Finding New and Unintended Ways of Playing Games 346
Ronald Diemicke writes "World of Warcraft players sometimes hang out in front of Ironforge and dance. Fallout 3 players seek out new and elaborate ways of destroying their avatar. Brawlers in Smash Brothers have an itchy pause finger, ready to catch any humiliatingly hilarious screengrabs. The thugs running rampant in Grand Theft Auto are putting Evil Knievel to shame by using a full assortment of vehicles to pull off some incredible stunt work. Personally, I like to collect and move things. My favorite is making piles of bodies in any game that lets me move them around. Ever catch yourself doing something in-game that isn't exactly part of the game, or just something really dumb?"
I like to get the first post on news forums (Score:5, Funny)
Interesting Discussion (Score:5, Funny)
I've never really realized how subconsciously evil I am until this topic was brought up. I'm usually a care-bear when it comes to online play, but when it comes to computers, I'm a total dick. For instance, in Spore I would pay all my allies to fight against each other in an effort to start a mindless massacre. In Oblivion, I would kill a whole town by using command humanoid to gather them, then casting a giant frenzy spell to start a mindless massacre (you can start to see the trend there). Then in other strategy games, I like to destroy everything except their main base. Then I build up a massive army of the strongest artillery, surround it, and then blast the bajesus out of it.
Re:Interesting Discussion (Score:5, Interesting)
Its fun to be a dick. In games its easier and theres no consequences in it and in single player games you wont be ruining anyone elses game either.
This is partly why I love physics games too. Its fun to build, destroy, smash and do something unexceptable to see the results. Physics games probably fit this category the best because they're made to play around with.
Sometimes I also dont want to get into some epic story but just have a bit of fun. Good physics engine + Good and responsive AI and the fun begins.
Re:Interesting Discussion (Score:4, Funny)
My favorite is in Freespace 2. Just start friendly firing nonstop on 1 ship, and soon enough they call you a traitor and start shooting the bejesus out of you. But on some missions you can actually kill all of your allies and destroy a capital ship or two. And then after you warp back to base, the debriefings are always different....like "you will be executed at 0800 tomorrow and we all hope you burn in hell, traitor" or "in light of your recent assassination attempts, we are putting you in a facility for the medically derangedn where we will get to the bottom of this, traitor".
It's still my favorite game of all time.
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I think everyone does that to some degree. In civilizations you turn off "domination" victory, beat the last guy to one city, completely surround it with artillery, send in spies to destroy any building and sabotage production of any units, build cities all around it so it has no resources.
In fallout I am busy trying to kill every non-generic character I can in capitol wasteland. I also do this often with "Way of the samurai." I like games where you can choose to kill almost every character and it affect
Re:Interesting Discussion (Score:5, Funny)
That reminded me of the times I played Lemmings in my 386. Whenever i got bored or frustrated I would just put two lemmings in "guard" mode right where they came out into the level, and after getting them all packed into the 3 or 4 pixels left between the guards, I would hit the suicide button and watch all of those lemmings blow up. It was like fireworks! Pretty fireworks!
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Oh my. This topic brings back great memories such as:
ATARI- Asteroids. Playing "chicken" with the boulders.
ATARI- Asteroids. Eliminate all the boulders except one, and then take-on the UFO in a one-on-one gunfight.
ATARI- Berzerk. Hide behind a ball, fire at it, and watch the robots walk into it. I imagined that my laser fire was magnetizing the wall and drawing-in the metal beasts.
ATARI- Pitfall 2. Go the highest possible level. Jump. Watch Pitfall Harry fall for 2 minutes.
ATARI- Freeway/Frogger. S
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That reminded me of the times I played Lemmings in my 386. Whenever i got bored or frustrated I would just put two lemmings in "guard" mode right where they came out into the level, and after getting them all packed into the 3 or 4 pixels left between the guards, I would hit the suicide button and watch all of those lemmings blow up. It was like fireworks! Pretty fireworks!
Wait... you mean that's not how lemmings was supposed to work?!
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Just an observation, but you prefer to kill remotely. IE: You'd rather let the AI kill each other than do the deed yourself or control the battlefield instead of grabbing a sword and going toe to toe with others. I assume you don't play much FPS or if you do, you enjoy to snipe?
