Not sure how to title this better 😅
Are there any games that you tend to play contrary to how they are intended?
What prompted this question was playing Project Zomboid; but I am all comfortable and snug in my home base that it doesn’t feel like playing a zombie survival game anymore. I feel like I am just playing The Sims with a character that mimics my introverted ass. I never leave the house and just spend all day reading, watching videos, learning new crafts, and just staying alive. I have no need to scavenge since I am loaded up with tons of armor, guns, ammo, food, a source of water, a generator and acess to a near limitless supply of fuel from an underground fuel tank generated in the basement.
How 'bout y’all? Do you prefer Surf to actual Counter-Strike? Have an unconventional way of playing Pokemon? I wanna know! 😃
Excel is meant to be used for virtual spaceship markets and industry tracking, but I keep hearing people are using it for real world companies.
ProsperousUniverse I presume?
Ah no, Eve Online. But now you’ve given me something to check out. Curse you!
Almost like I did it intentionally…
But seriously, try it out. It’s a great game. You can play free for about 6mo before hitting the free wall, but you’ll probably pay for PRO soon enough.
I like the devs because they don’t do auto-renewals.
Excel? The flight simulator? That Excel?
I use it to play Tetris, personally. 🤷♂️
I have played probably 2000 hours of Counterstrike, but maybe only a dozen or so of playing the game as intended.
The majority of my playtime is surfing - a mechanic that allows you to slide on sloped surfaces that is exploited to make whole maps that you go down. I play on servers that make compete with other players for time and rank among all other players on the server across maps.
Oh the memories, thanks for mentioning it!
I used to play on surf maps a lot with my friends back in the mid to late 00s; that and scout only maps.Forgot I also did a lot of bunny hop maps, kz climbing maps, zombies,and a little prop hunt too!
Can anyone recommend a good video of this? I want to see something representative not whatever YouTube feels like should have been picked up by the algorithm
Here’s a world record compilation (best completion times) from the server I used to play on.
Their channel has tons of WR videos that are quite impressive!
Wow! Mesmerizing
Just remembered all the servers for Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy that were dedicated to polite dueling. You had a big etiquette to follow if you wanted to do lightsaber battles. If you attacked someone with their lightsaber off you got banned instantly. Those servers were mostly used for chatting.
Those were basically the reason I played the game so much back in the day. The lightsaber combat was insanely good. I especially liked the ones that only allowed the Force Jump and Force Throw powers, so it was pure melee combat and not just throwing each other around or zapping a dude with lightning from across the arena.
My favorite TF2 game mode is prop hunt :3
Most single player games I have mods installed to remove any grindy parts of the game because it just feels like a waste of time to grind for resources in a game where I’m not competing.
After beating Deus Ex 1, there was a time where me and some friends would install a coop mod and instead of playing through the game normally, we’d pick a map, clear it and play proper hide and seek.
It was really fun since you could easily hide under objects like tables, the lighting system let you essentially become invisible in shadows, the maps had a fuck ton of all kinds of nooks and crannies meaning plenty of unexpected hiding spots, etc.
Sometimes I make a save just before some part of a game that I think is really fun. When I go back to play the game instead of like starting a new game or loading my save that is the furthest way through I just run through the part I really like.
There are a ton of games I consider my favorites that I have never played all the way through. I don’t really care that much about completing a game and I generally think the beginning is more fun than the later stages of many games.
Speaking of Project Zomboid I often, but not always, play that game with the infection turned off or set to bites only at least because I don’t want my run to end just because I made a tiny mistake or something really janky happens with the user interface that gets me scratched. I also play Project Zomboid with a game controller which isn’t how the game was originally designed but luckily someone on the team decided it was worth coding and I love them for it.
Sometimes I play Rust on a private server by myself with no other players just messing around and doing the PvE content.
Speaking of Project Zomboid I often, but not always, play that game with the infection turned off or set to bites only at least because I don’t want my run to end just because I made a tiny mistake or something really janky happens with the user interface that gets me scratched.
I set the infection to take like a month to kill you, and have a mod that lets you research and develop a cure. It makes it so that being bitten isn’t an automatic end run, it just changes my priorities to finding everything I need to stay alive.
I also play Project Zomboid with a game controller which isn’t how the game was originally designed but luckily someone on the team decided it was worth coding and I love them for it.
Oof. I actually came back to it because I saw they added controller support and wanted to try it because I much prefer using a controller these days for comfort reasons. I gotta say, I really hope the new chsnges they are planning make it better because right now the controls for controller kinda blow. Controlling the game is purposefully clunky as is with a mouse and keyboard; the controller exacerbates it. 😞
Yeah it’s tough using a controller sometimes. The frequent use of dpad directions or the select button while also wanting to hold the sticks both in whatever directions gets me holding my controller in some interesting ways. Having a controller you’re very comfortable with helps. The controls of like TVs and radios is super terrible also, but I’ve gotten somewhat used to it.
The sims, Skyrim, cyberpunk and many others all eventually evolved into. “Modding, the game” the moment i get to tweak a game so the details are just what i want i feel so satisfied i rarely play much after.
I promise myself i keep em ready for when i do want to play, but in reality that means a update got me interested again because now i gotta start modding all over again.
I spent months modding Skyrim to be as realistic as possible. Nutrition, calories, temperature, disease, frostbite, starvation, injuries, infection, no level scaling, dangerous combat, one life. Took a week to gather and prepare for a dungeon dive.
Frost Troll greeted me when I entered the dungeon. One swipe killed me.
That’s when I learned that the modding was the part I had the most fun with.
