again a few months / year later and quit at the same place for the same reasons. The electric and burn damage some enemies could do seemed unfair too. I really liked the aerial aspect though, wish they would've done more with it.

In your opinion, is it possible in BL1 to play as a melee or stealth character? In BL2 there's a class for that I believe but if its like you mentioned, I wouldn't like it. TPS isn't good for melee though, despite me playing the melee character. Too little damage.

I was drawn to computer gaming because I just figured getting a gaming machine that can do stuff beyond mere gaming is even better, and console cartridge games tended to be more expensive than e.g. floppy disk games.

I guess there was also the casual piracy thing (getting games for free), but that didn't happen to me until Commodore Amiga. Before that I had home computer systems where I (or rather, my parents and my big brother) had bought all my games, partly possibly because I knew no one else with the same system, and piracy on them wasn't that feasible anyway.

But I did buy lots of games also for Amiga, even if there was the possibility for piracy as well.

Buying more games (including crappy ones) than I will ever have time and effort to play, let alone finish.

Tell me about it! Once in Risen I quicksaved instead of quickloading, when I was falling to my death to a pit... Essentially locking myself into a game over. Luckily I also save manually like a maniac so I only lost about 5 minutes of progress.

I should have remapped the hotkeys so quicksave and quickload weren't immediately adjacent to each other.

You were pretty close to the end then. There are only 2 bigger areas after that before the end (excluding the DLC). And yeah, the DoT damage the enemies do is one of the most annoying things in the game as it deals massive damage and there are not many counters to it.

Playing pure melee in BL games is quite annoying at best, because from BL 2 on, there are so called "roid" shields, which boost your melee damage when depleted. In order to play pure melee, you HAVE to use a roid shield AND you have to find a way to deplete it before starting a fight and keep it depleted. Extremely annoying and tedious thing to manage which also makes you pretty fragile. And without roid shields, melee only is simply not viable.

But I greatly enjoyed the hybrid playstyle of Athena in TPS. She has a melee tree that was great fun and supports a playstyle, where you hit enemies with both melee and ranged attacks from close range and works great even without roid shields. Combined with her action skill, it was by far the most fun I've had in Borderlands.

In BL 1, Brick could probably be played as mostly melee, although I'm not sure as Brick is the character I almost haven't played.

I never felt like I reached the fully powerful form of my character though (was Athena, but invested into something non-melee). I always felt like I wasn't doing optimum damage because of lack of good weapons and that increased every time I levelled up. I reached the point where I realized I couldn't choose the weapons I liked but instead had to compare everything and use whatever did the highest damage.

Yes Athena's shield was really cool. If that's the best melee in the series, then I'd rather give that a shake than BL1.

Also me. Trying to do the stupid ass bootstraps thing but I've bought games in anticipation of a life I don't actually have. Too busy. Don't have a dedicated TV for any consoles. Working hard to reverse that so I can make this collection feel like less of a mistake.

Biggest mistake? I started.
Once I got hooked up, I was never able to drop them. :P

I just sold my Amiga and 14 games I still had in the box for it less than 1 month ago. Loved that machine. For my family, it was the idea that we needed computers for work and school so why bother getting another machine to game when you can have the same computer do that. It's my mindset to this day especially when in the 90's computers became easier to hook up to TVs and watch TV channels on them.

Amiga games were so cheap. A lot of the rental stores near me as a kid would sell used copies for under $2 and that's how I started getting my games. Also computer stores would have 3 for 1 bags. 3 games in 1 bag or box for $1. I picked up a used copy of Tie Fighter that way.

I was into MUDs and many were free so I did not touch piracy until I was an adult and one of my game disc stopped working. I remember using postal money orders to buy games from 3DRealm and ID shareware programs. Old as fuck :)

Sorry to hear that. I still play PS2 games often... but mainly through PC emulation since my PS2 consoles both lost the ability to read yellow wavelength (usually the first thing to go on the console re: the laser). That's how I play the Max Payne and early GTA games. But yes, the remasters have been good.

I'm a bit older than you. Both my parents worked in telecommunications and where tinkerers. The had working Altair computers from the 70's up until the early 90's before getting into DOS and Amiga. I use to repair CB radios with my Dad for arcade money.