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Markson

Games you enjoyed for the "wrong" reasons

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I was thinking earlier today about all the games I love for reasons that seem beyond their "intent."

 

What games have you really enjoyed and maybe thought, on reflection, that you enjoyed them for unconventional reasons or played them "wrong" and loved it?

 

I'll give some examples of my own! Lots of fond memories:

 

I loved Mario Sunshine, but not for the levels or any of the actual main gameplay. I had a ton of fun riding Yoshi around Delfino Plaza, throwing fruit at random people, kicking that spiny fruit around the city like a soccer ball, swimming, etc. Just generally dicking around in the hub world was way more fun for me than any of the "real" challenges or running through levels.

 

My sister and I also loved to play Kirby Air Ride's City Trial mode on its sandbox setting - where there was no time limit, no power-ups, no challenges, and every ride was available in a "garage" under the city. Usually the City Trial mode has you riding around on power stars, trying to upgrade your speed, offense, defense, etc for a challenge that happens at the end of a 5 - 15 minute period. But my sister and I played the sandbox non-challenging mode for hundreds of hours just making up stories and roleplaying as Kirbys living in a city. We'd nickname different rides and gave each colored Kirby a different personality and life story.

 

I also played a lot of Chrono Trigger and FFVI on the SNES as a kid...and I beat them, but one of my other favorite things to do was just leave the game running in certain parts so that I could hear my favorite music. Then I'd get out the LEGOs or something and play with those instead, using the game as a jukebox. I actually have hours of the FFVI soundtrack recorded on casette tape from when I was younger, haha. My mother said I needed to stop wasting electricity by leaving the TV on all the time "without even playing," so I decided I should record it all at once and use the walkman.

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Apparently Little Inferno is supposed to be some kind of super artsy statement, and you're supposed to get dissatisfied with the gameplay so the Big Message can come in. Joke's on them, I just focused on the items that burned in exotic ways and had fun with it as a "Burn weird stuff" simulator.

 

Fire Emblem Awakening is a turn-based strategy game with a fixed-seed random number generator, meaning you can savescum the hell out of your turns, but your die rolls are essentially fixed, so you can't simply retry a hundred times until you get lucky enough that all your shots hit and all theirs miss. I enjoy turning the difficulty up to maximum and playing it with heavy savescumming because it essentially turns the game into a tactical puzzle game. "Okay, my next attack is going to be a Dual Strike, after that I have a very low roll queued up so it'll miss if I use anyone but Chrom, when I end turn these enemies are going to go here here and here..."

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I enjoyed going for strolls in GTA4, usually it ends up turning into an attempt to get onto a roof from a train-platform or something like that. I cruise around the GTA games and just listen to music, paying attention to traffic laws and people watching.

In Civ5, I tend to just try and build a nation that I like and maintain it. I don't like the win-states or trying to reach them.

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I am really terrible at strategy games and don't quite understand the rules of Civilization IV, so I always play it on the easiest setting and the fun comes from just watching my beautiful civilization grow unencumbered by worthy opponents. I used to play Starcraft a lot and would always use cheats for resources and fast production to basically do the same thing with base expansion. 

 

In Warcraft 2 I would make my own custom maps where the opponent was walled off (for some reason enemy AI couldn't attack walls) and just play it like a weird shitty version of Sim City.

 

I would use Sim City 2000's map editor to create huge mountains and cliffs and valleys, and fill everything with roads and then import that into Streets of Sim City so they'd be crazy stunt tracks.

 

My mom made me play Mario 64 with my little sister even though she didn't know how to play, so I invented a hide-and-seek game where you would lock the camera down and then go and run Mario behind some wall or object and the other person would have to guess where he is.

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I've invariably played Sid Meier's Pirates, time and again, by ignoring the plot and most of the shipboard stuff, instead loading up with as many guys as I can and going around the Caribbean flipping the entire map to the French or Dutch. Capturing cities for a faction is presented as doable, but I don't think it was intended to be done wholesale, to the exclusion of everything else, because the game's systems start to groan pretty bad once all of Central and South America are French...

