The Gamer's Quarter

[Redeye]

I thought this would be a fun thread.

Why not have some fun by "misreading" ?

Reading meaning playing the game "right".

Last night I played a part of STALKER "wrong" by loading up on 50+ medkits and 75 or so bandages.

Then I went to the Facility at Yantar.

I ran through the place, stopping on a roof to toss "Defensive" grenades to clear a path.

Then I jumped down and entered the building, traveling down the stairwell to the interior.
(Had to shoot some snorks and a zombie on the way.)

I did NOT have the "psi helmet". I didn't do the earlier required quest(s). So I used medkits and bandages to constantly heal myself from the psi-wounds inflicted by the field around the place. It was tedious as hell.

Inside the facility, the psi-field was not active, so I was safe.

I cleared the interior, taking care to loot as many medkits/bandages as possible.

The final area had another psi-field, so I lured as many guards out of the field as possible and shot them in the non psi-field area.

Then I ran up the stairs, constantly healing and restoring the sprint function which was disabled every time I took psi-damage. I hit the levers and moved on. Saving along the way proved pointless as a reload meant instant DOA.

I used up dozens of medkits along the way and had to resort to rapid-fire usage of bandages for healing towards the end, always literally a second away from death.
(I disabled the "G" for dropping my gun. Than reassigned H for quick medkit and J for quick bandage.)

I finally won, killing the last two guards and getting to a safe area at the top. Saved again, then went for the Final Switch.

Had to wait there for the cutscene and wooziness, then killed two spawned guards. Then I finished the Controller with a nade and a shot to the head.

I WIN!!!

Just get through the tunnels and out.

STALKER was supposed to be a non-linear game. I hated the BS of having to do everything in order, so I made my own non-linearity without cheat codes/glitching/etc.

Of course I cannot finish now due to later need for psi-helmet, but at least I proved it was possible to do something really big out of order.

So, has anybody else found a way to deliberately misplay a game, productively or otherwise?

I was going to post in the STALKER thread, but then I thought why not share the love.
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I felt sheer anarchic joy when I ran over my first pedestrian.

[Adilegian]

In Oblivion on the PS3, I would enter shops expressly for the purpose of dancing on the tables and knocking everything onto the ground. I would then pretend to be embarrassed and ashamed of myself, apologizing to the shopkeeper and offering to help clean up my mess.

Of course, the second you pick up anything that isn't Public Domain, they release the Imperial hounds, which renders futile any attempt to repair the damage you've caused. In other instances, I found it easier just to kill the shopkeep (and anyone else in the shop) so I could replace the dainties myself, then create some sort of spectacle to attract the guards who would then find the shop littered with bodies but perfectly clean.

I mean, yeah, that's all role-playing, so it's not necessarily "misreading" the game. However, it's using the idiosyncrasies of the game's engine and reactions to create unscripted situations. Which are kind of fun if you're not too embarrassed to talk to your television screen in the persona of your character.

In Morrowind, I came upon a naked Nord outside a city. (I don't remember where this was.) I had agreed to help him with his quest to get back his stuff (not quite a grail quest, but who's complaining, right?). However, when I agreed to help, I triggered his FOLLOW YOU WHEREVER YOU GO script, so I suddenly had this naked guy following me around.

I went into a shop and tried to sell my stuff. The prices were pretty bad, so I used my suavity to get the owner to like me better and give me better prices. Unfortunately, I was not very likable and none of my persuasion worked. After a while, he hated me so much, he refused even to sell stuff to me.

After that conversation, I stood there thinking about what to do next, and he said, "Go away." Then a guard came over and said, "What seems to be the problem?"

My character looked around in this order: shopkeep, guard, naked Nord, guard, Nord, shopkeep, Nord, Nord's package, guard, Nord. Then said: "This is probably your fault." So I attacked him in the shop, thereby causing everyone to attack me. I ran out of the store and hid from the police officer and the naked man who were trying to kill me, until the naked man accidentally punched the police officer.

This brought the holy fires of Hell down upon the naked man. He had four Imperial officers hacking at his corpse in no time, and that was evidently catharsis enough for them to forget that I had, for all intents and purposes, picked a fight in public.

I went back to the shop where everything had started, and I bought the cheapest wardrobe he had available. Then I went to the naked man's corpse and dropped the shoes, pants, and shirt on his corpse. I poked him with my sword and bid farewell.

