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Finding New and Unintended Ways of Playing Games
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?"
instead of reading articles, it is more fun to be the first to comment on it without knowing what I am talking about
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
Short answer: yes
Long answer: /golfclap
When I was introduced to (pre-WOW) Warcraft I would annihilate a level by _almost_ completing it. For example, if a requirement was that I needed three buildings to clear the level I'd only build two. Then I'd put the peons to work chopping down every tree, emptying every mine, sucking up every last bit of oil... Once there was nothing more that could be done to rape the landscape THEN I'd move on to the next level. Don't ask me why, it wasn't exactly fun sitting there waiting for them to finish. I just had the urge to take it ALL... I think I was meant to be an upper level executive instead of an admin. :P
I'm not sure if this really counts because often it fits in with the intent of the game, but I like to completely explore everything. Especially if there's a map that gets filled in as I explore; I will happily criss-cross a bare desert if it's the last uncharted corner of the map. It really clues you in on the quality of the game: the best games are the ones where the designers stuck all sorts of cool little things away in corners for people like me to find. The worst games are the ones where none of the doors open but the ones you need to reach the next story point.
ceci n'est pas une
How high can you actually get ball bomb jumping in Metroid?
In racing games, I like to go around the track backwards, and hit the other cars head on.
In the games with skyscrapers, I was always amused by going to some of the taller ones, and just jumping off.
I guess the obvious would be teabagging after a frag.
I used to spend hours with the koopa shell in the first mario64 level going everywhere possible. Even doing timed runs up the mountain and back again. Who hasn't?
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
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. ;)
Willie...
Emergent behavior is a property of any complex enough non-linear system.
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 with superhero-like glitches flying you around the map juuuuust short of that one ledge. *runs around and tries it again*
It's just a matter of time before someone mentions machinima. Machinima is awesome. Most noteable is Red vs. Blue (another halo ref, I'm sorry) - a fan machinima that's been going for YEARS and even got it's most recent full-length film put into CANON. I couldn't believe that when I heard it. You know what, I just tried to get a citation and couldn't (going off of what my friend said). Who can confirm/deny that claim? I'd appreciate it.
Tricks and machinima. I think game developers (at least at Bethesda(spelling) and Rockstar games) are quickly realizing that sandboxy games are an easy way to let the gamers' imaginations add 100s of playing hours.
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.
My personal hobby is making little kids cry when playing board games.
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...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
...have absolutely nothing on the admins of it-he.org
Read their Ultima sections.
Reeeead them.
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams [...]."
This video was really popular around 6 years ago! Warthog jump
I also remember my college friends spending all their time shooting seagulls in Metal Gear Solid for the PS3.
I'm guessing you've played a bit of Thief: The Dark Project in your time, am I right?
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 limits how far you can fly.
I was particularly impressed when my brother called me over to show me how he figured out how to jump out of the train in Half-Life. My friends played that game for years and never found that little gem. Weirdness ensues when you leave the confines of the train and confound the scripts.
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?"
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
...
/msg xOaPxJacky wiptistean
PACK: !Piles, AFR, CBA, KTC
gl+hf
get a standart map (not the one made by players where you have like unlimited ressources..pfft, cheat if you dont have to steal the other's ressource)
play against 7 coop computer .. and win, without a single lost (terran evidently, since you can repair bunker and all)
best score to date, 1850 kill 0 lost
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.
I actually finished SC and BW campaigns doing nothing other than zerglings for zergs, zealots for protoss and firebats for terran (marines are too powerful; so I decided to go for firebats). The entire game was quite easy even with this unit choice handicap. But when I arrived at the last mission of the expansion pack of BW. It was hell. The mission is as follow : You need to kill 3 overminds; each one with a special ability : 1- Your entire base is surrounded by invulnerable sunken colonies. The only way to reach that overmind is through a very long path of invulnerable sunken colonies. 2- Once ever 2-3 minutes a boss ultralisk would spawn and attack your base. That ultralisk takes only 1/2 HP damage per firebat hit, has 800HP and kills the firebat in a single hit. 3- Guardians and mutalisks attacks. Pretty hard to kill guardians with turrets since they have bigger ranger than turrets. I spent 8 hours in that single mission. I mined almost every last mineral of the map (some I couldn't reach because I could not build shuttles). t was absolutely awful, but I couldn't stop there. I HAD to be able to say I finished the entire game building nothing but the most basic units of the game.
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.
Help fight spam
when the round ends in BF2 (and it's mods like AIX2.0) the splash screen shows a live action camera view of a specific part of the battlefield... the trick is to position yourself, your vehicle etc so you appear in the frame at the end of the round just as the tickets expire and take a screenie of you and your buds posing for group shot :D but it's mostly helicopters spinning out of control, jets crashing into the ground and assorted carnage, all in good fun!
http://battletracker.com/index.php?page=Index&gamefilter=bf
What! Do I look like a people person?
Back in my early days in Wow, our horde guild made a pact with an alliance guild to charge gold for anyone of the opposite faction a toll to ride the boats. For example if a non-guildy horde guy showed up to the docks and didn't hand over gold to one of us, we'd tell via Vent to the alliance guys to gank him. And vice versa. =)
Nothing is more fun than watching them pee their pants because you did not provide a bathroom.
http://www.destructoid.com/blogs/Tino/the-sims-torture-test-pretty-pictures-included--42504.phtml
Or we could fess up to the real reason this happens: We can't believe we dropped 50 bones on a game we beat in 2 and a half hours and now need something better to do with our time, so we prance around the game until we find something to entertain ourselves with.
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 the first place.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
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 the way it was intended to be played, but the results could be quite amusing anyway.
Played GTA (the original, not the funky new 3D versions) by just sitting and driving along in traffic, trying not to attract police attention.
Struggling to think of any more right now.
A donkey kong clone on - if I remember right - the zx81, allowed you to climb up the stack of ramps then jump over the damsel in distress that was supposed to be your target. Jump onto donkey kong's arm, over his head onto the other arm, then make an adrenaline-filled slow-motion fall down the full height of the screen back to where you started.
Well, you had to be there.
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!
In Daggerfall I used to enjoy finding routes around town that minimised the time I spent on the ground. Why simply walk down the street when you can run along hedges or leap from rooftop to rooftop? Using magic would have been cheating of course.
In Tribes, almost every server you come across is heavily modified. Though, some take the game in new directions. For example, there have been "Boot Camp" servers where you practice playing the game. Some versions of these include such challenges as climbing up tiny platforms that stretch on for miles and racing along floating bridges and other things.
The racing can't be done without a skiing script, which basically makes you hop continuously which makes you glide up and down hills, but everyone who plays the game uses one of those. It actually became a built-in feature in the later Tribes games (though, those are nothing compared to the original, sadly)
Also, in Quake II, I have a nasty habit of blowing up every corpse I see. That's not exactly a way of changing the gameplay, but it is an odd habit I've developed.
