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Is The Best Game One You Were Never Intended To Play?
Wired has an interesting look at the sport of pushing proscribed boundaries in video games. Easter eggs in games have been around for years, but now finding surprises, intended or otherwise, is becoming a driving force behind the enjoyment of games. "In games as diverse as Fallout 3 and Mirror's Edge, players are pushing to find or create unexpected ways to break past the game horizon, and turn the designers' intentions on their heads. It's only a matter of time before someone releases a game where the best version is the one you were never intended to play. That's only to be expected, says David Michicich, CEO and creative director of Robomodo, the developers of Activision's new Tony Hawk: Ride, and a 14-year veteran game designer. 'Today's news gets old quick — we Twitter, blog, pass viral video. We thrive off the sudden excitement of the latest and most buzzworthy,' Michicich says. 'It's exciting to still feel like you can discover something new. It's stimulation, plain and simple.'"
I remember playing Goldeneye and Turok 64 with group-enforced rules to spice things up. We'd play "Hunt the Raptor" or assign the best player the worst controller. We called it the Torgo control, if that means anything to you. :)
coffee | nose > keyboard
A lot of vaudeville acts got into the movie business (The Three Stooges and The Marx Brothers among them), and they very quickly learned that a shtick that could last for years on the various circuits on the road got national exposure on film -and then they had to come up with new shticks. Games have something of the same dynamic going on with hedonistic adaptation. First the intensity goes up, but eventually the form itself changes.
See Warcraft 3 and DoTa. The DoTa mod is vastly more popular than the original game.
Unfortunately 3DRealms fucked it up
Turns out that was a dude, I thought she was just hairy.
Is that you Joshua?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
..Include "surfing" in Counter Strike (there seems to be a whole community of guys creating maps just for this purpose, check them out on Youtube) and "stunting" in the GTA series, most notable Vice City and San Andreas (there's also a pretty thrivig community, it seems).
I also remember spending hours playing Lemmings, just having fun doing crazy tunnels/bridges and totally disregarding the actual goal.
Exception: the ridiculous ones like shoot the gnome into space in Half-Life 2 Episode 2
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
and ever ... and ever ... and ever ... and ever
Surely lots of people make house rules to certain games, no? And isn't that a game "you weren't intended to play?"
My buddy and I still play the 17-year-old Super Mario Kart regularly, but the game's evolved with a ton of house rules. Some exampes:
1 - If you get a ghost, you have to either steal the opponent's current item or the very next one, but you can't just hold onto it waiting for a red shell.
2 - If you get a banana, you can yell "GAME!" and the other player has to stop. Then you position yourself, and try to hit him by throwing the banana.
3 - If you have one hit left, your opponent has all three, and you get a green shell...
This wasn't the game the designers necessarily had in mind, but it's the game we like. Ghosts are too powerful. Bananas are too boring. So we tweak the rules.
TFA mentions Easter eggs rather than house rules. Easter eggs just can't be what they were before; the internet makes it too easy to learn everything about a game. There's no way the new Zelda will have a secret room that nobody knows about for years, but ~10 years went by before I found out about the secret room in Zelda for SNES. You just can't have secrets like that in popular games anymore.
I was playing this at a friends and we were having more fun trying to get the quirky accomplishments than the actual game.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
There was a bug in the game that allowed you to "ski" by hitting the jump button repeatedly. Skiing let you gain a lot of momentum and using your jetpack to climb hills would let you maintain it.
That bug completely changed the way the game was played and made crossing large open environments effortless. The developers never fixed the bug and instead made it a feature of Tribes 2.
Nethack. The Devs Think of Everything. The best game is the one you didn't think you were intended to play, but were. Or at least can.
Not a sentence!
Exactly what I did with trying to play Max Payne using only the baseball bat. If you roll, time your movements properly, make enemies shot each other, use some glitches and repeat parts ad nauseum you can play most levels using only melee weapons. Recorded this on its own site.
If the best version is one in which one must unlock something, find as an "easter egg", or some how activate a cheat, and it is intended to be that way, then the game is intended to play in that mode and finding how to activate the mode becomes just another part of the game.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Games that end up being described as truly great often have a sandbox quality, and some of the sand is spilling out. Super Metroid was a big one, and has spawned over a decade of "sequence breaking," catalogued over at metroid2002. One of the great fighters in recent history, Marvel vs Capcom 2, can only be described as a trainwreck as far as balance goes, and yet the open-endedness of the fighting method has allowed for years of slowly developing and improving gameplay and strategy. Games like MMOs (lets not name any names) that get patched anytime someone discovers anything, really end up excluding this player development and discovery process. At any rate, this is not really 'news' to anyone, and it certainly shouldn't be news to a game developer.
Is The Best Game One You Were Never Intended To Play? Duke Nukem Forever
"i lost my dignity on a slippery wiener"
The only winning move is not to play.
How about a nice game of chess?
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
I frankly think the WoW achievement system is entirely done wrong, because it is neither social nor rewarding. You get absolutely nothing for all your troubles, save for a few near-impossible meta-achievements that give you a mount or shiny underwear or something equally useless. A challenge needs a reward to make things interesting, and warm fuzzies don't count in most cases.
I much preferred LoTRO's achievements, which offered minor improvements to your stats for experience-related things like killing N spiders or completing M quests in a city, while being separate from the singular XP total. That gives struggling players other avenues to improve and customize their characters, and high-level players something to appease their OCD. They made the game-within-a-game worth playing.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I remember back in the days of Desert Combat when I was in early high school, getting the idea of parking mobile AA on the hillside, allowing you to get the gun pointed down farther than being level and using the AA guns against people - was great stuff,
I mean, I doubt I was the first person to do it, but I'd never seen or heard of anybody else doing it before after playing it for months myself...