But there's more nudist hilarity!

Because I found that situation so rife with potential role-playing fun, I loaded up the save file right when I brought the naked Nord into my company. We went and looked for the witch who had stolen his clothes, and, when we found her, I decided that she was pretty hot and therefore not to be killed.

My decision enraged the Nord who wanted swift justice (and also his clothes back). He put up his dukes and started to fight. I was really low level at this point, so he kept beating me to the ground (wearing out my fatigue) and kicking me until I died. After a few times loading up a save, trying to kill this naked man with my sword, I decided to use the Boots of Blinding Speed (which give you great speed briefly in exchange for your sight, "Blinding Speed," lol).

I ran and ran and ran and ran, faster than the gingerbread man. The Muffin Man was cutting himself with envy on Drury Lane. After a while, I couldn't hear the Nord screaming at me anymore, so I stopped and took off the boots.

And I was immediately attacked by several birds. >=(

After killing the birds, I decided to slowly retrace my steps to find wherever my pursuer had stopped, so I could kill him at a distance. After several minutes of picking through Morrowind's weird mushroom bramble, I saw a naked Nord standing on the side of a road far into the distance.

I readied my fire arrows and rained brimstone upon him. When he fell, I went to loot the corpse.

And I saw that I had somehow come upon another naked Nord just standing in the middle of the road, minding his own goddamn business, until some near-sighted Dunmer (me) mistook him for the only other naked Nord on the island.

I apologized profusely to the corpse, explaining the situation as best I could, knowing it was more for my own conscience than his information. "I mean seriously, what are the fucking odds?!" I pleaded.

And, quietly, in the distance, I hear: "There you are!"

The naked man who had actually been pursuing me had found me, and he was closing in fast. I clipped him several times with my remaining fire arrows, until he stumbled, mortally wounded, atop the body of the other naked Nord.

I decided that life was too complicated to divide into right and wrong, and I stole the hats off their corpses.

I don't know if all of this relates exactly to the thread topic, but it sure was fun to recollect!

[DaleNixon]

Well the best example for me would always be Oblivion. I only liked that game because I could break the hell out of it.

Deus Ex. Boy oh boy did I have some fun with that one. I would grab all the trashcans at UNATCO HQ and pile them up in Manderley's office before a briefing. Then I'd go in there and the cutscene would be all full of garbage cans and stuff.

Playing that game with the knowledge of what to expect allows for some pretty cool scenarios. I had my lifting strength biomod up to a decent level on that part where you have to go to the top of that building and send that message to the "terrorists" then everyone in the building freaks out and decides to kill you.

Knowing what would happen, I found the heaviest metal boxes I could find and built barricades at every stairwell. Then I got to the top and tazed the guard BEFORE he was hostile to me and proceeded to throw his body off the roof.

I then sent the message and the whole place went insane but the enemies couldn't get past my barricades. I watched as they hopelessly ran back and forth around my crates. I just picked them off like fish in a barrel.
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[dhex]

thank god for 3d sandboxes. they make the most delightful stories.

daggerfall's main quest broken-ness lead to a lot of silly games like "jump off the highest tower point" or "fly down, kill some citizens and fly away from the guards" or "let's assassinate the duke!"

the last one is fun because all of a sudden you'd have these massively leveled guards who seemingly could not be killed chasing you about.

edit: obligatory mondain's skull ref.

see also: hoe of great destruction or whatever it was called
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[dessgeega]

[dhex]

[DaleNixon]

Gunther Hermann fun
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[Pink Teddy Bear]

When I was a wee lad my friends and I used to play "house" with Mario Kart 64....

[ryan]

My friend and I used to ram into each other on Rally Cross. There was this great course that had a huge jump, and it was always around that point than one of us would do a u-turn and ram into the other. The closer we got to the jump, the closer it was to jousting: one trying to push the other off, while the other tried to swerve around to be on the opposite end. That game was great for that kind of stuff.
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Come to me, Mordel. We shall depart.

[sediment]

in every Ultima game where it's possible, I've assassinated Lord British. (This even includes Ultima 7.5, where LB only exists in a fancy dreamworld.) Incidentally you can "cheat" and carry over dreamworld items to the normal universe... where they're grossly overpowered and maybe a little bit game-breaking.