Not to worry though, I don't think. I do the same whenever possible. I hate PVP in online games ("mano a mano") but I love to let the world destroy itself and/or distance myself from the carnage. One example I can think of that
Dumb AND obsessively repetitive... (Score:5, Funny)
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Nice to know know I'm not alone.
Re:Dumb AND obsessively repetitive... (Score:5, Informative)
StarCraft with nothing but the most useless units (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:StarCraft with nothing but the most useless uni (Score:5, Funny)
Re:StarCraft with nothing but the most useless uni (Score:5, Insightful)
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Um... the most basic units of the game are the workers, e.g. SCVs, drones and probes.
Oh, perhaps it is better for you to forget I said that...
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Along the dumb and repetitive lines, I used to make maps that were ALL wood with the bare minimum required to move and cut my first log. From here on it was just a matter of cutting and cutting and making more cutters (Once I could build the required living spaces)....
I don't know why.
Re:Dumb AND obsessively repetitive... (Score:5, Funny)
You feel threatened by the potency of a male figure in your life, probably your father.
If I were Freud I'd say you want to sleep with your mother too, but I'm not.
Re:Dumb AND obsessively repetitive... (Score:4, Interesting)
Short of hacking your save file, it's a good way to beef up your resource counters.
Re:Dumb AND obsessively repetitive... (Score:5, Interesting)
I did the same in pretty much every game. I have to kill every monster, collect every powerup, and do everything possible. And I can tell you the causes of this with a very nice example. (I have forgotten the details, so I will fill in my own.)
There is an old movie, where there is a imminent nuclear explosion. And the women in the household, just starts to clean everything in the house to total perfection. Because her mind can't stand the "chaos". She feels the extreme urge to order that chaos. So instead of running to a bomb shelter, she dies ironing shirts in the living room.
Find out what gave you the urge.
I have a well-proven method to find it: When you are doing the "landscape raping", stop for some seconds, and concentrate on the bad feeling that that gives you. Try to do as much as possible to strengthen that feeling. (Create congruence.) Like adding other things to the situation (or removing them). Jump right in the middle of the feeling. And get it to the absolute maximum. :)
Yes, it will hurt. and your subconscious will fight it tooth and nail. Which is why it's much easier, when you have someone who can keep you on that path, while not bringing in his own (possibly twisted) influences. Also it means that you have to be in an environment, where you can really act out the stuff. It must be OK, even if you flip out, destroy half the room, do "perverse" things, or cry like a baby. (Shame is the natural enemy here.)
This usually re-activates old (=weak) neural associative pathways, that once were created when the original source of the problem happened. Which means those old things suddenly pop up and reappear in your mind.
Now beware that more often than not, there are many steps to re-activate, and the first thing is usually not the original source. Which means that you can only be sure to have reached the real source, when after a long time, you still don't get to a next step. Which is unrealistic, because it takes very long. But prepare for your first "final source" to not actually be the final one, and having to do the whole thing even deeper, when you find out that it's still not really solved. (These intermediate "sources" usually are re-traumatizations that added something to it. Often they also are *partial* "final sources", because there is more than one final cause.)
Anyway... when you have reached that final source/cause, you usually see a huge range of things in your life, that are very twisted, and have nothing to do with how you thing it would make sense to react. WRITE THEM ALL DOWN! (In a tree-like mind-map. I recommend paper, or the FreeMind mind-mapping software [open-source] [sourceforge.net]) This again is a process where you have to scrape the bottom of the barrel for those "twisted" things. To really get them all.
Once you have that map of your not-so-rose-colored glasses, you can start to re-train yourself. Which means that every time you get to such a situation, you (usually) automatically notice that what you would do now, is something that makes no actual sense, but only in the context of that "twist". So you do what you *actually* think makes sense.
This again is a hard process, because you fight against age-old habits. So reward yourself generously, get as much mental strength / love from your loved ones as possible, and just expect it to hurt to fight it, until you are over the top of the mountain (a more accurate description than "out of the woods"). And don't let this stop you.
It will take time to re-train yourself. And the stronger the new impressions, the more you learn, and thereby the faster it goes. But keep your personal balance between "too hard" and "too easy", to keep the acceleration at a maximum. It's no help when you get completely off the "road" because you were too fast.