Oh for the lack of history education now a days ... I suspect the great desert fox himself might have invented the technique circa 1941...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/88_mm_gun
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Rommel
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The only game devs which did not know about the RJ were... ID Software when the released Quake 1
scar3crow: Quake has always had wonderful deathmatch, and it certainly popularized something many take for granted these days - rocketjumping. Aside from your lateral use of it in Mt Erebus in Doom, did you foresee it in the way it came about in deathmatch? John Romero: We had no idea until after the game was released and I started hearing the word being used... Even then I thought it meant jumping over someone's rocket! When I saw it in action i was amazed and immediately starting doing it all the time.
scar3crow: It certainly makes for a different dynamic in the flow of maps, in some cases completely circumventing the pace the mapper may have intended (such as in DM4 where it makes the map even tighter).
John Romero: Yeah, most of the single-player maps break with rocket-jumping. E2M1 in 11 seconds. Heh
src: http://qexpo.quakedev.com/interview_romero.php?page=2
Ha! People tend to forget that counter-strike is a mod for Half Life ! A game that notoriously sucked, in multiplayer mode...
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
If you make easter eggs an intentional part of the game, something that players are supposed to find... well, guess what, it's not an easter egg anymore.
These kinds of things are only interesting because they weren't part of the normal gameplay. Most easter eggs are actually pretty dull if taken on their own merit (a "developer room" with NPCs standing around doing nothing? Wow, so glad I spent 500 hours trying to find this place).
Truth is that if you can really do something in a game that completely borks the intended design, that is a failure of QA and/or QC, depending on whether it wasn't found or wasn't fixed. Any number of game exploits-turned-features got their start this way, from Warcraft 2's lumber bug to the Quake rocket jump (which was a physics bug).
While these tricks have been treated as features, they basically add a non-intuitive learning requirement to play the game effectively against other people. It's this sort of thing that risks turning off a lot of players. The fighting game genre, for example, since Street Fighter 2 has bled off everyone except the devoted hardcore fighting audience, because to be good at these games really means learning not how to play according to design but how to exploit combo engines and hit detection to trap the other player. Basically a matter of who is able to get their exploit first.
I admit I don't use Twitter, but I recognize that broadcasting brief, one-way messages is useful to some people.
However, I'm sick of seeing Twitter referenced as a major milestone in communication. What influence did Twitter have on the latest Tony Hawk game? It's impact on the way people play video games is negligible at best. If Twitter went away tomorrow Facebook and MySpace would fill the void without a single enhancement: "Playing Tony Hawk 49, found a door I can open on the Tokyo level." What would be lost without Twitter, other than the verb "twit"?
The original NWN on AOL was intended to be a multi-player cooperative RPG. Players were not allowed to attack each other. However, players discovered that they could still cast spells at one another, including damage spells. This allowed pvp to exist in the form of spell warfare. NWN pvp was one of the best social gaming experiences ever. It was turn-based combat, so its slow pace allowed chat, taunts and tactics, stuff more substantive than the "gay" of xbox live, to flow while fighting.
I welcome our new 99% overlords.
Please. Rise of the Triad had the rocket jump back when Doom 2 was new.
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
Lots of games like this. I'd play X-Com with a hacked save game giving me 2 billion dollars... but limit myself to never hiring any replacement soldiers. Very difficult game. Or edit two soldiers to have ungodly stats, and playing the whole game with ONLY THEM.
Civ 3 was literally made for creating such games. I created a "space colonists marooned on a hostile planet" scenario where you started with all techs, but only had one city and could build no more. Surrounding you were hostile civs bent on destroying you. Victory was limited to finishing the "colonize Alpha Centauri" ship. Fairly difficult game, and not at all like the "regular" version.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
That is one of the reasons i stick with PC gaming, the mods give you so much more replay than you ever get with a console. Take Freelancer for instance. While the original game was fun, with the Freelancer Mod manager loaded full of cool mods it is like I have a dozen new games to go with the original. Hell of a good deal for the $35 I paid for it at Gamestop awhile back. This game was released in 2003 and there are STILL new mods coming out for it. To me that is value for my gaming dollar.
And while console gamers scream "PC Gaming is expensive!" it really isn't unless you get into that whole epeen "must be able to get 60 FPS on high everything on Crysis!" BS. I just built myself a new AMD dual core, and since I already had XP X64 I picked up awhile back with shipping and all the box cost a whole $281. I will play on the built in 3100 for a week until I can pick up a $100 card, which will probably last me a couple of years before needing replacing. The P4 3.6GHz box it replaced has had maybe $500 spent on it over the last 6 years counting building it and my oldest is playing Left 4 Dead on it right now, thanks to a $50 X1650 Pro GPU upgrade. So for me PC gaming is the way to go. The mods give me so much more for my gaming dollar than anything I have seen with the consoles.
I mean where else can you still get new gaming experiences for a game you paid a whole $35 for that came out in 2003?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Interestingly these self-made modes and challenges are now not all that uncommon in retail releases. With games awarding prizes for things like only using one weapon all game or the Don't come second mode was in a Rayman game my friend had.
Please. Rise of the Triad had the rocket jump back when Doom 2 was new.
The first Marathon had it two months previous to RotT. And it was necessary to reach many of the secrets.
"When I smile, I have a mouth full of teeth; when I frown, I'm not even here."