I used to only play Oregon Trail for the hunting mini-game.
That was basically everyone in my class in school, lol.
StarCraft brood wars and warcraft 3 had like 80% of my time in custom games playing turret defense games and whatnot. I say those were pretty much the birthplace of League of Legends.
Do randomizers count?
If so, I play through Link to the Past using unintentional methods about once a month.
TIL about randomizers. Time to go back into the cave with my favourite games from the past, tyvm
I’m from a time when complex games could lead to softlocking your progress if you made the simple mistske of assuming the game was programmed logically, so I avoid using those myself because I don’t want to get half way through the game only to be unable to go the rest of the way becsuse RNJesus forsook me. 😅
But yeah, they count.
Every randomizer I’ve played has logic built-in to prevent that exact thing from happening. If there is a game you know inside and out, there might be a randomizer for it that can breathe new life into a title you love.
But with LttP specifically, you can set the randomizer to use a few different modes when placing items which range from “make everything accessible with vanilla item behavior” to “I’m a freak and walls are merely a suggestion”
In addition to what other people have pointed out, I’ll also add that most decent randomizers are very configurable – you can usually make things as random (or as not random?) as you want. And typically you can also get a “seed solution” which will tell you exactly how to complete it (or if you’ve configured it to allow impossible seeds, it can tell you if it is even possible to do so). And there are many more options to use besides that. If you only want certain aspects or elements or sections of the game randomized, or you only want them randomized in a certain way or according to certain rules you can usually do that too. And you can usually either search for or tell it to generate specific seeds that will give you certain things early to give prompt access to the whole world if you want. These are called “open” or “very open” seeds. For speedrunning they can even be a significant challenge, as there is little guidance on where you need to go to get the next item when the whole map is almost immediately unlocked. The opposite, so-called “linear” seeds, have a very direct a->b->c->d progression path (much like the original game probably did) where as soon as you get an item, you know exactly what your next goal must be because the particular combination of items you possess might only give you access to one new location each time. But you may only realize this once you become intimately familiar with the game mechanics (and sometimes the randomizer’s mechanics too).
Randomizers are really powerful tools for replaying a game you’ve otherwise mastered but they’re not intended to only be hard. Sometimes they’re actually very easy, especially if you tune them to be. And that’s part of what’s fun about them, the flexibility of being able to play some of your favourite games again in ways you always dreamed of doing, or ways that you never dreamed of doing. It’s not just a challenge it’s also a sandbox. It allows you to do new things that you never would’ve been able to do in the game without cheating, but it doesn’t necessarily remove all challenge the way cheating normally would.
the “big list of randomizers” actually does not allow randomizers that are prone to softlocks
that wouldn’t be a randomizer, it would just be random lol
https://randomizers.debigare.com/
I’m not sure where that common misconception of randomizers softlocking came from, it would be considered a bug
I’ve seen plenty of Dark Souls randomizer runs that have to be restarted before leaving the asylum at the start because it didn’t spawn the key needed to leave. But that also was quite some time ago when these things were fairly new.
Also remember that randomizers often have a lot of settings to customize, and sometimes they’ll have an option to disable the logic checks, so the players might’ve been doing this to themselves lol.
I know the Zelda, Castlevania, Final Fantasy, and Deus Ex randomizers are very robust against softlocks.
I play Minecraft to build incredibly dense, complex, automated farms and sorters. I love the new copper golems, but they’re actually worse than my usual redstone. I’m currently testing them as a flush system and redundant sorter for when server problems backup my main hopper loop or someone decides to toss fish in my system again.
or someone decides to toss fish in my system again.
Hard to get the smell out?
You’d think it wouldn’t be as bad as rotten flesh, but it’s worse.
Just the other day my buddy was telling me how he would play Warzone 2100 with friends and they’d just focus on base building. Combat was consensual and didn’t focus on destroying opponents’ bases.
Speaking of Pokemon, I’ve been playing one Pokemon challenge runs for a while and they’re fun. You modify the game to choose a specific mon as your starter, and from there on you can only use that mon in battle. If it faints, you reload. You also can’t use items in battle. You can have other mons for HMs to navigate the world, but otherwise you clear the elite four with one Pokemon. If it’s gen 2, you also beat Red.
My current record for Crystal is something like 11 hours in game time using Jolteon. Since it’s so grindy, playing it on an emulator at 4x speed makes it so you can literally complete a run in a single day depending on your starter.
Monopoly comes to mind. Uno is another.
Back in the warcraft 3 days, i would always play either tower defence or hero defence, or hide and seek, anything but the RTS the game supposed to be.
I’m reminded of my daughter who used her Hulk puppet as a baby puppet. Kids will always find a way to play what they want.
She also didn’t care much for the story in Spider-Man or GTA but then again I think those games are designed with such players in mind.
Every time I think of some example I realise that it’s actually encouraged by the game. Like Creative Mode in Minecraft to just build stuff, playing Sim City without catastrophes, killing every NPC in an RPG.
My brother used to shoot me in the back in Doom co-op. But if PvP wasn’t intended it would be turned off.
My brother used to shoot me in the back in Doom co-op. But if PvP wasn’t intended it would be turned off.
Reminds me of playing Rainbow 6 on the N64. It had co-op, with no PvP but it had friendly fire so my friend and I would clear out all but one terrorist so the mission wouldn’t end, and then try to kill each other in a now mostly empty map. I once dodge his bullets because it was one the earliest games where your model would bend and move as you aimed, and my controls wonked out and made me look strsight up in the sky so my dude was bending over backwards as my friend shot over me lol