LB's death sometimes creates humorous situations later on, esp. when dealing with the Guardian. He congratulates you for your good deed, too!

Once, bearing in mind that the Avatar is the embodiment of all virtue, I went on a crazed gambling spree in Buccaneer's Den. I, of course, cheated at the rat race and thus generated more money than I knew what to deal with - more money than Dupre (who is usually my cash-carrying drunken lout) could even carry, so I stashed it all somewhere, went and did Forge of Virtue for the 60 strength, and came back with three barrels- one in either hand and one on my back (still not sure why barrels are equippable, I figure the people of Britannia saw a barrel with platemail legs carrying its two children to the casino) and loaded up, then dumped everything into my ship's hold with all the other garbage and miscellaneous crap that I'd accumulated to that point, including 6 crates of grapes and a whole hell of a lot of loose orange fish. And a lot of clothes.

Oh, and in Serpent Isle, one of the funnier things I've done (before releasing the Banes) is to kill everyone that's scripted to die after the Banes are release. You can also trick those who become the Banes into dying prematurely so you still have them with you..! So, not only are all their friends dead, but they have to watch you messily cleave them in twain.

In Deus Ex, on my second playthrough, for every scripted fight I prepared in advance and rigged the scene to blow. So, obviously, JC Denton became like a force of nature, happily blundering through the universe while his enemies exploded for no reason. In this way you can turn many, many people into angry ghosts, fyi. It's pretty weird. They get all transparent and act like nothing happened, so if you gently tap them with a big stick they explode messily.

I've got more, but generally less interesting, stories. I prefer to play through games wrong!
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[Redeye]

[Ketch]

This isn't playing wrong exactly, but I like fireballing people's bookshelves and stuff in Oblivion to see everythinng fly away.

[Harveyjames]

I refuse to play any GTA game in the way the developers want me to. Last time I played San Andreas I just spent the whole time trying to take women on the most amazing dates I could think up. You have no idea how long it took me to land that helicopter in the middle of her road, especially since the ambulance men kept taking my gimp suit off me every time I crashed it. And once I'd finally done that after about an hour of trying, resplendant in all my rubber-suited glory, did she get in my helicopter? Did she fuck.

[Redeye]

Gothic 2. The skeletons in the tomb by the farm with the mercenaries can climb.

I led them to the farm. Teh funny.


Ultima 3. Made special looting parties with druids. They regenerate mana twice as fast as others, so they can unlock chests faster (Like in Death Gulch.). Also for dungeons to get the Marks. Put one guy from your real party with 3 druids. Teleport down, down, down, get mark, up, up, up.

Yes the ship cannons and LB.
Stealing horses from Dawn.
Making fences out of horses.
Making land bridges out of ships.

In Ambrosia you can use a powder to stop time and Mount an enemy horse. When time unfreezes, the horses attack but you still get to keep the horse icon you mounted.

Only 4 guards in Grey. Bribe 2 then evade the other 2 while slaughtering the remaining town population. Over and over.

Make a bridge of ships inside of the Death castle place so you can enter and leave via the Moongate.

I got so bored of that game.


GTA Vice City:

You can jump off a bridge onto a boat and get to the other side of the map right at the beginning of the game.

Grab rockets, helicopter, etc.

I love cheating with explosives.
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I felt sheer anarchic joy when I ran over my first pedestrian.

[The Great Unwashed]

I spent quite a lot of time fiddling with the characters in Perfect Dark and GoldenEye 007 to get the most ridiculous looking cutscenes. It was much easier in Perfect Dark of course - especially on co-op where you could get your friend to cover you head to toe in remote mines before triggering a cutscene, in which the wonderful Daniel Carrington appeared to not be even slightly bemused as he was rescued from imprisonment by a walking mass of shining, beeping explosives with a soft English accent.

Not to mention the Perfect Dark training levels, where you could glitch the game by taking the spare crate from the hangar into the firing range, filling it with knives, then taking it upstairs to the gadgets training, going back down to the firing range, using the Farsight to shoot through the roof and blow up the crate, then go back up to the gadgets training and start a mission, picking up the throwing knives and being able to viciously embed them into the faces of your teachers and allies. All of whom would be perfectly nonplussed as they began to more and more resemble a bleeding, lolling pincushion that would occasionally mutter "Stop that" or another, feeble protestation.