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I used to play Starcraft a lot and would always use cheats for resources and fast production to basically do the same thing with base expansion. 

 

I once made a custom map in StarCraft that was basically my own version of a tower defense game (before that was even really a thing).  I'd play as the Terrans against several Zerg AI, use cheats to set up a huge base defense, then see how long I could hold out against the swarm.  I designed the path to be a lot of long canyons that I could line with bunkers and siege tanks with goliaths and missile turrets for anti-air.

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San Francisco Rush for the N64. There was a particular track with a park area that had some steep hills and ramps. We used to spend hours on end trying to line up insane jumps and outdo each other with flips and stuff.

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My friend and I would turn on moon-gravity in Tony Hawk's Underground on the PS2 and run around on foot searching for glitches.We found that if you had moon gravity turned on, there were certain walls you could jump against to double-jump for infinity. Specifically, we found that if you climb up the tower in Vancouver, once you reach the top your skater will fall into the floor and just be a head poking out of the ground, which we found consistently amusing. We spent hours and hours doing this. This same friend and I would play Star Wars: Battlefront and play on different teams and see who could get the "Bantha Fodder" award for most team-kills on our CPU teammates. 

 

My sister never was a huge game-player so whenever we played games it would turn into some sort of role-play where we would aimlessly wander around pretending to do something. My main memory is playing Lotus on the Genesis and pretending we were on the phone while commuting to work. I don't know why we considered that exciting enough to want to imagine. 

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I've invariably played Sid Meier's Pirates, time and again, by ignoring the plot and most of the shipboard stuff, instead loading up with as many guys as I can and going around the Caribbean flipping the entire map to the French or Dutch. Capturing cities for a faction is presented as doable, but I don't think it was intended to be done wholesale, to the exclusion of everything else, because the game's systems start to groan pretty bad once all of Central and South America are French...

 

There's a plot to Sid Meier's Pirates!?! XD

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There's a plot to Sid Meier's Pirates!?! XD

 

Yeah, the whole "find your imprisoned family members and revenge yourself on Baron Raimundo" thing. It's actually been pretty funny in some games, where I accidentally find a relative or a villain in a city I'm capturing, free or defeat them, and then go on with my business, despite the game jumping and cheering about my heroism. All in a day's work, I guess?

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I played a ton of Mass Effect spending most of my time trying to climb near vertical cliffs and do jumps with the Mako. My favorite thing was to find packs of guys and sideswipe them. Didn't work so well on the thresher maw though.

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My mom made me play Mario 64 with my little sister even though she didn't know how to play, so I invented a hide-and-seek game where you would lock the camera down and then go and run Mario behind some wall or object and the other person would have to guess where he is.

Oh god that's adorable

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If you like these kinds of stories, Anthony Burch from Gearbox runs a tumblr about playing different games "wrong" called No Wrong Way to Play

 

Also, I think the most recent post on it might be tegan writing in with some super obscure Pokemon correction, which is pretty great.

 

Edit: 
 

 

San Francisco Rush for the N64. There was a particular track with a park area that had some steep hills and ramps. We used to spend hours on end trying to line up insane jumps and outdo each other with flips and stuff.

 

I don't think I ever actually played a race in Rush. I would go to Blockbuster as a kid with my sister to check out a copy, we'd load up that map, and we'd play that stunt course for hours. Racing just wasn't as cool as trying to do sweet flips.

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Since Oblivion I now play Elder Scroll titles also using mods to create custom extra companions to my main character and all I often do is just taking photos of them with different outfits and poses. Most of my Skyrim mod list, which is very huge,  is just poses, cosmetic stuff, outfits and a few places that I might use for a photoshoot. No extra gameplay (I don´t want the game to crash during anything). In fact, my old Oblivion game and my new Skyrim game might resemble a crazy jrpg instead of what they used to be. On the meantime I play mostly to get more material to forge new weapons and armor for new photoshoots of my characters.

