The Gamer's Quarter

kirkjerk · . Joined: 12 Apr 2006 Posts: 1227

What alternate games inside an existing game have you made up?

I was thinking about one my friend Evil Bastard and I came up with.... "Storm Chaser"... it's on Dry Dry Desert in Mario Kart: Double Dash. I was kind of curious about what path the tornado in the game would take, so I started following it once when we were playing 2 players (I think I had screwed the pooch and had no chance of winning anyway).

So we started following it around its reverse course, and then got into a match of who could get closest to it for longest without getting sucked in... the cool thing is you could joust a bit, trying to nudge the other guy in or slamming it into reverse to prevent the same from happening to you.

It would make a great Mario Party-ish minigame... our version was definitely lacking a method of keeping score.

I know I've heard some other examples of this kind of game re-purposing around here, like "obeying all the traffic laws in GTA:SA" (though in that kind of sandbox game, it's more just distinctive play, rather than repurposing...) What are good examples you can think of?

dessgeega · Posted: Sun May 14, 2006 7:39 am Post subject:

i used to play city defender in rampage. i would protect the buildings from those little bombs the soliders kept planting.
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Swimmy · . Joined: 16 Sep 2005 Posts: 990 Location: Fairfax, VA

In the Road Rash games, I would play, "Get a pedestrian killed." It was simple. Crash your bike somewhere in the city. Instead of running back and getting on, just find a person in the streets, preferably an old woman, and push her into the road. It took a while because the sprites were so thin, but it was possible to get people pushed completely into the street where they would meet wacky fates on the grills of trucks.

Not much of a game, though. I suppose one could compete with a friend, see who can get the most people killed.

Does speedrunning count?
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OtakupunkX · . Joined: 23 Mar 2006 Posts: 730

Game repurposing is something I do a lot. In fact, I've probably done it with every game I've played since I started playing games waaay back when I was 4 or so. It's an interesting creative excercise.

Besides the aforementioned GTA:SA stuff I've done destruction derbies in NASCAR sims, SimStalker in Shenmue, countless wipeout contests in the Tony Hawk games (well, I guess that's not really repurposing), and all kinds of other stuff I can't remember.

One time a friend and I played "Parking Garage" on the Halo 2 Map Pack map with the train since it had a toll booth and all kinds of other fun things. It ended with the toll guy getting murdered by a psychopath with an extreme case of road rage, just like in real life ;p.

One of the more disturbing ones I've done was a "Fashion Photo Shoot" in Deus Ex: Invisible War. Basically I killed a bunch of people, positioned their bodies in silly poses, and took pictures of them that came out really crappy because my TV doesn't like to get photographed. Eventually I took all the bodies, stacked them up, and put some kind of grenade in there to see if the bodies would scatter everywhere. The game crashed.

sawtooth · . Joined: 02 Nov 2005 Posts: 419

Nascar! The only thing those games are good for. Turn around, go in the other direction, and go as fast as you can and see how many times you can flip your car over. There was a version for nintendo that worked really well for this, because it was really, really difficult to get it to flip over.
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ApM · Posted: Sun May 14, 2006 7:27 pm Post subject:

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the Zero-Point Astrosmash Challenge in this thread, but I wouldn't recommend anyone actually try it.

Essentially, Astrosmash works by awarding you points when you shoot an asteroid, and deducting points from your score when you don't shoot it. You get extra ships pretty much constantly, like every 1000 points or something. So, as long as you're shooting more asteroids than you're missing, you're pretty much fine. Of course, things get faster and more hectic the more points you have.

My bright idea was, get as many points as I dared, and then stop shooting. Just dodge until my score plummets to 0. See how high I can go while still being able to stop shooting and survive.

It was agonizing. It must've taken twenty minutes to shed the 21,000 points I'd racked up. I mean, I don't even know. My mind shut down completely as the game just got slower and slower. I didn't feel impatient, or frustrated, exactly. I wasn't like, oh man, this is no fun, but I gotta do it FOR SCIENCE. It was really just like I was slowly turning off.

Videogames are not meant to slow down.

kirkjerk · . Joined: 12 Apr 2006 Posts: 1227

It's funny how there's a subset of this idea that tends to tax the limits of the model of the system... like the NASCAR system probably really isn't designed for heavy collisions.

Warthog Jumping is a fantabulous example of this.

One thing I did was just hang out around the final level of DOOM 2, using some cheat codes to stay healthy and away, and then coming back to see SOOOOOO many monsters, and then try to fight. Actually, DOOM could pump out HUUUUUUUUUGE number of monsters even on a 486... so many that it could leave corpses behind like a breadcrumb trail for you, something that most later FPSes don't bother with.

I also used a hack ROM that would let the plane become invisible and fly over the "River of No Return" in River Raid for the 2600 forever. I let it run overnight, the next day the game was still going but glitching in odd ways. (Since then some other better ROM hackers have made a variant that lets you select from 4 different rivers, it really changes the game... the "pseudorandom number generator" they used for spitting out parts of the river in the original was tremendously clever.

kirkjerk · . Joined: 12 Apr 2006 Posts: 1227

Yeesh, I just realized that I came up with "Storm Chaser" about 2 years ago..
http://kisrael.com/viewblog.cgi?date=2004.05.16
Amazing how time goes. Mario Kart DD still feels like a new game to me.

OtakupunkX · . Joined: 23 Mar 2006 Posts: 730

I didn't realize it had been that long since the game came out. It doesn't seem that long at all.

DonMarco · . Joined: 02 Mar 2005 Posts: 349 Location: 33903

I used the FarCry map editor to make a jetski race track or two. The best one started out in the center of a tall island, then you would race down a river few a couple of waterfalls, then twice around the island, then climb back to the center of the island, where we started from.
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OtakupunkX · . Joined: 23 Mar 2006 Posts: 730

dhex · Posted: Tue May 16, 2006 9:58 am Post subject:

hey marco, are the maps transferrable? i'd like to see that (assuming you're talking pc)
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Mr. Mechanical · Friendly Stranger Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 1276

I think he might be talking about the Xbox version, as it has a supposedly really friendly and robust map editor to play around with.

Lackey · . Joined: 11 Jul 2005 Posts: 1107 Location: Canada

I made a jet-ski track too. This is a lot more fun than the actual game.
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dhex · Posted: Tue May 16, 2006 3:04 pm Post subject:

WRONG!

far cry is fucking awesome. LITERALLY. IN ALL CAPS.
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TOLLMASTER · nippon ichi PR man Joined: 15 Feb 2005 Posts: 187

Lackey · . Joined: 11 Jul 2005 Posts: 1107 Location: Canada

Well Dhex, this was on Xbox and I did only play the multiplayer, but it wasn't very entertaining. Everything seemed so half-hearted.
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