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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.'"
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
Is that you Joshua?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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.
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!
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.
While playing Pilot Wings 64, I always wanted to see what would happen if the giant balloon was bounced into the cave entrance just above the waterfall - it literally went ballistic.
Going into the caves with the jungle-hopper boots was fun as well. Actually managed to get bounced out of the cave and into the ground plane of the moutains and was able to see the tunnel network clearly.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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.
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."