 

Also I remember once downloaded a mod for Oblivion to reduce the number of Oblivion gates because they outside begin annoying the often ruined my outdoor photoshoots. Right now, while I haven´t used yet, my Skyrim mod list does have one which add japanese school* (it is place to explore only, also this mod add a nightclub and a cyberpunk place (I mean a couple of streets and buildings)).

 

Back there on Daggerfall I too ignored the main quest and just did random quests for guilds and exploring the random dungeons, so much that I really never finish it (mostly because, back there, I want to make the game last forever).

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If you like these kinds of stories, Anthony Burch from Gearbox runs a tumblr about playing different games "wrong" called No Wrong Way to Play.

Also, I think the most recent post on it might be tegan writing in with some super obscure Pokemon correction, which is pretty great.

Yessss tegan!!! I'd seen the original post and thought Hmm, I wonder if those ratios have been independently verified.

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When I was a kid, my brother and I played a lot of Disney Extreme Skate Adventure, a Disney movies reskin of tony hawk, but with the difficulty tuned way down (you could basically grind indefinitely for instance). We played a bunch of it because when you're a kid you play what you have, and one day we found a spot where you could reliably get out of the normal map boundary. While out of bounds the physics got really weird, you would slide across the ground like ice and the game would never treat you as landed, so you could keep your combo meter up until you left the glitch area. We would fairly regularly load up a game of the tag mode on that map, get outside the wall, and play a version of tag where you could barely control your character, and knocking your opponent back onto the map was basically a win.

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My sister and I also loved to play Kirby Air Ride's City Trial mode on its sandbox setting - where there was no time limit, no power-ups, no challenges, and every ride was available in a "garage" under the city. Usually the City Trial mode has you riding around on power stars, trying to upgrade your speed, offense, defense, etc for a challenge that happens at the end of a 5 - 15 minute period. But my sister and I played the sandbox non-challenging mode for hundreds of hours just making up stories and roleplaying as Kirbys living in a city. We'd nickname different rides and gave each colored Kirby a different personality and life story.

 

I did something similar, on a smaller scale. My sister and I would play Need for Speed (I forget which one, the original Hot Pursuit maybe?) and play split screen on this one countryside track with a bunch of nice looking houses on it. We'd play this track because the houses had driveways you could actually drive up and park in. My sister loved picking a house and pretending she lived there. She'd back out of the drive, cruise around under the speed limit and pretend to go shopping and stuff. Meanwhile I'd usually play as a cop and pretend to pull over and ticket NPC cars.

 

I used to play Warcraft 2 with a friend on his dad's laptop. We had to control the mouse with one of those horrible keyboard nub things, which made playing actual missions kind of difficult. Instead, we'd play around with the map editor a bunch and make our own events. The one I remember most fondly is when we hosted our own Warcraft 2 olympics. I set up a bunch of mages to destroy some houses or something, which represented the opening ceremony fireworks, and placed a bunch of peasants around to form a crowd. Then we'd have events like archery, fighting tournaments, or just racing units around a formation of trees. The winners would go to a makeshift podium thing (I forget how we made this) and the losers would go in front of a firing squad to die. I must have been a pretty sadistic child because this was always my favourite part. I was always looking for excuses to put more people in front of the firing squad, including the winners and even random members of the crowd who I'd decided were disrupting the games. Fun times.

 

Edit:

 

 

When I was a kid, my brother and I played a lot of Disney Extreme Skate Adventure, a Disney movies reskin of tony hawk, but with the difficulty tuned way down (you could basically grind indefinitely for instance). We played a bunch of it because when you're a kid you play what you have, and one day we found a spot where you could reliably get out of the normal map boundary. While out of bounds the physics got really weird, you would slide across the ground like ice and the game would never treat you as landed, so you could keep your combo meter up until you left the glitch area. We would fairly regularly load up a game of the tag mode on that map, get outside the wall, and play a version of tag where you could barely control your character, and knocking your opponent back onto the map was basically a win.

