I have the same issue in video games. I always end up at the end not having used my unique items because I only have 1.

same but brain

i'm like that in anything vaguely RPGish, videogame/board-top/cards/whatever.

if there is a such thing as a potion or anything like it i'll horde it and never use for fear of needing it in the future, well past the last boss or the credits..

I've noticed this a few times where I've hoarded items to use later only to find I've finished the game before that challenging "later" arrives.

For some odd reason, the specific game that comes to mind for this was Horizon:Zero Dawn PS4/5.

Conversely, I'm playing Half-Life:Blueshift right now, and I didn't try to save anything, now I've hit a couple of points where I'm out of ammo or health and can't progress without loading an older save.

I had one fun experience in Black Mesa (HL fan-remake) where I was knocked off of the edge of a "cliff" by a large enemy (no spoilers) and it auto-saved mid-air, so it reloaded me falling forever >_<.

Oh god that was the worst. And then Trine came out.

I'm definitely the type to always be saving items "just in case" and the Half Life series is definitely one where I felt the most paranoid about that.

I played HL1 on the PS2 recently with a memory card that was really limited in space so I was only managing a single save for most of the playthrough until I soft locked myself in a room I couldn't leave using my ONLY save and had to start at least carrying a second backup save to prevent that happening again.

Half Life 2 felt like it almost made fun of me at times for building that hoarding mentality, always dumping health and ammo on me when I had already been preserving it as much as possible right before. Meanwhile the few things I would run out of it would never give any more of for entire sections.

> I played HL1 on the PS2 recently with a memory card that was really limited in space so I was only managing a single save for most of the playthrough until I soft locked myself in a room I couldn't leave using my ONLY save and had to start at least carrying a second backup save to prevent that happening again.

I get very little time to game these days, which has the benefit that I have saves usually spaced no more than about an hour apart. Sometimes a couple of hours on the weekends. There were a couple of points in HL1 where I had to go back to a previous save because I was in a bad situation, I'm playing on PC so there was no real limit on the number of saves I can keep.

I've not started HL2 yet (this time around, and it's been 20 something years since I last played it) so I can't remember what that was like.

I'm going to finish Blueshift, then go on to HL2, but I'd really like some texture and quality updates; HL2 is a real downgrade from Black Mesa. I tried it in VR but was feeling nauseous within a few minutes.

All of this is to lead up to Alyx on my Steam Frame which is just sitting there waiting until I replay these so I can remember what happened.

> Half Life 2 felt like it almost made fun of me at times for building that hoarding mentality, always dumping health and ammo on me when I had already been preserving it as much as possible right before. Meanwhile the few things I would run out of it would never give any more of for entire sections

I'll bear this in mind. I think HL1 was a little too obvious; you suddenly get a cache of rocket ammo, you know what's coming.

I'm kinda opposite on reason, I feel like using one means I failed to do the battle the normal way and picked the easy mode.

I've mostly healed from that affliction, at least for buyable consumables, now it is just math, if I buy X potions I won't have to go back to rest and heal, so it's more efficient to grind while spending a bit of gold earned on regen

Me but with notebooks. Not unique or interesting ones. All of them. I'm always worried about ruining the notebook by putting the wrong stuff in it so I just have an ever increasing collection of blank notebooks that I thought were definitely the one I would finally use.

I haven't worked with paper in a long time, but IIRC some notebooks I used in school had pages you could tear out, sacrificing a strip along the side, while preserving holes that'd work in a 3 ring binder. So then you could just write anything in one of these notebooks, tear it out, and put it in a 3 ring binder afterward. The binder could be more thematically organized then, separate binders by subject. A bit like opening your text editor, writing stuff down, then deciding which dir to save it to later.

Also even if your paper doesn't have the holes, you could use a punch to add them, assuming you have space on the side without writing.

Also, backtracking 5 minutes to pick up the health pack at the start of the level instead of the one right in front of me

You didn't miss much. It took 20-30 minutes each pass, plus the extra cost for the discs.

But even if you were fine with that, it came out too light under actual lighting conditions, even after you burned it twice, which defeats the use case of making it look professionally labeled. For home use, a Sharpie beat it in every way.

Huh, that wasn't my experience. I mean, it absolutely was slow especially with sufficiently complex labels, but they generally came out fine. Granted, you absolutely couldn't just drop any arbitrary image into the LightScribe software and have it come out looking good, you'd have to mess with the contrast, but black-and-white text and line art would come out fine. And more legible than Sharpie, with my handwriting.

[delayed]