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What Guilty Gaming Pleasures Do You Enjoy?
Thanks to GamerDad for its editorial discussing some of the guilty pleasures involved in playing video games. The author, in trying to define why he enjoys games so much, rhapsodizes: "When 3D games run at a high framerate and wow me with effects, I'm drooling like any other graphics loving moron. I don't need them, but I do respect and admire them." He continues along this train of thought: "Another guilty pleasure is the need to blow things up. Why is it that's so damn liberating? I just love to see things go boom. Zombies, space ships, tanks, cars, buildings, robots, aliens, demons - but not often people, since I'm kinda squeamish with that." What's your guiltiest videogaming-related pleasure?
the few gigs of MAME rom's I've got floating around my universe.
... all that investment, and finally, i get something out of it: free access to all the arcade games i could possibly ever want to play.
i haven't put a quarter (or 50 cents) into a videogame machine in years. MAME was like the 'nirvana'-point of arcade gaming for me
the new stuff doesn't interest me.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I admit, my friends organised a night in watching movies, drinking, usual banter
He had a Playstation 2 set-up with Vice City which had just been released, now, being a complete beginner to the gaming world *OS X geek you see* I was pretty well drawn into the sheer brutality of pulling some young broad out a moving car, then proceeding to smash up line after line of innocent civilians
Months later, I still play just to get my police record "topped up", sod the missions!
And yes, I thought it was rather cruel to smack an old lady in the chops with a steel bar, but... but... oh nevermind
Anybody who's finished a boss in Ikaruga will know what I'm talking about when I say there is nothing like cruising effortlessly through dense showers of bullets and unleashing finely-timed, perfectly-executed explosive death on your enemies, and then watching them explode, and then doing it again, over and over again, for the entire level. In chains of three of the same colour enemy.
qntm.org
Finding every single person on a level of Carmageddon and running them down. It was nothing to do with getting enough time to finish the level, just about pure-grade destruction.
Carmageddon was great for that. Didn't look very good, but was enormous evil fun.
"What if they're using IE?" "I've dumbed Mozilla down to cope with it." - BOFH
Freedom Force, the squad-based superhero tactical RPG, got me in the tutorial when the narrator says, "Why don't you try picking up this light post and using it as a club?" It's fun using everything (except buildings, unfortunately) as a weapon. Cars, light posts, benches, phone booths, hot dog carts... it's a fun game.
A few guilty pleasures over the years include:
Chun Li from Street Fighter (hey, I was really young - no, I didn't play with one hand)
Narc - first game I ever played that was extremely violent and very graphic
Mortal Kombat [1 and 2] - I loved the first two MK games, the gameplay was great for the time, but the guilty pleasure was obviously the finish moves
King of Fighters - bounce bounce :) More hilarious than anything else
GTA - I never bothered with the missions until the third game, but running over people, running from the cops, etc., was friggin great. Once in GTA 1, I killed every single cop in the city(there were a limited number in the first game!). Then I blew up every single car except the Jeep Wrangler. The best fun, though, was setting up a huge ring of blown up vehicles surrounding my guy, and then proceeding to lob explosives into crowds of people and mowing down cops as they struggle to make their way through the wall of rubble.
Quake 1-3 - high-framerate gib flying fun!
Max Payne - silly story and game elements "ripped off" of the Matrix
And so much more...
Cheers!
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I can't believe no one has mentioned Dead or Alive. The whole series is based and the concept of 'guilty pleasure'. I mean, has anyone played this game just for the fighting?
I first saw this game (DOA1) in an arcade in France and just coudn't take my eyes off it... well, I coudnt take my eyes off the bouncing.
Physics based videogames just became a reality to me.
In the same vein, the only reason to play the Jurassic Park based Trespasser game was to look down.
Got to love em'.
Also, Harvest Crack has been around far longer than Animal Crack... even the original SNES game is still addictive (as I discovered not too long ago).
There was something oddly captivating about letting the room fill with monsters (they infinitely respawned untill you ended the level) and then just blasting away on fully automatic. It was also oddly enjoyable to run around shooting at them just enough to cause massive brawls. I kinda liked watching a flock of Demons systematically assert their authority through sheer numbers.
Depending on how much mayhem you could handle, you'd get completion rates in the thousands of percentages. Mmmm... dead pixilated monsters.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
In Romance of the Three Kingdoms VII you can visit other officers and lieges, and when your bond with that officer is exactly 42, you randomly get chances to assassinate them. If you save at the right time, you can just retry until you get it. So my friend and I made our own Kingdom, and we tried to take over China through assassinations. Apparently if you assassinate all the officers and liege of a kingdom, the kingdom goes away.
In Enemy Territory, I'll forego helping out teammates or trying to win our team the match to practice trick-jumping to cool places.
I don't know how Morrowind is supposed to be played, but my friend has it, and whenever we play, we work on conquering towns by killing all the villagers in it.
Usually I restrict myself to exploiting bugs and loop-holes of the in-game world (as in not blatant cheating), but I used to play this free MMO called Graal (it was based on Zelda, and was originally just Zelda Online until they changed the graphics), and I loved to use trainers in that game.
One of my favorite things to do was help n00bs get their items so that they wouldn't get beat up (PKing was rampant), so when someone would ask me where to get an item, I would tell them to follow me, I would hit the button on my trainer, lift up a bush, and out would fall a lvl3 sword. Unfortunately, the company began to take drastic anti-cheating measures, and the poor n00bs who got my hacked items ended up with their characters in jail! The guilty part of this is that it really made me laugh, and I would have done it to my friends if I could get out of the jail.
Graal was a game with low death penalties and you could hit another player almost anywhere in the game, so one of the best pasttimes was to hunt people down. Me and a friend changed our names and appearance and hunted our newbie friend down once or twice, and I remember one time on a small server when I was a little bored, someone named Lycia was bothering me or something, so I yelled out "Lycia hunt!" and about 6 or 7 of us chased her down and killed her.
Running 3D games at the lowest resolution possible. 640x480 is getting harder to do, but 800x600 satisfies -- it has a "feel" to it. And it plays faster. :)
So, I confess, I enjoy the occasional game of Gunbound There is the one item that switches your current position with that of a teammate. Jump off a cliff, on the way down Team Teleport, and enjoy the confused cries of the masses wondering how I am still alive. No penalty for it either, yet. Most of the time team killing costs you a few rank points, but they hadnt thought of this yet.
SAILING MISHAP
According to the developers, Q*Bert just sent random data to the voice chip.
So if he swore, it wasn't their fault.
I respond to your sigs
"One-handed" MUDding with a hot new employee from work. She didn't know it was "one-handed" of course, since she wasn't there, and I'm a good typer with one hand.
;)
Now that is sad...
(Although in my defense she was *very* attractive
Having a Windows install just for gaming. I swear, if it wasn't for Neocron and other games not working properly in WineX, I'd never touch my Win2K install with a bargepole!