Allright. Good luck. And try it with a professional, if needed. (Just beware that most professionals actually can *also* get to a level where it's too much for them. They are only human, even if they are trained to stand it. But that is their fault, and you do not have to take this into consideration. If needed, find a better/stronger/stabler one. After all, you're paying for it.)
Explorer (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Explorer (Score:5, Interesting)
Same here - for me, it's part of why Ultima stood so far above the rest.
I get any game, doesn't matter what, and I'm always trying to hop onto buildings, fall off maps, find new KOS zones, etc. Usually long before it makes sense for my character to be in a zone or area, I'm there. Sneaking around, harassing NPCs.
Oblivion is one of my all time favorites for exactly this reason. I've explored probably every inch of that game. Right now, I'm visiting and taking screenshots all over LOTRO, though there are less hidden wonders than I'd like (the river basin with two opposing waterfalls is funny, though. Where's the water *go*?)
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In classic WOW (before any expansion), I remember stealthing up to the dark portal as a druid. It was pretty great and I said something in guild chat. No one knew what I was talking about.
Re:Explorer (Score:5, Interesting)
That's why I stopped playing WoW.
My strategy has always been the same: I liked to find the ultimate 'combo' and push my character far beyond what the original designers intended. For example, in WoW I played an Alchemist Paladin - the theory being that by using Paladin shields and spells, I could survive just long enough in high-level zones to pick some uber herb, make uber potions, and then use said potions to turn myself into the Ubermensch. I could pull it off too. I was able to go into zones 10 levels above me, and walk out with bags full of herbs. I did things like jump off cliffs on low-level zones into corners of high level zones while shielded, so I would be able to pick the one herb that was there out of range of any monsters. I carefully waited for patrols of elite mobs to wander past, and I'd carefully sneak past them into high-level zones.
My strategy would have worked, except that Blizzard put in totally artificial limits into the game, so that if you did manage to cleverly set your character up like that, it wouldn't actually do you any good at all. The best strategy (in terms of efficiency) by far was always to grind roughly equal level mobs while doing boring quests (kill X of Y mobs). That pissed me off. The game actively forced you to play in a boring, linear, repetitive manner. Creativity was not only discouraged, but in many cases virtually impossible.
I'm sure they did it to prevent 'twinking', or 'exploiting', or whatever, but it made the game deadly boring for me. I much prefer games like Nethack, where you can find a wand of wishing after playing the game for 3 turns, and still die four turns later. (Yes, it happened to me. I now know that I shouldn't wish for artifacts that blast the wielder with their power when picked up if I'm still at level 1.)
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This is what bothered me about WoW. There are places (such as the southern reaches of the Eastern Kingdoms) where you can swim around the continent and up onto hidden beaches and up into valleys, but there's nothing there. No gold. No creatures to kill. No NPCs to interact with. It's like it was created to be a secret spot, but they forgot to reward the player for spending the time and effort to get there.
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Were there any non trivial reward everyone would go there...
Re:Explorer (Score:5, Insightful)
No, you need a non-trivial reward *not related to gameplay*. An exceptionally beautiful scene, for instance. Or an old woman sitting on her front porch with fifty times as much dialog as a typical character, just talking about her life and the things she's seen and the places she's been.
It has to be something you can't take with you, but there should be a reward.
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I'm the same way with a lotta stuff. Even though I had Cartographer in WoW, I had to open up all those zones completely.
In Team Fortress Classic, there was that whole skills community... maps based around conc, rocket, pipe-jumping etc. I miss stuff like that.
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Guild wars gives you rewards for that. Not only do you get titles for poking around everywhere, they occasionally put some neat-looking stuff in places where there's no game-connected reasons to go.
Designing a SIMS home-improvement (Score:5, Interesting)
I've used The Sims (1) to create some rather nice and pseudo-realistic drafts of some ideas my wife and I have for an expansion/remodel of our house. It worked quite well, despoite the limitations of this version of the game. Just create some random Sim, plop him on the property, pause the game, use the "rosebud;!;" cheat to rack up the Simoleans, and go to town.
