I remember in the original 1990’s NASCAR Racing game, I discovered a glitch where if I managed hit an AI car into the outer wall a certain way while driving backwards, it would launch said AI car backwards at some incredible rate of speed which could make for some spectacular wrecks.
I like to play crusader kings II from the point of view of God. Using console commands, sketchy cheat mod, and knowing the right game mechanics you can make characters do all types of crazy stuff. Using the “observe” console command let’s you play as a spectator, you can use the “play” command followed by a character ID and you will jump into playing as that character. I like to find a character, give them insane stats, and give them all of the best traits, make them immortal and then spectate for a few hundred years and see what my chosen one made the world into. I also like to try to determine before hand what I want them to do, like becoming emperor of brittania or whatever, and see how close I can get from just 1 or 2 interactions with them.
I’ve done this a few times in different Civilizations games to see how the computer would react to things like an abundance of gold or over powered for the current turn units.
A lot of the time it was underwhelming with them not really utilizing what was given to them or switching up their strategy. With gold they wouldn’t buy units or tiles and would still demand gold during trades or for peace for example.
I did that with RTS like Starcraft or Age of Empires II. I would just build a city, develop every upgrade, build good defenses and basically play it like Sim City
This is pretty much the basis for the entire speed-running community. Maybe not totally different (like walking around as a peaceful tourist in Hitman), but definitely not utilizing mechanics as intended
I mostly play according to the intended game design. The only exceptions that come to mind at the moment are:
Open world games (GTA, Fallouts, Elder Scroll series etc) - I tend to act like a normal, civilian part of the world. I eat and drink, travel like a person rather than player (i.e. safely, without quick travel), avoid violence and do peaceful tasks when possible. I also go on trips and take screenshots of the scenery.
Finally, if there’s an equipment system I limit myself to “reasonable” amount of baggage (both in terms of weight and volume).
Mirror’s Edge and Portal - the only games I learned to the point of speedrunning. I’m nowhere near the level of being able to compete with professionals (nor am I interested in that) but I can get through both pretty quickly and without issues.
This one is slightly less on target, but I’m really intrigued by a free demo I found this week called Exo Rally Championship. It’s a rally car game, but set in exotic little exoplanetary environments. The movement looks really interesting especially because you’re not just in a low-grav setting, you also have 360⁰ jets you can use to assist in steering or course-correction midair.
Hah. As a kid I used to just hang out or make up stories in Lucasarts games, like Monkey Island and especially Maniac Mansion. I know I wasn't alone, because there were multipe contemporary games built around that idea, including form Lucas, even before The Sims came out. Toe Jam and Earl 2: Panic on Funkotron was also a good, weird roleplaying avenue.
And I did engage in some amount of "let's make my house in this map editor" back when games came with map editors. We all did, I think.
Oh, and some games I'd play just to listen to the music. It's hard to argue this was unintended, though, given how many games had sound test modes. I remember I'd fire up Panzer Dragoon just to gawk at the intro, which I realize seems silly if you look at it now.
It has tons of emotes (or things that can double as emotes) and multiplayer. In a world where making game characters expressive was not a thing, much less at the player's command, they felt like puppets.
I fondly remember when my parents bought a new house that had yet to be built. I took all the drawings and made a Doom map so I could show my parents what their house would look like.
Some friends and I play multi-world randomizers together. Randomizers modify a game so that important items/unlocks are in different locations or are obtained in a different way. I usually play Ocarina of Time and a randomizer changes all the “treasure chest” items found throughout the world, so instead of finding the bow in the Forest Temple (where it should be in the game), it could be found behind a rock in a cave in the middle of the field. I constantly have to ask myself “What items don’t I have yet?” and “What areas do I have access to that I haven’t searched yet?” It turns the game into a kind of puzzle game. There is a website we use called Archipelago.gg that lets you connect randomizers together. I can play an OOT randomizer and my friend can be playing a Pokemon Emerald randomizer, and when I open a chest I can find items from his game and he gets a gym badge, an HM, or something else dropped into his inventory. And it works the other way when he beats another trainer, he could get one of my items and I get some rupees, or a hookshot dropped into my inventory.
I play Trailmakers which is like Legos where people mostly build planes and tanks to shoot each other, but I build cranes, forklifts, trucks and boats and fill them with the barrels and crates from around the maps and move them to other places. Very peaceful and rewarding to me.
I play heavily modded Elder Scrolls, where my character never touches the main story.
My favorite Morrowind run was a princess who ended up creating an agricultural baron, buying up every plantation and owning probably hundreds of slaves. She also got into the skooma business on the side (needed money for all of her dresses). Morrowind had a ton of wacky mods that were just fun to play in general - people made Star Wars and LOTR questlines. There’s also the work of Tommy Khajiit (RIP), which is something unique and which has never gotten the respect it deserved. (Or Lady Rae - she liked to recolor the game bright neon colors, and basically got bullied out of the modding community.)
Skyrim is a hunting/vagrant simulator for me. I usually play a Dunmer refugee and avoid the in-game quests entirely. Survival and economy mods to make the focus of the gameplay getting enough gold to afford a room for the night, tweaks to loot to make things more “mundane.”
The Sims for me is either 1800s Utah polygamous Mormons, post apocalyptic Handmaid’s Tale scenarios, or prisons.
I always like to see people who go all in on the roleplaying in RPGs.
I do wish people would leave mods that aren’t for them alone. There are a bunch of mods extremely not to my taste that I just scroll past instead of intentionally clicking to tell the mod author just how much it is not to my taste and that they should not have made it because I am uninterested in the content.
Downloading unhinged Morrowind mods in the mid naughts exposed me to new franchises, music, ideas… Like this banger, which plays at some point in the Underground 2 along with this one. (btw, Dawnguard is Emil or whoever wrote it ripping off story beats from a 20 year old Morrowind mod based on the Underworld series lol - play both and don’t tell me that the Soul Cairn sequence isn’t inspired…)
Did she make music? Holy shit - if you have a link I’ve been trying to figure out what happened to her for years. She’s genuinely a major inspiration for my painting and art.
The prison mod is great for running the “re education” camps in the Handmaid’s Tale scenarios. I usually rezone all of the lots in Downtown to residential, and then explode a series of bombs across them (+ enhance with some assets ripped from the Fallout games). Occasionally I add in a zombie apocalypse to shake it up.
My Utah Mormons I play out the generation after they moved from Nauvoo. Clothing is period accurate, as much as possible. The goal is to populate an empty map, and find something to do with all of the extra men (wars, Indian raids…)
When I was ten and playing the original Sims, it was Roman families with historically accurate slavery (minus the sex stuff.)
I thought that was the Sims intended playstyle? You mean to tell me the developer didn’t intend for me to make a family of 8 of my friends, then trap them in a house until each of them dies one-by-one Hunger Games style? Then build a glorious mansion for the final one?
Will Wright after seeing everything he owned in ashes after a series of major wildfires in the Palisades: “what if I made a virtual dollhouse for people to explore sexual and violent fantasies that would make Freud say, ‘no, that’s too much.’”
I get the tone is jokey but I wasn’t sure if that was a hypothetical alternate universe proposition with a different Will Wright, or something that happened in real life, so I looked up the wildfire thing.
Wright’s house was caught in the Oakland Hills firestorm.
Rebuilding his life, and having to reacquire so many of his basic possessions, fed into the idea for The Sims.
Most games I play that I don’t plan on playing a lot of. I use trainers hacks and cheats on things I find grindy or just feels pointless. Or unnecessary hard games.
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