 

This reminds me of a mini-game a friend and I invented with one of the Tony Hawk games... I think maybe Project 8 or something? The ragdoll physics were all kinds of messed up, you could ragdoll your character and control the ragdoll to float basically horizontally through the air without issue. If you ragdolled across the ground you could manoeuvre your character's body to tumble along almost endlessly if you manipulated it right. We found this spot on the map which started with a downhill slope that went onto a long, flat street and ended in some stairs leading up to a store of some kind. We set a starting spawn point at the top of the hill and spent probably multiple hours trying to be the first to slide all the way down the street, up the stairs, and into the store's front door.

 

I won.  B)

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My brothers and I used to play a great game we found in a bargain bin called Europa 1400: The Guild [mobygames] [gog].  Despite being built for multiplayer (a lot of the mechanics - blackmailing to stop someone from acting x number of turns, spying and counterspying when you thought someone was acting against you, strategically voting in elections etc - resembled a boardgame and were massively more interesting multiplayer) the actual network code was awful.  We could only get it to work when different people ran different patches; this ended up with some pretty strange bugs.  When a player gets married the other players see it happening in a cutscene - one time we noticed that on one of our screens both bride and groom were men...  after testing we found that our different clients disagreed on certain NPCs' genders.  

Naturally we exploited this to aggressively marry same-sex; certain professions were gender-locked so by marrying men you could get children with better genes and more interesting ancestries.  We eventually ran breeding programs over generations to try to create more and more interesting people (very rarely, NPCs would appear with fantastic archaic German or Italian names and rare portraits and costumes, for no apparent reason - we tried to isolate the gene).  The endgame being what it is you always ended up with the winning family crushing the competition and coming to own the entire city of London, Madrid etc. - but instead we turned swords into ploughshares and our city was a bizarre oligarchic enclave ran in peace for the single aim of creating beautiful people.

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Before World of Warcraft's official launch they had a few beta weekends and on one my friend and I tried to swim around Kalimdor. We made it maybe a third of the way around and it was one of the most fun times playing a video game that I can remember

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When I was about 10 my friend would come round and we would play Halo 2 together. We would mostly just play maps with loads of vehicles so we could drive round in circles and off jumps - very rarely would we actually try to kill each other. On one map we found a particular spot that if you flew at with a Banshee would instantly kill you, coming up that you were "killed by the guardians". We were quite proud about finding what we thought was a weird bug (although in hindsight it was clearly intentional on the developer's part).

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I remember spending a lot of time in Halo 3's forge with friends and not really doing anything, not really building anything, just kind of spawning tanks and throwing them at eachother. Forge just kind of turned into a glorified chatroom that happened to have tanks and murder.

Certainly though, i also spent a ton of time with co-op and matchmaking and even -actually- making things in forge and playing those things in custom games, but when i think back on it, probably an alarming amount of time was spent just fucking around doing nothing.

 

Another one: Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back when, back when i was playing Total Annihilation as a kid, i used to love setting up skirmish matches that were just massively stacked against me. Huge groups of allied AI commanders.

Except, see, the AI in that game had a pretty big issue. The commanders didn't really know how to deal with enemy air transports, and you could easily hijack their commanders if you rushed early in the game with a swarm of air transports. So i would go around collecting all the AI commanders, send around some early rushes to destroy what they had built, and then have all the suspended-in-cargo AI commanders just hang out on one end of the map while i built up my base unopposed. Get everything in place, make that hard save, and then just loose all those allied AI commanders and have hordes of thousands of units crash against my base's defenses to then see if i could both hold out and then mount a retaliation strong enough to still win the game.

That was definitely me playing that game in a "wrong" way, but I also played that game online a bunch back then, and given that live matches rarely made it to end-game tech, it was just my way of ensuring that i had opportunities to play around with the coolest toys.

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