I also used it to create sketches of a future radio station facility:
http://www.wphafm.org/concept [wphafm.org]
All done with The Sims (1)
I would like to try this with the Sims 2, seeing it provides much more flexibility and realism for such things. For now, though, those are my major "out-of-game" adventures. ;)
Re:Designing a SIMS home-improvement (Score:5, Interesting)
I seem to recall an interview with Will Wright that mentioned that he was told that he was tasked with making a program to do exactly what you described, but to also test design efficiency of floor-plans. The end result became "The Sims". He was essentially tricked into making a game.
So no surprise that you ended up using it for exactly that, designing buildings.
Did you actually use the sims in the game to test floor-plan efficiency?
Re:Designing a SIMS home-improvement (Score:5, Funny)
Really? I had no idea.
I'd always thought the point of Sims was to build elaborate swimming pools, take out the ladder, and watch your sims drown to death. Or my other favorite, surround the sims with four walls but no exits. And watch them starve. If I were feeling generous that day, I'd make a window or paint the walls.
Heh heh heh.
Re:Designing a SIMS home-improvement (Score:5, Funny)
Jeez, a little imagination please.
Try taking two Sims (or better yet, many!) with opposing personalities, then bricking them into a room with nothing but a toilet and an espresso machine.
"Get the fuck out, asshole. I need to take a leak!"
"Really? You sure you just don't want another Caramel Machiatto ?"
It's the only way I've actually made a Sim I didn't control kill another Sim (gotta love them neighbors!). It takes about 10-15 fist-fights, but eventually one takes a permanent dirtnap. I even had BOTH Sims fall asleep in the middle of one of them fist fights once because there was no bed. Ball of Fury, then pow!, interrupted script and two Sims sleeping in puddles of piss.
The funniest part is watching the "totally surprised" reaction of the Sim that did the killing when the Grim Reaper shows up.
"Oh sure, it's all fun and games until someone gets hurt!"
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In Sims 3 I would always create a neighborhood psychopath, whose sole purpose was to lure the neighbors into his basement, build walls around them to form a cell with one window, and then paint their resulting agony (you essentially make a first-person screenshot your painting). He would then hang the paintings on the wall of his fabulously gothic hall. The Sims would beat their fists on the window to be let out and those made the best paintings by far. Adult Sims would eventually perish and you could paint
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It makes me wonder if there are parallel worlds created where this sort of thing happens all the time.
Yes, there are.
Any conceivable universe exists in some parallel. Every story written, game played, world imagined, and possibility contemplated exists somewhere in the multiverse.
That is one of the things I enjoy keeping in the back of my head as I play games like Fable, Oblivion, Fallout, and Neverwinter Nights, and pretty much any game in which you have a world you can influence. Played Black & White? You are a god to some civilizations out there, just not in this aspect of the multiverse, so
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Reminds me of one of my all time favourite comics, from the www.vgcats.com website:
http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=122
Titled 'Fire bad, FIRE BAD!' :)
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Really? I had no idea.
I'd always thought the point of Sims was to build elaborate swimming pools, take out the ladder, and watch your sims drown to death. Or my other favorite, surround the sims with four walls but no exits. And watch them starve. If I were feeling generous that day, I'd make a window or paint the walls.
Heh heh heh.
That's because this is largely a perception issue. There have always been well designed games and poorly designed games and the more than half of them have always been poorly designed games because video game creation is a complex mix of art and science and computers a relatively new discipline. What does change is the perception of the players however. When you were a kid some poorly designed games were enough to hold your attention because you didn't mind doing the same thing over and over or it had St
Emergent behavior (Score:3, Informative)
We could call it that... (Score:2)
Game developers have come a long way, but nowadays it's 99.999% about graphics and how much eye candy and shit you can pile into a game, and almost everyone's forgotten about the actual game part of the game, and the reason we'd want to play it in
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"but nowadays it's 99.999% about graphics and how much eye candy and shit you can pile into a game, and almost everyone's forgotten about the actual game part of the game, and the reason we'd want to play it in the first place."
People have been saying this ever since the mid-90's. There is no 'nowadays' about it. There is no 'forgotten.'
superbounce (Score:2, Interesting)
man, I must have spent a whole summer in halo 2 superbouncing and rocketlauncher-sword zooming (I forget what we called that) to see where I could get on maps. I hated it when people did that in ranked matches though.