WTF dude? Why did you 'HAVE' to do this? In another age, you would have been a bomber aircrew with a singleminded determination to esacpe a Nazi prison camp (the real kind, not the Wolfenstein 3D kind.) Or you would have been a crusader with the determination to wipe out all Christians from the Holy Land. Or you would have been a crewman on a British frigate, determined that Spain should not have hegemony of the seas. What happened to us, such that our best and brightest waste their talents on imaginary worlds instead of the real one?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Covering as the whole city in gold piles, problem was they disappeared after a while... quite disappointing. Starcraft: building an armada of command centres trying to cover the opponents buildings so he can't select them. Lords of the realm 2: attacking with as many 50 peasant armies as possible burning every single one of the opponents fields. And of course burning the quarry and the black smith. Doomlegacy: Changing the corpse sprite to a normal sprite, then hiding in the jungle of your own corpes plasmaing the opponent to death. My buddy used to play as a box, Now THAT is annoying.
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 get it painted to dump your wanted level, then equip it with a bomb. Use the bus or fire truck to shove the bombed car into the street, and blow up another crowd of people with a new car bomb. The people WILL come back, never mind that cars keep blowing up. They're totally oblivious to what happened 30 seconds ago. Repeat till it gets old -- which for me took about 30 minutes.
I would also dump a bunch of oil in and around an intersection, jack cars and pack them insanely tight with one bomb-equipped car in the middle, and set it off to see how many I could get to go up at one time. The oil just made it easier to jack a lot of cars in a short span of time.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Am I really the only one here who remembers 'beyond naked mages'?
-Troll, Flamebait, and Offtopic are NOT equivalent to disagreement.
I love trying to get around triggers when playing heavily scripted games. In many cases you can just avoid setting monsters or events off, and I enjoy it when you can just use the game's unfair tricks against it: "Oh, if I do that the game will teleport several elite forces into my camp." *moves camp* *builds traps and defense towers* *triggers event*
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 you can never really get a look at the monster design.
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
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...
When the policeman of the tie, rule you violate, hello punishment of the kitty?
we just get them spamming the forums with crap like "naked woman caught by sattelite watch" with a link to a keylogger.
sad thing is, seems to have caught a few people.
ahhhh Elite 2 : Frontier... what a game
I used to pilot a Panther clipper (some really big transport ship with 6 gun mount-points and 2.000 metric tons of cargo capacity) and I would fit it with an hydrogen scoop (to collect fuel from gas giants).
I would then buy 300t of grain, 50t of narcotics and a few sex slaves, a few automated mining installations, and head straight AWAY from the civilizaed core of the galaxy, into the unknown (and the unpopulated), where I would simply jump from star to star, refueling out of the outer layers of gas giants' atmospheres, dropping mining stations on select asteroids and rocky planets.
I once managed to reach the center of the galaxy that way (hundreds of hours of play), until a statistical rarefaction of gas giants occurence inside a 300 ly zone forced me to stop jumping and settle.
Oh yeah. I would also converse with my ship computer, discussing philosophy and politics, that sort of stuff. 'her' name was, unsurprisingly, 'Panther'.
The idea of leaving the corruption and conformism of the federation / empire far behind would procure me intense joy, and that truly was the only way I could play the game while still feeling different.
good thing I never installed Eve Online...
On one of the levels ("On Thin Ice" -- I think) you descend in a drop-ship. The aliens are in an enclosed valley, and I found a way of climbing my tank to the tip of the mountains over the valley, baited tanks about the alien factory, sniped them, and then destroyed the factory with grenade pack... then proceeded to clear the level, as much as possible with sniping. Ended up being more fun than the level itself.
Battlezone II was a game with so much potential -- but so poorly scripted. Still like to go back to it every so once in a while.
I often find myself wandering around in circle in Dalaran while just chatting on vent. The time could be spend fishing, mining, or doing anything else, but it's nice to just do nothing sometimes. On a more in-depth note, if you haven't checked out Spore for some time-wasting, I suggest you do. The amount of customization in the game is unreal. I can spend hours just creating a space ship custom to my liking that I get to fly around with in space and explore thousands of star systems with!
Zealots, useless? What are you ON?
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.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Destructible environments are my downfall. I have spent hours blowing everything I can up, just because.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9_XMyxXY8c
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 the foreign aid rules, originally meant to provide help to other players, have been exploited to allow for a system of barter, rapidly accelerating everyone's growth to both faster and farther points than the game originally allowed for.
The inter-alliance politics have also grown to staggering levels of complexity, allowing for warfare to take place with thousands of players on a side when people are sufficiently motivated (the current record sized war had 16000 people at its peak).
Even the way the donations that fund the game take place is different now, with the smaller in game bonuses from donating being replaced by larger bonuses payed by game rich but cash poor players who want to support the game, but don't have money to do it.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
I always used to enjoy the jumping scene on CoD1. Getting outside of the map or on top of buildings that you arent meant to and suprising/confusing people was always pretty fun. example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lCPHYsnbnY&feature=related
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.
we ran out of IRL land to deal with so the best minds go to the cyberlands, maybe if we get into space quick then it will be ok.
So instead of single-mindedly killing fake people it's better if he single-mindedly killed real people? Perhaps not such a bad change after all, eh?
Not a sentence!
Reminds me of videos like this that are all about taking funny pictures in Metal Gear Solid 3.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rd_wMCuWzZE
Why yes, now you come to mention it... GTA:VC is a work of art, a beautiful evocation of a place and a time (and mindless violence). Sometimes my friend and I would just drive a boat out into the ocean at night, and watch the sharks swimming under the hull. And sometimes...sometimes we'd try get Tommy standing on the top of the tallest buildings in the city. And then throw him off. It turns out there's only a couple of buildings that are tall enough to kill him.
Rgasuya aata! : I have been coding Perl and cannot tell where my fingers are now!
....despite knowing that there were bugs in the game that made it impossible to complete.
Which may sound daft, but I wasn't alone.....which raises the question - in today's modern gaming world, when did *you* last like a game so much that you did the same?
I like GTA3, even though I have only done one or 2 of the missions. I like to drive around and explore (I have saved games where I am on each of the three islands). I also like to get a tank and just be destructive. I have found several places in the game where only the police helicopter can get me, no matter how many game characters I shoot. I like to do insane stunts. Its also fun to run around and kill the pimps.
I do similar things in other games too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twYkJqS8784 HD very much recommended.
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?
Becon Art. when bored in the enemy base using beacons to draw things like happy faces that teamates could see on their HUDS.. Normally done during matches where things are going very poorly for the unfortunate foe.
I Need someone to rebuild a Digitech Digital Delay pedal for me....for me...for me...for me.
A German setup called Egosoft make the X series of space sim/RPG games, along the lines of the old Elite games, where you can fly around trading, pirating, policing and generally making money and building your own fleet and space stations. Some of the more experienced players got a little bored with doing the same thing over and over so they started playing "Dead is Dead" or DiD games. The one golden rule is that you only save the game when you're done playing, and you only load to start playing. If some pirates "borrow" one of your traders too bad, if you jump into an ambush and your carrier gets badly damaged you'll just have to fork out for repairs, and if you die you have to start a completely new character. The extra edge meant that some people began chronicling these, and some of them have become incredibly popular (Story Guides section).
