Essential Powers For Beating Our Favorite Video Games

Video games can be tough, yes. But they can be nigh impossible without the proper tools or, in the case of the following list items, the proper powers. Even from gaming's infancy, we've learned that special powers and power-ups helped give us advantages that made the experience just a little better. Case in point? The Power Pellets in Pac-Man that allow the little chomper to move faster and gobble up ghosts. The powers we've listed, however, are ones you just can't do without. And yes, they're way better than scarfing down a mushroom to become huge.

We don't care how great your aim is or how intuitive the controls are, Dead Eye Targeting is essential to the Red Dead Redemption experience. There's just something awesome about riding on horseback and slowing down time to shoot a snarling cowboy off his nag, right before he tries to hit you. In some of the more epic gunfights in Red Dead Redemption, you'd end up with more holes in you than the Dawn of Justice plot. Not only did Dead Eye help you with your aim, but it was also a very useful scouting tool, allowing you to take note of how many enemies there were and their positions. Thanks to this power, you were always given the opportunity to have your bullets make their homes inside of your yellow-toothed adversaries.

As the titular Prince in The Prince of Persia series, you also had awesome powers that manipulated the flow of time. But instead of just being able to slow things down like John Marston with his Dead Eye, the Prince could straight up rewind time, freeze enemies, make himself incredibly speedy, and even see the future. The ability to rewind was very important, especially if you misjudged a jump during some of the platforming sections of the game and ended up screaming to your death while free-falling into an abyss. In fact, any time you failed miserably, you could always rewind a bit to correct your mistakes. But you had to make sure you had enough power available to fully rewind to a correctable point in time, otherwise you'd have to relive your failure over and over.

Thanks to the Eagle Vision power in Assassin's Creed, we were always sure of who was friend or foe. This kept us from going on an accidental murder spree by pinpointing the targets of missions or just pointing out where all the guards were, just in case we wanted to keep things stealthy. Assassins have used this power for centuries to glean information and to help them take out their adversaries with foreknowledge of their movements and positioning. Just think of it as a hack, except one that's built-in and helps you beat the game by showing you exactly who to kill and where they were most of the time.

BioShock Infinite's Elizabeth is an indispensable treasure, capable of tossing you items when you need them most and providing commentary as you walk around the floating city of Columbia. More importantly, she has the power to open Tears in the fabric of space and time, allowing parts of parallel universes to appear, ready for Booker's use in battle. Elizabeth's usefulness is two-fold, especially because she tosses you Salts when you need to use Vigors, ammo when you're running low, and first aid kits when you're getting ready to stumble off this mortal coil. Oh, and she picks locks too, because Liz is badass like that.

If there's one thing we can take away from this list, it's that having control over time is amazing and is something we all want. In the case of Link in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, it's kind of a necessity. There is absolutely no way that Link can save the day and head home without the help of the Ocarina of Time (and its alternate instruments), because he's only given three days to stop the moon from destroying Termina. Time and time again, Link must head to the past to fulfill some requirement or another to help alter the chain of events so that he can put down Skull Kid and put an end to Majora's mischief. It may have been a pain to learn all of those songs, but at least they allowed us to travel back in time or even speed things up. If only the Ocarina of Time was real and could speed up the work week for us.

This is a no-brainer; you can't have a Spider-Man game without the use of Spidey's powers. The web-slinging, the wall-crawling, the agility, the Spider-Senses, and the strength are all required for any Spider-Man game, even if only for traversing Manhattan. Being agile enough to swing around with web, whether it's organic or comes from a mechanical shooter, is integral to the Spider-Man experience. We can't really see him getting a cab in order to stop Doc Ock downtown. More importantly, without his Spider-Senses tingling up a storm, he'd probably get the Uncle Ben treatment when it comes to trying to stop armed criminals. Sorry Peter.

It might seem very simple, but healing is an incredibly important power in any game. And while they're not exclusive to massively multiplayer online role-playing games, we've chosen to highlight healing spells in World of Warcraft because of their importance in group content like Dungeons and Raids. Without a proper healer, most groups would not be able to complete any of World of Warcraft's current endgame content. Whether they come in the form of area of effect heals, heals over time, or direct heals, the fact that these spells keep health bars filled should be enough to get any tank or DPS class to bow down at their importance. Respect your healers—they keep you alive.