I think we do these things because it's a new way to play a familiar game. Games get old and new games can be fun - especially when all your friends are already playing them - and you're tired of the "real" game.
Take a game like halo: standard shoot-em-up. Now you're practically free-running wi
sims (Score:4, Funny)
I always found it amusing to try to get straight female sims into lesbian relationships.
You could get them to be best of friends and then ...
Never worked, but it was fun trying.
When I was younger (Score:2)
I used to play a game called "Island of Kesmai", an ASCII pseudo-graphic multi-player RPG. My guild (the KILL guild) would specialize in these silly antics, such as attacking the dragon with a broken glass bottle, rocks, coins, and other fairly harmless items. I can't believe we paid $6+/hour for such silly stuff, but well, we had fun. Oh and yes we killed it - eventually...
These guys... (Score:5, Interesting)
...have absolutely nothing on the admins of it-he.org
Read their Ultima sections.
Reeeead them.
warthog jump! (Score:3, Interesting)
This video was really popular around 6 years ago! Warthog jump [youtube.com]
I also remember my college friends spending all their time shooting seagulls in Metal Gear Solid for the PS3.
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This video was really popular around 6 years ago! Warthog jump [youtube.com]
Someone went to the next logical step and made a flash game [bungie.org] out of it.
Hooray for body-piling! (Score:2)
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Man, my Google-fu is rusty.
There was this fansite where they looted and noted every single moveable object. Every guard, every apple, every box and crate and key, every useless item from wooden plates and gobulets to simple flavor items to objects and NPCs that couldn't be manipulated except by spending a long time running at them and nudging them.
They did this and then stacked and sorted and placed all this crap in perfect piles and rows and stacks. They explored every boundry, every wall, ledge, fence,
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Well, I found part of it. It's called the Guide to the Strange and Unusual and it's by Azal. Sadly, the image links haven't held up through the years nor does the link in his sig here [ttlg.com] go to any Thief related site.
Finding glitches... (Score:2, Interesting)
and things that shouldn't be there! Sure, the regular easter eggs are fun, but it's more fun finding interesting ways to break a game or finding ways to end up somewhere that teaches you a bit more about how the game was constructed. TFA mentions suiciding in FO3. It sure is fun to shoot up a pile of cars and go flying (the best one is just west of the Arlington Library, on the freeway). The neat side effect of this is your corpse bouncing off the skybox. That's also the disappointing effect -- it limi
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That sounds like fun! What happens afterwards? Do you instantly die? If not I'd love to know how to do it (if you don't mind sharing). Thanx
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Ultima Online... (Score:4, Informative)
My best in-game friend letting me kill her over and over, then chop up her corpse(s) to supply me with body parts which were needed to take advantage of a bug that allowed you to place objects on the walls of a house.
It got to the point we were having to get creative to kill her as fast as possible. A pet White Wyrm turned out to be the best method. One Bite-Death. If he got hungry, I could feed him some of the body parts as well.
"Whoa! How'd you get all that stuff to hang on the wall?"
"You really want to know?"
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Your kidding right?
That was ten years and 4 computers ago. You'll just have to imagine it. :)
Pro Roping (Score:5, Interesting)
The roping community from Worms: Armageddon and World Party abuse the ninja rope in ways the developers certainly never anticipated.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQeNMD95lrE [youtube.com]
...
/msg xOaPxJacky wiptistean
PACK: !Piles, AFR, CBA, KTC
gl+hf
WoW gold farmer spamming (Score:3, Interesting)
A few weeks ago the gold farmers got a bunch of level-1 characters, all dressed alike, to lie down in a major city, then I guess got a high-level from the opposite faction to come in and kill them - so the bodies all spelled out a website URL. I wasn't there when it happened, just saw the results. I assume it happened on most of the other servers and for both factions, but I have no direct knowledge of that.
In WoW, a dead body sits around for quite a long time if the player doesn't resurrect. A level-80 mage or other character with an area-of-effect spell could most likely run in, avoiding combat until in range of the level-1's all lined up, then just fire a few quick blasts while running up the line and they all drop dead.
I tried to think of ways to move the bodies, there are a couple spells that can affect corpses, but I don't know if anyone tried to do it. Lying down or standing a large mount over them sort of messed it up, lighting fires or planting flowers really didn't do much. Eventually the bodies started disappearing as Blizzard cleaned it up. They did it again a few days later.