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.
I often consider achievements and trophies to be rather lame versions of challenges that I used to create for myself once I'd finished a game on it's hardest setting. I remember trying to complete Another World without a single death, and playing through Half-Life left handed. I've always found that the tasks I set myself for games far more creative, interesting and rewarding than the arbitrary achievements or trophies in recent games. Oh, and in the first System Shock game I wandered around the space station trying to vaporise all of the corpses before the time limit ran out. I imagined once while I was doing this that if I was ever on trial for murder then this bizarre cadaver removal obsession might be used as evidence against me.
Ever played Super Mario Bros.? In this video, the dude can live without knowing what lies behind the flagpole!
Your Ad here
In HL2, My compulsion involved picking up any and all weapons, ammo or exploding barrels and just carry them through the level or until I needed to reload.
Incidentally, in Episode 2, there's an acheivement called "little rocket man". This involves lugging a garden gnome through almost the entire game. Pretty sure this was made for people like me.
I didn't know Dick Cheney posted on Slashdot.
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.
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...
Oliver.
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! ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
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. ;)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Any game where I have to gather wood (Age of Empires, Galactic Battlegrounds, etc) I would always feel the intense need to clear cut the forests around my base using villagers, trebuchets, etc. Why I felt the need to see cleared land.... no idea. My subconscious timber tycoon, maybe?
Also in games where I have flight capability - sending whatever to every corner of the map so there's no fog of war - usually leaving one enemy unit to keep the game going...
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.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
For some excellent examples of metagaming, check out the Speed Demos Archive, where videos can be found of speedruns for many games, under various self-imposed conditions: 100%, minimal%, etc. These are not tool-assisted, these are pure player skill!
For metroid fans, I also highly recommend the Metroid 2002 site, which has video and text explanations of an incredible array of sequence-breaking tricks for nearly all of the metroid games. Picking up items out of order, exploiting engine quirks to jump farther or higher than is supposed to be possible, and using tricks to get past areas that are supposed to require an item, without having it yet. Speed runs of metroid games are amazing to watch, because they rely heavily on these tricks. Unless you've played the game a lot, you might not even recognize that the speed-run player is doing something that is supposed to be impossible!
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.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
In Motocross Madness (a Microsoft game, shame me) each level was finite, of course. But you didn't just run into an invisible wall at the border, oh no: There was an actually visible wall around the level that was supposed to keep you inside. Of course, I made it a game to scale that wall, and soon could do it on the first try. I found out that there is another border beyond the wall, invisible, which passing through simply resets you onto a spawnpoint inside the level.
I explored a lot in Gothic and Gothic II, it had larger worlds than any game I had ever played. By that I mean the area that's accessible at once, I have played games that had big levels, but didn't allow the player to return. Just how big the world was was shown in Gothic II impressively by the fact that the two parts, the first one in which Gothic I took place, the other new, were divided by a loadscreen which took quite a time.
Red Faction had (has! RF3 is to appear soon) this awesome Geomod engine that allowed one to blast rock (of which there apparantly is a lot on Mars) away by the various kinds of explosives employed in the game (and a giant, manned drill-vehicle at one point in RF1).
How did you finish the last terran map on SC, The Ioncannon is on a diffrent platform and you must use transport to get to it. Plz tell me how did you do there? // (OneManClan)
I remember playing Railroad Tycoon where instead I would build a small railroad then take over the first competing company by buying the majority of the stock. I would then shift the money to my railroad and sell the majority. In doing this the first thing they would do is take out a bond then I would take over the company again and continue doing this until the company would go under.
I was able to beat the game with having unlimited funds just as the true Railroad Tycoons of old would have done.
I always loved the exploring games, spent hours, and days on end playing them. Then I had to go back to work.
Well, there are certain mayhem and killing urges in young men, probably biologically mandated - even best and brightest engage in such activities. One may argue that we are better off if such urges are channeled into fake worlds, rather than bringing death to real people and destroying real constructions and nature.
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.
In this respect I think that the C64 game Nemesis the Warlock still must be considered an authority.
Well a couple of weeks ago we had the story about the bored professor who made it his hobby to kill Villain carebears. There's some of the appeal of griefing. The game world is limited so some use it as a 3D IRC client where anybody so inclined can kick with a railgun.
Once you could land in water in GTA and not die, plus you have air craft, chute less sky diving was the game. Find random speck of water on the map, fly a plane as high as it will go, then jump out. DO not use the chute. Not that game physics are all that real, it's just fun.
Back in the day, my friend and I would co-op in GTA2. Our mission was to steal as many cars as possible then jam them next to each other for as far as we could go. Then we'd blow one up and create a massive chain reaction which on occasion would crash our machines. It was great fun.
Back when I was a young whippersnapper walking across other peoples' lawns, we had Quake. The game that arguably launched the modern computer gaming scene. Mods could be written for Quake, so new and unintended ways of playing Quake were coming out every day. Player also had full access to the console, so if things got too boring, you change many parameters of the game to liven things up.
One of the best hacks that I can recall, though, was the Quake Guy Tower. The Quake engine had an unusual property when it came to stacking players on top of each other. You could stand on top of another player, but the engine would gradually push you off so if you wanted to stay on top, you had to keep correcting for it. The fun part, however, was that standing on top of someone rendered them completely immobile, even if *they* were standing on top of someone else.
Someone created a very tall map with a teleporter at the top and spread the word that on a certain day, at a certain time, they would try to create a Quake Guy Tower. Stack as many players on top of one another as they could. The map could, somehow, count how many players were stacked. I want to say well over 150 people showed up to participate in the tower. It was quite a thing to behold, standing on the ground and looking up to see a tower of Quake Guys stacked up almost into infinity. I still kick myself that I never took screenshots or video of it.
After the map limit was reached and Quake guys were stacked as high as they could go, someone who knew the map shot at a random spot at the wall, retrieved a Quad, and destroyed the tower in a glorious shower of gibs. Good times. The only reference I can find to the Quake Guy Tower now is a sentence on Blue's News. No pictures, no web page, nothing.
I say finding all the extra, meaningless stuff to do in games comes from 2 sources. 1) For all of us long time gamers there was tyhe immense fun of filling our castle with everything we could find(like the bridge) in Adventure for Atari. 2) Remember when you found that first glitch in your first game(again, long time gamers still hunt for them since the amount we found on floppy disk games had so many)? We still have the uncontrollable urge to find these things and call everyone we know to tell them about it. I find that it's the older generation of gamers who hunt down the useless things to do, but it's the next gen-ers that over-use them. I stand by Adventure and will probably hook up my Atari to fill my castle once again! Ahh... nostalgia....
My little brother used to spend hours building elaborate forts out of the mushroom blocks in Super Mario Brothers 2 (Doki-Doki Panic). Drove me crazy, and he'd just say, "I'm doing my duty."
All games are about breaking the rules. Smart games take this into account and one of the rules is to permit bending the rules.
