Picture this — you're about 16 years old in the mid-2000s. You're either studying for a math exam, or getting ready to head out to the movies with friends, and the most constant interruption you face isn't the landline ringing or mom calling you for tea.

Instead, it's your younger brother, standing sheepishly at the door with a controller in his hand. He's not here to play with you, either. He's asking you to save him. A mission, a level, or a boss fight that's too hard to handle. As that toddler, my elder brother may never have been a through-and-through gamer, but he sure was a fixer, and these games were ones I always needed him to help me out with.

Contra challenged me with my first-ever TPS camera

"What do you mean I'm looking at his back?"

Contra was the game we played on the famiclone we had, and I'm not proud to admit that it took us a long time to ever get past the first level. After I managed to get there, though, my five-year-old brain completely broke, because the game suddenly switched to a behind-the-back third-person perspective. I couldn't figure out how to shoot, where to jump, and I just kept running into the electrified barriers over and over.

Honestly, Contra had turned into a completely different game, and I did the only thing I knew to do — ask my brother. Once he got me through the section, and dropped me into the boss fight, that's when I finally figured out what I was dealing with, since it was literally my first brush with a behind-the-back camera in any video game ever, period.

The original Dead Space was too scary and clunky

A boss battle in zero gravity was above my weight class

I may have blasted through the phenomenal Dead Space remake over a single weekend, but back in 2008, that was simply not the case. The original game was terrifying enough on its own for my ten-year-old self, but the clunky zero-G mechanics were definitely my kryptonite. Since this horror franchise only gave us zero-gravity flying in the second game, this one just had zero-G jumps, where you launched yourself from one point to the other. Now, combine that with a huge, chamber-sized leviathan boss fight, and you get a brick wall for me to run into. Three jumps in, I'd have to spend ten seconds to gather my bearings and figure out where the ceiling or floor even was. By the time I did? I was swatted into oblivion.

My brother, despite being in the middle of his very important 10th-grade exams, sat down to figure it out for me, and that was also the case for the boss fight that followed. Ironically, though, that was the same boss fight that cost us our PC privileges, since he helped me finish the boss fight outside our designated 'computer time'. Our folks took away the PC, which took an entire month away from the game. That only made the game harder when I finally resumed it, and I don't think I ever finished the original game.

Captain Claw's boss fights were too tough for a toddler

Except this time, we both got stuck on a boss together

Captain Claw was one of the first PC platformers I ever played on PC instead of an NES clone, and boy did it blow me away. The cutscenes, the animations, and the pirate-cat swagger of it all had me hooked from the word go, and I blazed through the first few levels, stabbing dogs and taking names. But then came the level 6 boss, Wolvington, and he proved to be an unbreakable wall of canine I couldn't get past. I tried, failed, and failed some more before simply handing over the keyboard to my brother.

Interestingly, this was one boss even my brother couldn't beat at the time (think 2004). What followed was a month of trying, giving up completely, finding out the cheat codes for the game from the closest internet café, and then coming back to finally beat him. To this day, I don't know if Wolvington was actually that hard, or if we were just kids punching well above our weight.

Super Castlevania IV

The whip was really not enough for me

Once I got myself a knock-off SNES in eighth grade, I played the heck out of the cloned console. One of the masterpieces on the Super Nintendo I couldn't get enough of was Super Castlevania IV, and looking back, it really does hold up well. When I first played it though, it felt like the game was actively bullying me with its clock tower jumps and Medusa heads. This was my Soulslike experience well before FromSoft birthed the genre with Demon's Souls, and to top it all off, I found myself face to face with The Count himself, Dracula.

I'm not going to pretend that I got to him on my own, since the final few stages were really just about handing over the controller to my brother anyway. But with Dracula, he powered through with the patience I did not have, slowly learning his patterns while I sat beside him, chewing my nails off. This was a proper tag-team boss fight, and honestly, that made it even better than winning solo could've felt.

Spider-Man on the PlayStation 1

Monster Ock behind Spidey is a chase sequence I never finished

The superhero genre in gaming has grown in the past few generations, but the PS1 Spider-Man game? That remains one of the most unforgettable and underrated gems, and it's still fun, as I'm discovering halfway through my replay on RetroArch. Everything from chasing Venom through the sewers or fighting Scorpion while JJJ cowers behind his desk is memorable in the game, but it was the ending that still haunts me to this day.

Carnage takes over Dock Ock in the penultimate level to create Monster Ock, and that guy was straight up nightmare fuel. What follows is a chase sequence that had my tiny hands shaking, and the clunky swinging mechanics didn't help either. Pair that with a self-destruct timer on the building we were in and the sheer terror of Monster Ock's roars right behind me, and I caved. I never could do, and that's where I needed my brother to once again step in and escape Monster Ock for me. I'm a few hours away from replaying it on my phone, and let me tell you, I'm not sure if I'm going to have it in me this time around, either.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

Demolition Man and Checkpoint Charlie were well beyond my skill level

GTA Vice City was my playground to steal cars, blast radio stations or Windows Media Player music playlists in the background, or just spam 'THUGSTOOLS' every time I died or got arrested. Enter Demolition Man and Checkpoint Charlie — two missions that demanded a frightening amount of patience, focus, and an actual understanding of controls for a terrible camera. Did I have any of those at eight years old? Nope.

My brother, on the other hand, who never liked GTA, had to come in and bail me out with both these missions. For Demolition Man, he struggled as well, and it wasn't until I took command of the numpad while he flew the RC helicopter that we were able to bring down the building Avery wanted gone by the time he came back to Vice City.

Now, I don't see a lot of people talk about this, but Checkpoint Charlie was a brutal mission in the game. Not only do you have to race through a series of checkpoints on the water to collect packages, but you also have to do it while controlling one of the worst-handling vehicles in gaming history, on a 2.5-minute timer. My brother hated every second of these missions, but had it not been for him, my playthrough would have ended twice over.

YouTube walkthroughs could never replace a co-op partner

Looking back today, these moments were about the ritual of shared experiences, and him swooping in like a hero to bail me out whenever I got stuck in a game. Sure, there were moments where we both found ourselves stuck against an impossible boss, but every time, the privilege and luxury of having someone by my side was a lot more important.

Today, everyone's got walkthroughs and YouTube tutorials for every game on the planet, but they could never replace that small, sheepish glance I'd shoot my brother, controller in hand, asking: "Could you help me out with this one game?"