Re:WoW gold farmer spamming (Score:4, Interesting)
What strange things have I done? (Score:2)
I broke into Manic Miner so I could change the title music. It had the best polyphonic tone generator I could find on the Spectrum.
I once tried to play Elite without using the jump drive. Turns out you don't actually move when you're not using it.
I used to play Doom II with the intent of minimizing the number of things I killed.
I built ships in Master of Orion that had huge numbers of the smallest missile launcher available and no defensive systems at all. Perhaps this isn't quite playing it outside of t
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I once tried to play Elite without using the jump drive. Turns out you don't actually move when you're not using it.
What version of Elite were you using? The PC version (not Elite Plus) moved you without the jump drive. I didn't find out about it until the second time I played, and once had a police viper shadowing me all of the way from arriving in the system to the station, and I definitely did move, albeit very slowly. Fun Elite fact: someone calculated that, based on the frequency of random encounters, over 99% of the mass of the universe in Elite is space ships. I once tried getting from one system to another us
Operation Flashpoint (Score:3, Insightful)
I always liked playing coop Operation Flashpoint with friends, there was a particular map where the enemies had 2 or 3 tanks next to each other with the drivers standing next to them. The map was supposed to operate with you fighting the tanks with RPGs etc as the drivers would jump in as soon as you were detected, but we found that you could put everyone in a jeep, then drive full speed at the camp and if you were lucky you could run over the drivers before they got in the tank. Then everyone jumps in the tank, blows up the enemy tanks before they can turn the turret, and go on a rampage in a mission where you aren't supposed to have a tank. Soo much fun.
There was another mission where you could steal a helicopter in a similar way.
Sometimes it would take many tries to do it without someone being killed, but it was so worth it!
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Well, there are people who fire up the mission editor and use Flashpoint as a racing game. Dirtbikes can be a lot of fun, but you have to keep the guns out of the race. Then again, we had one race with armed spectators that joined in. :)
Daggerfall (Score:4, Interesting)
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The Daggerfall engine wasn't the best though... I remember getting climb up and it ended up hurting my game more than helping. I would climb up doors in dungeons and end up in "The Void."
GTA2 carbombs (Score:2)
I had a special way of passing time in GTA2, and it went something like this:
Find a grassy area with lots of pedestrian traffic passing, near one of the paint-and-weapon shops. Acquire something powerful like a bus or a fire truck -- you're going to need it later. Park it out of the way.
Steal a car, equip it with a bomb, and drive it up onto the grassy area. Wait till the peds come back, arm the bomb, and run like hell. Watch bodies fly every which way! Quickly steal another car (or have one waiting) and ge
Getting around triggers (Score:2)
I also like looking at enemies when they're frozen in inactive states - I hate that in almost all games nowadays the corpses just disappear after seconds, so
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There's a Starcraft mission where you, playing Terran, get overrun by the Zerg right after you kill off the Protoss. I left one Protoss building standing until I was ready for the Zerg. "Ready" meant that I'd poured all remaining resources into planting siege tanks, bunkers of marines and a few turrets in the area where the Zerg usually attack. I finally knocked over the last Protoss building to win the mission. The story animation -- explaining that Kerrigan was being left at the mercy of the Zerg army
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I hate that in almost all games nowadays the corpses just disappear after seconds, so you can never really get a look at the monster design.
Have you tried to set phasers to stun rather than kill?
Fallout 1: Pacifist (Score:5, Interesting)
I finished Fallout 1 without a single kill. Turns out the developers had thought someone wanted to do that. There were experience rewards for sneaking or finding peaceful solutions in almost every quest. It is with that mindset that I started playing Fallout 3. I was disappointed...
Re:Fallout 1: Pacifist (Score:4, Interesting)
I've completed both Fallout 1&2 without my character directly killing anyone. I've also completed both using only unarmed combat. And I think I've managed to complete both by killing every single killable character in the game (hopefully I didn't miss any ...).
Then again, I have completed both games over 40 times each.
I haven't completed FO3, and doubt I ever will.