The essence of poker is to discern tells. The point of pinball is to almost tilt. The gimmick with bricks is to get the ball bouncing to destroy the wall from behind, not to knock down one block at a time. And a modern game that is completely missing the experience of pure exploration (or demented play) demonstrated by Laurie Anderson's Puppet Motel or the Residents' Freak Show (or the Dazzleoids, for that matter, from the Voyager era), can't be much of a game.
Winning is most definitely not the point of playing.
You are evil you know that? ;)
I love exploring loTRO too, the Shire is my favourite as always seem to find a new view, Moria has some absolutely spectacular bits, and I want to sue the Rivendell and Caras Galadhon elves fordangerous building construction
i spent way more time on fable 2 than i'd like to admit.
the game fell short of my expectations (fable 1 was amazing) and i needed to add my own goals.
i owned every house, bought every shop, maxed every skill, opened every stone door, learned the best way to kick a chicken...
i could spend hours killing residents of an entire town, then killing the guards that randomly spawn and rush straight for the edge of my awesome sword of awesomeness.
i think the worst part of it was a week later when i told my significant other of this great accomplishment...
she asked me "did you beat the game yet?"
i quickly replied "yep!" then thought...maybe. maybe i missed something.
I've always enjoyed using them more like virtual building blocks then playing the actual game.
Instead of starting small and building naturally building up a city or household; I'd use the money cheats hardcore. Then I'd start from scratch and zone out a city I'd think would be really cool to live in, or a house that I'd think would be awesome to live in. Then, in Simcity, I'd money cheat a lot more so I'd never have to worry about a budget, and set the tax rates really low to get my population up and city built so I could admire it. In The Sims, I'd move a token family in and dork around with them for a bit to make sure the house design wasn't completely dysfunctional. But I'd usually get bored fairly quickly and move on to the next cool city or house I wanted to design.
I think it comes from having been more of a Lego kid than a Gi-Joe kid growing up.
cya,
john
Imagine all the people...
When the author praised halo as a landmark game because it gave the player regenerating health. Thats dumbing down a game not making it better, part of the fun of fps's when i used to play them regularly was trying to stay alive and avoid getting hurt. frankly i wonder when retail mainstream games will reach a point where they dumb them down enough that all you have to do is hit a little button on the menu screen to beat the game..
What happened to part of the fun of playing the game being the effort and skill needed to play it?
Surfing on CSS/TF2/L4D/etc (yes, l4d surf does exist)
>:O
a crusader with the determination to wipe out all Christians from the Holy Land
You are a bit confused there.
After slaughtering a few dozen people in Postal 2, I'd kick their bodies into a pile an light them on fire using the gas can/matches. They'd burn for a long time.
Sometimes if you blew up a bunch of enemies in a stairwell they'd remain on fire indefinitely (couldn't even piss them out) so you'd have no choice but to run through the flames and piss yourself out afterwards.
Somehow I doubt "Postal 3" for XBOX 360 will be as graphic. Too bad.
1) You can die 7 times in a row before being ported back to your respawn point. Just find a *really* high cliff. Added side benefit: only on death's worth of death-penalty!
Your fellow ---- has died. ... x4
Your fellow ---- has died.
Your fellow ---- has died.
We even recovered the body!
2) Making mazes out of dropable housing items. Got a nice 2m long oriental-style screen? Build a maze! Sure it degrades in 10 minutes as the items time out, but so what?
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
And by that simulate the old 80's TV show CHiPs in the game GTA San Andreas. Basically I get a car, take it up on the highway and then stop and park sideways across one side of high way. Then pretty much I start with a traffic jam but quickly cars coming down the high way ram into the back of other cars. (Just like CHiPs it turns into a 10 car pile up.) Finally I detonate my stopped car which hopefully sends up that car pile up in a bunch of explosions, just like CHiPs.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Back in the very early days of Battlefield 1942's PC release myself and friends would waste hours doing silly things like climbing a hill, setting up explosives, and seeing who could get themselves closest to a point below.
That and landing a plane on the back of a destroyer: http://www.miggy.org/games/bf1942/pics/utini-plane-dd-back.jpg
Or on a landing craft: http://www.miggy.org/games/bf1942/pics/utini-landed-on-landing-craft-2.jpg
Or a hut: http://www.miggy.org/games/bf1942/pics/utini-plane-on-hut-2.jpg
And then there was wing walking: http://www.miggy.org/games/bf1942/pics/athan-pilot-cptdoom-wing-bridge-1.jpg (there's a sequence up to -10 there)
And of course there was a whole community focused on making videos of stunts in the game.
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...
One of my favorite "side activities" in Doom was trying to make the monsters go "Splat!" by blowing up a barrel in their face. E1M2 was good for this.
A related, and even more fun trick was to get into the outside area in E1M7 (need to find the secret to do this), switch to the rocket launcher, and try to blast monsters out of windows. If you timed it right, the monster would move just after you fired, and the rocket would zip by their head, explode on the wall behind them, and send a pile of guts flying out the window at you.
Hours of juvenile fun. Did I mention I was about 13 at the time?
Crusaders didn't exactly want to wipe out all Christian from the Holy Land, you know...
Sometimes I obey traffic laws in Grand Theft Auto.
Black and White was great for this. You assign your disciples to be farmers and get the food stocks up, then make everyone a breeder. You'll end up with a big population that starves to death.
In Ultima 6 I travelled around Britannia, stealing furniture, books, vases, anything that wasn't nailed down, and created a nice house in the basement level of the old Shadowlords' castle.
In the game Crackdown for 360 you can ride on top of cars around town. Certain highways spawn more of certain vehicles, which will have different AIs controlling them as they drive around the three islands. The interlocking highway and freeway systems make for a really random and enjoyable tour around the surprisingly detailed city.
I enjoy editing the weapons options on worms 2 so every weapon has the same strength as a Holy hand grenade, the minigun with 50 shots ant a 15 degree deviation could wipe out the entirety of the stage in just under 10 seconds.
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
On the MSN Gaming Zone, I downloaded a map editing tool called QARK. I figured out on Q2DM1 (The Edge), that there was a game bug involving hitting the space-key (jump) multiple times on different surfaces, would cause you to 'double jump, triple jump' and so forth. It was the most obvious in attempting to get the ultra-health pack in the corner of the main room where you'd also grab the chaingun and combat armor. I implemented this on the very first map I ever created called q2dm_jump1. Little did I know what I would start. Someone followed after my heart in Counter-Strike: Source and through some sort of fluke figured out that holding down walk on a slope causes you to slide on it. Surf anyone?
127.0.0.1
You know that game "hot lava" that kids (definitely never me as an adult...) play where you can't step on the ground because its made of, you guessed it, hot lava, and you had to jump from rock to rock to get anywhere? Yesterday I found myself playing hot lava in Oblivion for a good 15 minutes before i realize just how useless i've become since graduating collage.
Running social "experiments" is my favorite part of first person shooters. Some of my favorites:
Any FPS (best in slower paced/larger map games): Closely shadow another player as they run/drive/fly around the map. Go everywhere they go. Don't shoot, don't hit, don't do anything but follow them around. See how long it takes them to get completely freaked out and TK you.