I spent a lot of time playing Exile and Avernum series "wrong" - mostly by slaughtering whole towns, then looting their stuff and selling it to another town, then looting their stuff and repeating the process. That and pretty much ignoring all the major quests to spend time working out how to own my house and running odd courier jobs for cheese until the world crumbled around me. Great games, great times.

I guess I also played one of the advanced maps in Portal wrong, but I'm not sure. It was the first one where you are introduced to turrets that are caged and can't be knocked over. I couldn't get past them so I crouched into an abandoned room behind the walls and portal'd out every single crate and table and box I could find into the hallway, using more portals from there to create a giant moving wall of rubbish that blocked the turret line of sight. Whenever I was in trouble I would just bring in my giant rubbish wall. I was quite pleased with myself for thinking of that, but my friend recently told me he did exactly the same thing, so there you go.

Also I used to play every level in every Splinter Cell game to the point where I would knock out every guard and pile them all up in one room, then just sprint through the objectives as fast and loudly as possible, firing my assault rifle wildly into windows and knowing nobody could stop me.
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[aderack]

I did something like that, inadvertently, my first time through the normal version of the level. Later I learned how to play the game better!
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[Mr. Mechanical]

Replaying Vice City recently I grabbed all the hidden packages as early on as possible so that when it came time to do that one mission where you have to steal a tank from an Army convoy I used the apache helicopter you get for getting 100 packages to just blast the fuck out of the convoy with rockets. The guy driving the tank says screw this and bails, making taking the tank so easy.

I used that helicopter for a number of missions that would have been more difficult without it. Like the one where you have rescue Lance Vance from the junkyard. Instead of going through there on foot like you're supposed to I just hopped in one of the choppers with machine guns, the Sea Sparrow I think, and flew over the place taking guys out and then landing it right there where you have to pick Lance up. You can even use it to take him to the hospital, which was funny because the dudes chasing you in cars trying to kill you have no idea what to do.

I don't think any of that really counts as breaking the game, though.
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Mr. Mechanical

[Scratchmonkey]

Given some regrettable design decisions in San Andreas, the developers might not agree with you.

[Mr. Mechanical]

[Redeye]

[kirkjerk]

[Mr. Mechanical]

[Scratchmonkey]

And my personal favorite example, that being a mission that involved tracking your foes to a helipad and then engaging in a running battle with the helicopter while speeding down the freeway -- if you tried to do anything to blow up/hijack the helicopter before the freeway battle, you'd run into various invisible walls set up so that the freeway battle would happen no matter what.

Basically, the developers largely took away the ability of the player to be a clever dick and finish the missions in an unorthodox way, which seemed to me to be incredibly short-sighted given that that was one of the major appeals of GTA to date. Plus it's a bad design decision because it breaks coherency:

- You can't blow up this helicopter now because we don't want you to.
- Your rocket launcher (and all the ammo) and your AK47 (and all the ammo) are gone because we want you to use an Uzi for this mission. Oh, and you're not getting them back.
- We really want to force you to use a certain car for this mission, so any car that you stash up here is going to spontaneously disappear when the mission cutscene starts.

Gah, I'm getting riled up just thinking about it.

[Swimmy]

One of my favorite games was to crash in the middle of town in the Road Rash games, then push little old ladies into the street to get run over horribly.

Siren can be very funny when you play it wrong. This guy has a shitton of videos where he tricks shibito to go places they're not supposed to, glitches them to not respond to his presence, tricks snipers into running out of ammo so he doesn't have to distract them other ways, and generally runs through levels where you're just not supposed to. It's too hard for most people to break, though.
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"Ayn Rand fans are the old school version of Xenogears fanboys."
-seryogin

[sediment]

Oh, easily-repeated AI stunt in Oblivion:

in Imperial City, waterfront, there is a pirate ship. You know the one.

Strip naked or wear a really funny outfit (mods work well for this) and leap onto the pirate ship. The only reason we're doing this is for comic value, if you're concerned for your health keep wearing whatever it is you wear.

Now run over to some guardsmen while the pirates are crying out for your blood. Brawl ensues.