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Apple II Stock Trader (Score:5, Interesting)
A neat trick I used to do with the Apple II was to put two machines side by side on the same power bar, switch both machines on then flipping on the power bar, causing the machines to boot simultaneously. Next, I'd load up a Stock Trading game on both machines and start playing.
Why do this, you ask?
Well, the Apple II uses a very simple random number generator that is always the same sequence from the moment the system powers up. So, by booting two machines simultaneously, it put the random number generators on each system in sync with one another.
In terms of the Stock Trading game, this meant I could use one machine as a sort of crystal ball, allowing me to see into the game's future, and then use the generated results to only buy up stocks that were going to increase in value and sell off those that would decrease.
As long as the machines booted up simultaneously, this always worked.
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Somewhere in the bowels of Wall Street they have a similar setup. And they have entrusted our lives and our fortunes on 2 pieces of near obsolete hardware hooked up to a $6 power bar.
America is now reeling from an economic crisis, auto manufacturers have asked for dole outs, banks have to be bailed out-- are you sure you've never shown this to anyone?
Re:Apple II Stock Trader (Score:4, Funny)
How the hell did you get a hold of Goldman Sachs' secret trading algorithm!?
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Why not just turn on wizard mode if you want to cheat? Not that I'm casting aspersions for doing so, it's a great way to learn how the game works before you really go for the amulet.
Cybernations. (Score:2)
The primary game I play (a free browser based MMO at cybernations.net ), has gone through a number of major transformations by the players due to a largely hands off attitude from the admin.
Alliances, equivalent to a gaming clan in normal speak, have elaborate internal politics, constitutions and governments, a few of the largest and most organized have banking systems and police forces as well. All of this set up without any coded control over the alliance, the players organized it themselves.
Loopholes in
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Hands off? Up until the most recent war pretty much every update was almost exclusively for the profound benefit of one of those ingame alliances. I'd hardly call altering the game rules every time his favorite alliance needed some help "hands off".
A better example would be swapping out nation improvements which minimize bills with ones that maximize income before players do either.
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I mean hands off in terms of allowing people to dictate how they play, and not giving special coded privileges to alliance leaders the way most (possibly all) other games in the genre do.
You are right about not mentioning the economics tweaking that goes on though.
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Team "senators" get special privileges and are the de facto alliance recognition.
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Nope, this is Requia. Totally different economics munchkin.
Combat flight sims (Score:2)
In games like Microprose's F-19, I'd try and shoot my allies, bomb the carrier I'd just taken off from, kill the operative I was supposed to pick up and rescue, drive my airplane on the ground instead of taking off, etc.
Grand Theft Base Jumping: Vice City (Score:2)
JC Denton, Interior Decorator (Score:4, Interesting)
In Deus Ex, I occasionally rearranged the furniture in rooms for no particular reason. I can only imagine the reactions later: "Oh my god, my ammo and credit chits are all gone! And... someone has swapped my desk chair with the sofa from the break room. And my microscope is now on the corner table..."
I gave myself bonus points for the one time I did it while a guard was patrolling the room. I wonder if there's some sort of term for this in psychology.
I also have a riot occasionally setting up Team Fortress 2 engineer-buildings in ridiculous places, such as completely submerged in a lake.
And don't even get me started on Dwarf Fortress. How long do you want to bet a dwarven settlement, constructed entirely of soap, can survive on a diet consisting solely of horse meat and beer?
tribes 2- Becon Art (Score:2)
bug exploitation (Score:2)
Doom:
Starting, saving, restarting with the nomonsters switch, killing one monster, and finishing with a kill score of 2400 percent.
Spyro:
Doing stunt glides to "unreachable" spots and gawking at parts of the level that didn't get completely built.
Also, Going to one part of the level, removing the disc, going to another part of the level where a pool is, and exploiting the lack of lakebed to bypass the surface coming back up, thus letting me swim through the air.
exploiting bugs is my favorite.
Even Toddlers are Doing It! (Score:4, Funny)
My nephew, age almost 4, had figured out the sequence of commands to start Sim City, enter the security code, and load a city. (he couldn't read, but he had excellent symbol-matching skills)
He had no strategy, he just bulldozed things until he ran out of money, then started a new game at random. I think he's working on managing Boston's Big Dig project now.