Any FPS where there is pistol whipping and team damage is off: Find an area near your team's spawn point and start pistol whipping one guy. If they don't respond. Wait for the next guy and try him. The objective is to find someone who will engage you in indefinate pistol whipping session. When you have one participant the group often grows group grows. I had a session where I eventually got about 20 players on my team standing in a group pisol whipping eachother. Eventually the other team found us and spectated for a few minutes until one of them decided to slaughter us all.
BF1942: Follow a team member around and whenever they stop, drop to you knees in front of him and bob your head back and forth (looking up and down in rapid succession). See how long it takes them to freak out and TK you.
BF1942: Sit in a jeep near a cliff. Use the in game speech function to say "Get in" while your teammates run by. Keep hitting the key until someone gets in. Drive off cliff. See find same guy and see if you can get same guy in a the Jeep again. If he does. Find a cliff. Drive off cliff.
BF Vietnam: Get in a armored personel carier and turn "Surfing Bird" on the radio and drive around at top speed like a madman. When you see a teammate, stop the vehicle, beep you horn and try to get him to jump in. Keep driving around and doing this until your carrier is full. Drive off a cliff.
I tried and tried to kill Lord British on the Apple II version of Ultima IV, Quest of the Avatar. Never could take him down, but it was fun to have British and a whole castle full of guards coming after you.
THOU HAS LOST AN EIGHTH! was only the beginning of the fun in that game.
Obviously, I was talking about being a Muslim crusader. They had them, you know. Broaden your mind.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I like to find tricks or weird things you can do in games. Some call them glitches, but I like some of em. Like walking through walls on a PS2 game (the name escapes me at this time, but the version 2 was something like world at war?), crashing a car in a unique way on NFS Carbon. I once flipped a car on a drift track, it went airborn and over the barriers on the track. I wasn't able to get back on the track after that and time ran out, that kinda sucked cause I had an awesomely high score which was ruined.
Mumble mumble mum....
You should post the replays. What? You didn't save them? Well, looks like you're gonna have to do it all over again...
I still remember the two locations where you can get a panty shot of Heather from Silent Hill 3 using the unlocked Princess Heart outfit.
When I played Oblivion on my roommates XBox 360, I started out following the story for a while, but after completing several quests I got bored and made it my personal undertaking to steal all the silver longswords from all the guards in the Imperial City and pile them by one of the gates. It became especially amusing when you would anger a guard in the city, as none of them had anything left to beat you down with but their two fists.
Sometimes the point of playing isn't to win. Back in the days of Unreal Tournament 99 with all the cool mods and custom maps half the fun was just pissing people off. Specifically the players with "skill" who always took things too seriously and went around trying to impress everyone with their moves. It was always fun to spam the hell out of them so they couldn't even move. Block them from ever reaching the goal. Let them get set up in their favorite camping areas then put a bullet in their head. Then do it again. And again. They would get so pissed and call everyone losers with no skills but we were the ones having all the fun. There was this one map with long tunnels between the two flags and these weapons that shot slugs as big as a football that sent out shock waves of damage, and if you shot two really quick and detonated the first one it would cause the 2nd to move down the hall at about 2 mph killing anyone who tried to move past it. The game would go on for 20 minutes with no one being able to score. Funny as hell.
Back in the day I used to play Rogue Spear against my buddies for hours using only shotguns loaded with rubber batons. It would take as many as 20 shots sometimes to take someone down. The total lack of melee weapons ensured there was a lot of limping around next to each other frantically reloading. Add a few J's and we could stay entertained all night.
I always enjoy trying to beat a shooting game's campaign without ever firing a weapon. Most often I will try to only use melee, but other times I will use grenades as well. On easy, this method of play is completely possible but the higher difficulties require some real skill. (I do make exceptions when gameplay requires it, such as in vehicle/turret scenes where there is no real alternative) The one game that comes to mind is Medal of Honor: Rising Sun. It is a pretty shitty game but when playing with a friend, only using melee is a lot of fun. The enemies just stand there and take it while you take out entire platoons (only loosing half your health in the process). Another memorable game for this method of play was the first Halo. For Battlefield 1942 online play, I would sometimes only use vehicles to hit other players or get them with car bombs. Hitting players on the ground in a plane took some real skill, but it always pissed of the victim. Also, tying to land a plane at ridiculous locations, on top of the enemy hanger or on enemy battleship, or using the planes as ground assault vehicles was always very entertaining.
When I used to play RTS games all the time I used to have books on war by me.
I used to apply Sun Tzu's Art of War to Warcraft 3, and it worked.
In my best win, I had lost a number of smaller battles but I had a spy (I was undead) watching their army. I then began to amass aboms.
I took the rest of my army, which was roughly the same number of units as I had Aboms, but with necromancers with all of the crap for skeletons, and with all of the upgrades for melee units. I sent a couple of ghouls to get them to attack me, and they did. While they were doing that I led my aboms to begin destroying their side-base. They then quit.
Has the old saint in his forest not yet heard of it? That God is dead?
My brothers and I made up a game called "civilian" within one of the old Tom Clancy games. Players could choose to control a civilian in the combat zone, so one of us would be the unarmed civilian and the other two would try to find and kill him before he could cross the map. Lacking camouflage, the civilian was easy to spot, but he had the advantage of being able to hear us coming and hide, since we usually used vehicles to try to find him. Sometimes one of the hunters would take a jeep or helicopter while the other would go as a sniper and try to guess where the civilian would go. It was tense and often hilarious.
Technically, the Moors had no crusaders since all Muslims were charged with the duty, and they were on the defensive protecting their holy land fom the infidel Christians, who were there to cleanse their holy land of unbelievers, which of course was the same plot of land originally claimed as holy by the precursors of Christianity, and some would say the precursor of Islam as well. Funny how the goal of both sides was nearly identical, both sides persecuting the original inhabitants of the Promised Land.
I agree with MindlessAutomata. GP was just linking to barely-related shit and does not deserve the upmodding.
Furthermore, it's either trivial or false. To the extent that complex non-linear systems necessarily exhibit emergent behavior, that behavior is not necessarily something we consider interesting. It could just be emergence of cryptographically-secure random noise, or of waves -- not the kind of thing that makes you want share with others or see what else you can get.
What we're interested in here is emergent behavior that is also interesting, not just the kind of emergent behavior that is inherent to complex non-linear systems. Like when[1] a guard gets so hungry that he leaves his post, which makes another guard chase after to arrest him, which makes the citizens notice there isn't enough law enforcement and start looting stores en masse. Emergence doesn't guarantee cool stuff like that.
[1]I don't know if this is a real example, but I remember it being on Wikipedia near Oblivion's release as something that happened in playtesting.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
It isn't to me.
Been a while since I played it, but don't you START that level with a few transports? If he only counts units he created, it might work.
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
I believe Jihadist is the correct term.
"A lot" is two words. You wouldn't say "alittle", would you?
How about this: a bird alit on an allotment of felled trees.
The CB App. What's your 20?