You can lead the FIGHT into other citizens, and they'll join the fray. If you're very crafty you can lure the entire melee into another zone (of Imperial City), wherein they will promptly turn around and go right back as their AI collapses under a "wrong place/wrong time" error of some sort. They will then casually stroll back to their initial positions - unless the pirates see you! If they do, GOTO 20, the guardsman will probably turn and strike them before their weapons are even finished drawing.
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[kirkjerk]

I should look up this one GTA:VC video I had, typical stunt video but a great intermission of fun with the cops. One notable one was getting the cop to zoom their vehicle right off the side of a bridge...
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=/ \(<D)_/
==/\/ >_ kirkjerk.com

[Scratchmonkey]

Fucking with the cops in the GTA games is almost always more fun than the "main game".

One of my favorite things to do in San Andreas was to take a car to a freeway overpass on the northeast side of Los Santos and drive the wrong way across it until I caused a massive pileup. Aside from the original carnage, it would get better as drivers refuse to brake in that situation, just piling their car into the crash zone at 80 MPH, causing even more destruction (which was not helped by me standing on the roof of the original car, pumping ammo into the chaos). The best part is if their car was still working, they would decide to try and get around the mess by driving their car off of the overpass, which led to countless examples of them trying very hard to get their car over the guardrail and then dropping 30 feet to the ground.

In Vice City I always favored the baggage handler vehicle from the airport. Leading the cops on chases across the golf course with one of those = good times.

[Six]

[Pink Teddy Bear]

That story alone is making me re-install Oblivion, right now.

[boojiboy7]

I keep thinking I should track down and play oblivion. Keeping in mind that I don't care too much about user generated stuff, and generally like playing things with a gamepad, which version is the best?

My 'keeping in minds" aren't to rule out the PC version, just to say that it will need to have a major advantage to make it worth it over playing on a pad.

[sediment]

you'd probably like it better on the 360, then.

the big draw of the pc version is the moddability. definitely, definitely play shivering isles once you're done with the obliv main quest.

Shivering Isles has some... unusual things you can do, too!
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[sediment]

hey kids in Portal I found out you can remain within the aperture of a portal pairing and fire off another portal when just barely outside of one side, and usually it won't throw you out

realistically this behaviour should kill you, since the part of you outside the portal when the portal's aperture changes positions should be neatly sliced off

but instead you can basically "portal walk" impossibly wherever portals are able to be placed and you can see where you'll be placing portals from the portal you're remaining in.

(this obviously becomes problematic when you've got vertical portal exits, but that's neither here nor there)

through this i've been able to completely bypass "zone loading" regions and freak myself out because I thought the world ended and was zipping back and forth trying to find a way out. lo and behold, by sheer circumstance i placed one right where the zone loader was so i could get better vantage of a hallway and realized what i'd done.
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[aderack]

The other day I tried to play Dead Rising by standing on the fire escape, flapping my arms, and screeching "POMPEII WAS RIGHT!". I now understand this is not the correct way to play.

I wasn't wearing a scarf, you see.
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[Harveyjames]

[Harveyjames]

I got tired of just typing it out so I thought I'd make this one special.

[WarpZone]

Is not using quicksaves 'misreading'? I sometimes try and imagine they aren't there if the design feels fair and honest enough on its own.

[Redeye]

I suppose.

I wouldn't go hardcore ironman in something that was heavily arbitrary.

Aside from all of it being sort of arbitrary by nature.

If the designers don't want save/reload madness there need to be alternate paths/solutions/things you can figure out with real reason instead of just memorization.
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I felt sheer anarchic joy when I ran over my first pedestrian.

[LordGek]

As the self appointed one man Baroque Hype Machine I just had to jump in here.

It appears to further encourage replay Baroque has some weird little bit called "Baroques". Check out the very last screenshot shown on this page:

http://www.atlus.com/baroque/ps2/system/index.htm

Basically the game lets you earn titles/achievements for playing the game in really weird ways like, "Beating a tower without killing anything", "Beating the tower without ever eating any food", etc. While it sounds cute one aspect that I find a bit annoying, if I understand it correctly, is that it looks like you'll only see these titles once you've earned them...so it will be up to the player to figure out WHAT styles of retarded play will be acknowledged. So if I beat the tower while never making a left turn, surely no easy feat, how would I know if the developers are even going to recognize such an achievement (or that they do but I accidentally did make a left turn on the 13th level when I went to answer the phone so that if I only tried this again I could make the "Mr. Right" achievement)?