GTA 1 (Score:2)
I used to make the city completely empty. And I mean empty. I couldn't even find a car to drive around anymore. It was just one big pile of burning police cars and dead cops in one place, and the rest was empty. I had to walk around the whole city to check.
But the old GTA games also had a nice bug, that punished very stupid users. A friend of my brother installed GTA to C:\. Yes, that's right. To the root directory.
Guess what happened when he uninstalled it.
Whoops! ^^
Doom 1 (Score:2)
I also used to make levels for Doom 1.
And I achieved my goal, to make the door stand in the middle.
The trick was to fill the room with so many monsters (1024), that time literally slowed down and came to a grinding halt. The door never reached the top. After one hour, I hit reset.
Oh yeah, I still know IDDQD, IDKFA, and even IDSPISPOPD by heart. And that you should not try them in Mechwarrior. ;)
LOTRO (Score:2)
In Lord of The Rings Online we have regularly scheduled player concerts in front of The Prancing Pony (at least on my server). Hearing Queen played on harp-and-flute is quite an experience.
Sonic 1 (Score:2)
Sonic the hedgehog 1 had a time counter, though it was used more for points than as an end itself (which was to complete the levels).
It has to be said, that STH1 had the most incredible design and subtleties for achieving fast level times, especially in the Green Hill and Starlight zones. The original version was good too, but it was the addition of 0.01 second accuracy and the spin mode that was available in the Sonic Jam collection (Saturn) that really made it the most amazing challenge one can imagine.
Amusement Park Tycoon (?) (Score:3, Interesting)
A friend's son was a huge fan of building a large park with no exits and some cool attractions. Once the park was filled, and the customers had no way to exit, he would turn a tiger loose in the park. The carnage was fun to watch. Bodies would be flying through the air after being shaken silly by the tiger, people would be screaming.... I was amazed that they'd built such things into the game.
I believe the title was Amusement Park Tycoon.
The Hitman Sandbox (Score:3, Funny)
In Hitman: Blood Money, on the third or fourth map where you had to infiltrate that mobsters house? Well, one day I just decided to do things a little differently. I went up to the clown guy, clubbed him and took his outfit. Then I stuffed him in his car, planning on coming back to him later. No one saw me, so things were cool. Then enacted my nefarious plan. It was a beautiful day in the neighborhood...
I walked up to the garbage man. He was just going about his business, with no appreciation for the wonderful gift he had in his possession - the garbage truck, a.k.a. Da Macheen. Da Macheen was mine, would be mine, and I had only one thing standing in my way. I clubbed the garbage man, while in full clown suit, because that's how wanton murder in broad daylight is done, and proceeded to feed Da Macheen his first meal of the day. CRRRUUUNCH. So satisfying. But Da Macheen needed more.
I look across the street, where a woman was tending her lawn. Da Macheen... I wander over, and before long, I had another tribute to Da Macheen. "The Street. Everyone! Feed me EVERYONE!" said Da Macheen. I adjusted my clown nose and position my firey red wig. "It shall be done!" This day, Hell had come to Baker Street...
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I think everyone does the "go backwards in a race" from time to time. Especially mario kart, trying to snipe the other players as they're rushing at you with the green shell.
Skyscrapers, just jumping off them is fun, but spawning a motorcycle, car, or bike in GTA SA was fun. In GTA4, the chopper blades send bodies flying, I keep trying to do something I did on accident: get out just right so I would be hit by the blades and sent flying across the river/bay.
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I think everyone does the "go backwards in a race" from time to time.
I'd really like to see this happen in Formula1.
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I used to play on a server that would have the losing commander fall from the sky and die at the end of each round while everyone watched and gave a 0-10 rating.
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You might want to check out the new Red Faction game. Not only is everything in it completely destructible, but recursively so. I've found myself going around to large vehicles in the game, bombing them, then bombing the remains a few more times for salvage. The buildings in the game even offer some unique opportunities, like tossing propane containers into the air and then shooting them to weaken the structure at their mid points.
Also, the remote trigger and proximity bombs can be attached to just about an
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I never got the rhythm of ball jumping in classic Metroid. I used the NES Advantage, flipped on the Turbo for the B button and then turned the knob until it got to the exact right frequency. I could climb all the way to the top of the screen that way (which is good since there was that energy tank on the ceiling in that one place).