With the original PC Golf game (the one with RealSound that reprogrammed the timer chip to play sampled audio through the PC speaker), just about everyone would design their own "impossible golf course" with the hole surrounded by a giant lake of water and nothing else.
I like to let my laser mouse glitch and make my player character pirouette maniacally.
I also continuously spawnkill to play a bowling like game with my grenade gun. How many simultaneous kills can I get off one nade? There is also the infrequent but rewarding nade snipe that kills on impact before explosion.
Nade zen is a religion to me but rough on getting bounced for tking on servers where no one gets "follow don't lead a grenadier" duh!
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
I'm sure it'll come up elsewhere, but you can't really talk about "unintended" ways of playing a game without bringing up Dwarf Fortress. Though I suppose it's hard to specify what the "intended" way to play is, I'm sure it didn't originally involve killing goblins by catapulting them into the ceiling with a drawbridge.
No I don't know. A muslin crusader is a contradiction in terms, since to be a crusader you have to be carring the cross as a christian.
But you might believe all you want, just don't push it as revelated thruth.
Last night I invented a new 21st century art form: VIRTUAL CRASH SCULPTURE. The canvas is Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. What you do is, jack a bunch of cars and crash them into each other. The more the better. Ideally you make them all explode, by parking a bunch of damaged cars together and then ramming into them with a car that's already on fire. It sets off a glorious chain reaction, and when the smoke clears you're left with a garden of charred hulks. I am the Picasso of this new medium. In the future I will use it to comment on gender issues.
A muslin crusader is a contradiction in terms, since to be a crusader you have to be carring the cross as a christian.
Well, yes and no.
Yes: The term he wanted was mujahid.
No: Lrn2metaphor. If you have no problem with someone explaining that "he's like a crusader, but ... for the Muslim side", then you should have no problem with the term "Muslim crusader" either.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
Well, today, for the first time, I purposely found a cheat for a game because was "over the line" ocd about it.
/how the AI will take advantage of them.
I was spending too much time working for higher scores. And since it was web based, I kept opening it instead of working.
Greasemonkey to the rescue. This is the first time I've ever purposely "ruined" the game for myself.
When I have total domination of an AI opponent, I'll sometimes hold off on winning and make purposefully stupid strategic errors to see if
It's burned me more than once but was very revealing about the AI's logic.
/me sips his coffee and ponders a new sig...
There is an area in Postal 2 with the street in a valley and houses on the hills.
If you go up in the hills and kill everyone, additional people walk into the zone from the street entrances. People wandering away from the street see corpses and run. (Usually back to the street.
End result, The street gets VERY crowded..
Toss a Moltov Cocktail at one end of the street from the hill and watch the wave of burning, screaming,running people propegate down the street in a glorious chain reaction.
Some people make penises (peni?) from inanimate objects.
Evidence 1- http://i214.photobucket.com/albums/cc206/tllnbks/LuckyCamRK1.jpg
Evidence 2- http://i28.tinypic.com/2mhbxh4.png
Both from a webcam in Anarchy Online - http://www.anarchy-online.com/
So, you mean like when I was a kid and my dad would humor me by playing Bases Loaded on the NES with me, even though the games were long and I always beat him? And how if you hit Fendy with a pitch he'd lways charge the mound and get ejected? And how I'd always bean cleanup hitters repeatedly to try to get them to do the same? Yeah, those were good times.
Or doing all sorts of stupid shit like always eating the shrooms in Rise of the Triad? That was one buggy but quirky and majorly underrated early FPS that deserves a mention any time "classic" games are spoken of. I need to find it again and give it a whirl on my next vacation.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Small-c crusader, not the proper noun. "A vigorous concerted movement for a cause or against an abuse." The cause? Islam. The abuse? Christians. It's an entirely correct usage. I just subverted the meaning, which evidently causes certain people's brains to explode and reject anything that's not playing on CNN or NPR 24 hours a day.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
In football (or soccer) games, I try to score (or lose?) as many own goals as possible.
For games which compensate the time for picking the ball / showing the replay, etc, it seems to take forever to complete a game.
When I was in high school, we were playing lots of T v CT games. We found a version of a mod that was like Counterstrike but based on the Unreal Tourney engine. My friend and I were messing around in the game one night and discovered if you bought a grenade, Flashbang, or smoke, and shot out all your ammo, youd have unlimited grenades. We decided to challenge our friends to a couple rounds and fuck around with them. We were lobbing grenades all around the map and just destroyed them. My favorite was being chased around by the opfor with low gravity hurling FB all around the maps. Also slowing down other computers with a million smoke grenades. That reminds me: We would set up a halflife game with low gravity and cheats on. The point of the game was to drop 5 trip mines, and using only the Gausse gun propel yourself across the map. First person to set off the mines (which usually resulted in everyones death) lost. It was quite amusing when 3 of us were playing on custom built AMD Athlon XP 1.5GHz 2GB ram machines and another was on a 866mhz compaq with 256mb Ram. Cheats on allows you to toss gibs by binding mouse 5 with "impulse 102"... we would slow down his machine so much, it was very amusing, but over all the game without being a dick was fun too.
Im a troll because I disagree with you.
Back when I played Ultima Online (I was only about 11 years old at the time) I discovered a very interesting 'feature'.
You were not allowed to kill other player characters in towns, and if you did attack someone all that person would have to do is say "guard" and a guard would pop up out of nowhere and instantly kill you with only one hit. I found a way to use this to my advantage. There was an ability that would make a monster attack it's monster friends, or if the ability was unsuccessful, the monster would instantly target you instead. Well this ability could also be used on other players. So what I did is I would cast this ability on another person and it would fail because my skill level was too low, and then all I had to do was stand next to that player and s/he would automatically start to attack me. At that point I would just yell for the guards to come and it would kill them instantly, leaving only me and their body that I could loot and steal all the things they had with them at the time. Eventually after using this tactic I got caught by an admin, banned and the players had their things returned to them. I totally agree that I got what I deserved, but it was still fun as hell to watch people's complete and utter confusion as they attack me for no reason and then their items just disappear into thin air.
I know this was pretty much just cheating by exploiting a bug I had discovered, but it was definitely a new and unintended way of playing the game.
Just wanted to thank everyone for posting their thoughts and sharing their own in-game antics as we had asked you to on SleeperHit. I'm not exactly surprised that I'm familiar with some of these antics, just much more surprised at how many more the community had created that I'll have to try out now. Again, I didn't expect many people to read either my article or Ron's rebuttal to it but I was still looking forward to hearing some of your thoughts. Rob and Ron look forward to disagreeing with each other in the future and we'd love to hear what you think and what stance you'll take then as well. Whether it's with us at SleeperHit or here if we get slashdotted again. Thanks for contributing. I'll be playing tag or catch with myself in Portal. -Rob
"And of course there was a whole community focused on making videos of stunts in the game."
Isn't "The Movies" good for creating stunts?
I play a version of Freecell, with the same rules but a different goal. But you need to turn off autodrop, so you can't play it in Microsoft Freecell. Pysol works well.
The new goal is to get all the cards in four long streams, king down to whatever, with as few cards as possible in the output stacks. Your score is negative - the best you can do is nothing at all in the output stacks which gives you a score of zero. An Ace counts one, two counts two, three counts three, etc. If the output stack contains an ace and two of every suit that's a twelve; not bad. I can usually get below ten, which is better.
It requires you to generate long streams of cards and be creative in moving them around. You have to decide the tradeoffs - can you get the stream from here to there or do you have to put an ace in the output stacks, costing you a point? And remmember that if you put the ace and two of spades in the output stack you'll be short a black two when you want to stream up the last red ace, so you'll have to put the red ace on the output stack also and your score will be four, not three.
It's a challenge; requires a lot more look-ahead than most versions of Solitaire.
Well I'm still hooked on 2 games: Age of Empires 1 and 2 and Return To Castle Wolfenstein.
*No Cheats*
In AOE I've run races between various units to find the fastest etc.
Where possible, I build a wall around an AI town centre and watch the AI keep pumping out villagers with nothing to do.
Killing birds is fun but hard to do. Eventually all the birds die.
Herding gazelles and elephants is possible, walling them off in an enclosure.
Stealing resources from the enemy AI landscape is the easiest way of winning campaigns.
Working out the game triggers and avoiding them is also fun.
It's also possible to demolish your own buildings to avoid being seen by the AI in some campaigns. That means you can concentrate on upgrading before you attack.
Beating your own time for a win is a continuous challenge.
The best part of RTCW is the return to the church where there's a bunch of SS dolls trying to kill you. On this level, I've gotten 2 of them to jump to their doom - took a capture of it too!
http://s598.photobucket.com/albums/tt63/PickerAUS/Nazi/?albumview=slideshow
The last capture has one of them falling directly on me and I suffered some hit points because of that!
Also, very occasionally, you can get the last boss to follow you into the cave entrance and then run past, demolishing the entrance and trapping him inside. After finishing off the ghosts and zombies, you can go back and take pot shots at him until he dies and you win the game. No captures of that though.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
My WoW guild prides itself on holding guild meetings in places players really weren't meant to go. For example, one meeting was held in the mountains above Orgrimmar. The only way to get there is to leap from Winterspring all the way across Azshara -- that is, all the way across a zone. Engineering priests and warlocks are crucial.
River City Ransom- Two-player human circus. Player1 standing on a rolling tire, holding Player 2, who is himself holding an enemy holding trash can.
Super Mario 2- Building giant bridges out of mushroom blocks instead of using them to crush bosses.
Legend of Zelda- Link to the Past- Doing the Dark World Dungeons as out-of-order as possible. IE, 1,6,7,2,5,4,3. Also doing "hard mode", beating entire game with 0 saves and 0 deaths so that it says "000" at the end screen.
Duke Nukem- Defining hideous, spike-encrusted tractor-harvestors with no set travel path. Without a path, they just went crazy driving in circles- gibbing all enemies they hit. Place in the center of an enemy-filled room.
Super Mario Kart- Red shell orbit drills. Place one player in center of battle map at rest. Other player can fire red shell perpendicular to player such that its maximum degrees/second turning radius cannot lock into player. Juggle as many red shells in "orbit" as possible. Also, run drills where you deliberately allow one player to fire red shell after red shell at you, deploying banana peel or green shell behind you at last second in "flak defense" drills.
In Oblivion I would collect all the skulls I found in game and set them all on the table in my shack of a house, and yes they overflow the table pretty quickly, but it still looked awesome, like a ball pit for goths or super villains. some games have picked up on the side gaming. Halo now works even better for machinima purposes thanks largely to RvB, and in Fable II while they still force you to do the main quest by not giving you access to certain places until you advance the "plot" ( >:( ) you can be a property tycoon, and run around in a wide variety of customized outfits.
In Morrowind I remember having to fight to become the leader of the imperial army: I used a pair of boots enchanted with "+1 levitate constant effect" to float above the opponent and continously fire arrows at him until he died. I don't know if that counts but I thought it was creative and fun.
In Bioshock, which I'm only just now finally playing, I was on a section which the game told me had two little sisters with accompanying big daddies. I hypnotized one and when I found the second attacked it. Then I got to watch a brawl between two big daddies (which was fun) and the winner had that much lesser life so he was easy to kill. Now if only I could find the little sisters...
In farcry, what with AI friendly fire, I used enemy rockets to kill other enemies for me. Which was good because I have no idea how else I would have killed the giants with rocket launchers for arms.
I'm obviously not even close to as creative as you all!
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
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...
It should be possible, in theory ,since workers could generate a small amount of damage in that game.
I used to do this a lot in battlefield 1942. My friends and I would come up with all sorts of "missions" we would have to complete that would usually revolve around getting a vehicle from A to B (where B is somewhere that vehicle should NEVER be), such as getting a tank to the top of an absurdly high, steep peak on Gazala or Guadalcanal, or something supposedly impossible/pointless (Airlifting a jeep by parking it on the wing of the b17 in El Alamein or Gazala), or downright disruptive to gameplay (parking the battleship in Midway on the island first by running it aground and then using the aircraft carrier to ram it further ashore. Good times.
Me and some of my freinds found that if you correctly placed certain map peices on timespliters then you could make a girder like structure which was fun just to try and navigate and if you actualy tried to fight on it you would just end up falling and fireing at the same time. Also on assassins creed i would just run round and try to kill all the guards in a city starting with the ones on the roofs then in the streets this got hared later in the game when there were many more. Or in daker 2 to just drive round the desert stages trying to find the largest clifs to drive off.
Half life 2: Episode 1 was just another iteration of the franchise, until... I made it my goal to ONLY use the gravity gun, take no health loss, and carry a gnome you can find early on, all the way to the endgame. That little gnome was my adventure companion, gravity was the only gun i had, and binding mouse4/mouse5 to Quicksave/Quickload was a godsend in order to not lose health. The hardest area was the strider battle near the end, where I thankfully had stockpiled numerous explosive barrels from the previous area in order to activate the 'Magnusson' bombs latched to the striders. I placed the explosive barrels in key spots around the map (as well as the Magnusson devices), then quickloaded every time I took damage during the fight, quicksaving when a small fraction of the current combat was completed, hard saving when I could. Using creative ways to approach each situation, I relied on luck more often than not, but it was a real sense of accomplishment after completing a near impossible scenario, to get out without a scratch, using no more than a gravity gun, wit, and patience - oh and the car's bumper. Waiting with an interesting expression back at the base was none other than my trusty gnome companion. I'm currently playing Fallout 3, exploring everything there is to explore obsessive compulsively.
In complete contrast to the other players here, who like to explore the entire game or collect all the collectibles or finish with the minimum time or maximum goods, or whatever, I do pretty much the exact opposite: I meta-game to break the game (short of death) until it's unplayable and continuing would require starting over or reverting to some previous save point, at which point I'm usually giggly and ecstatic that I broke it and am no longer interested playing in the game.
For example, in Half-Life 2 I was pretty bored with the game until we got to that part with the speedboat... now HERE was an opportunity for FUN! The developers had added game physics that worked so well, that I was actually able (after several deliberate tries) to get the speedboat to launch up into the air from some obstacle, flip over completely, and get stuck behind some rubble! I didn't die in the process (on the successful break attempt, anyway), just fell out of the boat when it flipped, and watched it get itself into an irreconcilably ridiculous position! Hahahah! It was practically impossible to get anywhere without that damn boat, and thus I had succeeded in breaking the game to unplayable. *^_^* (tears of joy!)
For some strange reason, I get kicks exploring into areas where my character will be stuck for eternity, but won't die, (like falling into wells or off the edge of the world or getting inside a wall), or for destroying the source of some spawning-object that I need to collect or use, etc. Sometimes I even submit bug reports for this behavior. =P
So, if the other guys are OCD for collecting everything, what am I for purposely breaking the game beyond playable?
-=[You cannot consistently judge this statement to be true.]=-
Building the biggest, best, brightest Metropolis I can create... then cut down all firefighting budget to zero and setting the whole thing on fire, allowing industries to spread it faster by exploding.
Oddly enough, even when half the city is in ashes with the remaining half burning fast, 30% of the people polled still thought traffic was the biggest problem...
My friends and I have had a long and illustrious history of playing games using peripherals not designed for those games. For instance:
Man, I miss those days.
Once in a SC "Zelda" map (you move builder unit to a beacon, and that beacon spawns a unit in an arena) I started to lose. So I made my SCV patrol between the SCV and the marine. I amassed an army of ~150 SCV's, and every time a marine popped, the enemy units would get distracted and attack him. My SCV's continuously repaired my base and attacked his. The dynamic was such that he would have to individually attack every SCV to kill them, since an auto-attack would go for hostiles (marines) first. It took 3 hours and a lot of him telling me I'm going to lose, but I turned the tables on his dumb ass.
I used to have OCD. now i have CDO, the letters are in alphabetical order LIKE THEY SHOULD BE!
> World of Warcraft players sometimes hang out in front of Ironforge and dance.
This isn't metagaming. Remember that MMORPGs derived from MUDs, which in turn derived from being a fancy chat program where someone gave the chatters something else to do besides just blabbing.
No, the WoW metagamers found fun when they, say, "contracted a highly fatal and fast-acting disease", then teleported to Ironforge and infected the bankers and auction house barkers before they died, and those in turn, with hellacious heal rates, survived but passed on the infections, killing thousands of playres.
Or standing on a roof in EverQuest and casting down on monsters to kill them. This is called "strategy" in most games or the real world, but is called "a bannable exploit" by that now-FAIL company that does little more than host a stable of also-ran MMORPGs for one low monthly price that almost nobody wants to pay for.
City of Heroes has one hell of a metagame, if you want to call it that, in the base editor system, where you can now stack all the stupid pre-made base items, to construct vastly cooler things like entire buildings from desks and decorative storage footlockers.
Cool items
Like a DJ booth
A missile array
And a gun requisition crib with chain-link fence
Whole buildings are constructed inside bases (a series of giant, bare rooms) now, where as previously you just dumped pre-designed decorations ala The Sims.
Attention MMORPGs: The next MMORPGs should allow base construction, but in addition to pre-made goodies, add bricks and other tiny building blocks that people can use to make their own stuff.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
People are constructing mountains with tunnels out of broken pieces of concrete (the decorative "item") and whole multi-story buildings with many halls and rooms inside.
I do a ton of this myself ("Real Trolls" SG (super group, CoH's guilds) on Freedom server) and have a new bud who has completely enbuilding'd the interior of a giant SG's base, including a giant war room with a wall of screens, medical labs with many rooms, and a dozen SG officer offices, all within a handful of old-school base "rooms". You can no longer tell what's old-school room and what's now rooms in their constructed buildings.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I was playing a game of Master of Orion 2 with a custom race (+50 attack, +20 defense, +10 ground attack, warlord, -50 pop growth, don't remember the rest). Game was going swimmingly, my empire taking over one side of the galaxy, and the Psilons getting the other half. War broke out, and I found myself in a pickle.
My ships were more powerful, and in a standup fight my fleets would annihilate the Psilons even against 10 to 1 odds. Problem was, I was foolish enough not to research Jump Gates, so I was not able to defend my colonies against his 7 deep doomstar fleets. He would never jump into a system that I had enough ships to defend, and as such my empire began to crumble. I finally was down to my last system (a really nice one), and they were finally forced to attack a well-armed fleet.
It was my ~35 ships, a mix of mostly Titans and Battleships, with a half dozen Doom Stars and even a couple Cruisers, against a 7 line deep armada of at least half Psilon doomstars. One of my cruisers went first, as it had been around a long time, refitted a dozen times. It was armed with 6 autofire disruptors and Achilles targeting. My heart soared as that one little ship fired 6 times, destroying a Psilon doomstar with each shot. Being a Warlord with +50 attack, all my ships went first, and that massive fleet became nothing more than wreckage.
Twice more the Psilons smashed their huge fleets into my meatgrinder before the tide began to slacken. Several more turns went by, and I was able to field an expeditionary force to recapture my worlds. Unfortunately I could not hold the systems, as I was never able to get the Jump Gate tech. Then I started simply destroying the Psilon colonies, but they kept popping back up as soon as I would leave.
I soon tired of this, so I added one more ship to my attack fleet: a stellar converter equipped doomstar. After a long and bloody campaign, the galaxy was rubbled, with only three systems with any inhabitable planets: my new home system, Orion, and the last Psilon colony, which had survived the destruction by being caught in a time warp. I bombed that planet to the last Psilon, and blockaded the system. I won the game by popping through a Dimensional Portal and kicking the Antarans. Good fun.
THE SOFTWARE, IT NO WORKY!!!
I still do this sometimes.. put the cheats for high speed and no damage on, and play a game of Survival in San Francisco.
A combination of simplistic 3D models of hills, cops chasing you and 160+mph driving made for lots of fun.
If you could hit the top of a hill at 150+ and glance off a police car you could launch yourself through the air and land 4-6 blocks away.. I would try for ages, just for the thrill of "landing it" by coming down on a road instead of inside a building.
And if the car was still driveable that was just too good to be true; because of the no-damage cheat, you only had to hope you landed on your wheels.
awesome fun!!!
"I split coffee all over my wife's nightie
I imagine this works for non-driving games too. Possibly even better.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Well, I was 12 when I discovered Warcraft 2. I did the same thing, but it was for a few reasons. I've never played any RTS games before, and I thought it was neat as hell telling other people what to do and watch them do it. I thought it was cool how there would be a forest, and then I'd tell the idiot peasants to cut it down, and then the forest would be gone! Also I wanted to get the highest score possible to see how high the ranks on the little score summary screen you see after each stage.
After that game I never did the resource hoarding thing again. Though most of the times in RTS games I have trouble actually spending all my money. I'll end up beating a campaign stage with half of my earned money still sitting unspent.
...put on a cape, diving helmet, and boots. Then I would attack the nearest dragon or flagged Horde player with a fishing pole.