How Have You Entertained Yourself In A Game?

[Moonface]

We all get entertained by the games we play (hopefully), but what have you done to enhance your own experiences in a game or give yourself ways to be entertained by it that aren't part of the core/intended experience? If you're wondering what could count for that, you may have done some of the following: set yourself challenges, mess about, camp or target a particular player in multiplayer, or give your rival in Pokemon a stupid name.

When I first started playing Resistance: Fall of Man online I found that dying in the Manchester map anywhere around the central cathedral could give you some amusing rag dolls if you happened to be on the roof and fall off when you died, particularly to anything explosive as it would send characters flying upwards, causing you to get some distance away from the roof if you went off of it (being shot simply had you flop down where you stood so you would just fall along the wall itself if you went off the roof). There were a lot of low walls and benches surrounding the cathedral so you had a high chance of landing on one, and if you hit it right your character could flop in some ways that at the time I found very amusing.

Once I found I could play on any of the maps by myself in local play, I would spend so much time just loading up a map (normally Manchester) and just finding spots on the map to commit suicide via grenades or the grenade launcher in the carbine weapon. One time I found that certain objects such as dumpsters could be moved ever so slightly if a character model knocked into them when it was dead, so one day I did nothing but spend a few hours just going to every dumpster and positioning myself so that the explosion from the grenade would launch me into it with enough force that the game would try to get me to go over the top of it, and if I did it right I could tip the entire dumpster over.

There was also one particular house that had a car outside, and I would stand by the second floor window and blow myself out the window and onto the car. The best memory of that was when I somehow caused the car to clip into the ground, which the game disliked and so shot the car upwards to unstick it, sending me way into the air above the map and the car ended up suspended on a wall of a demolished building.

Now let's see who else has any tales that as they type them makes them feel like they were a pathetically amused bastard like I feel right now.

[Mr EliteL]

This may or may not count, but t's the first one that comes to my head, probably because I was thinking about it the other day.

On my old PC game, Army Men: Toys In Space. I could only play either the campaign or Battle Mode against up to three AI armies (well, everyone's limited to 20 units each so not exactly an "army"), or in teams. In the Battle Mode you can select any rules, items, what units are allowed, if zombies appear after any death, and so on. It's usually good to have a diverse amount of options, but for hilarity I sometimes would to matches that only had the best unit allowed which was an Alien Commander. Getting a max of 5000 to spend when creating your army and they cost 400, getting up to 12 of them. You're practically unstoppable with them as I believe they have 600HP and, albeit slow firing, lasers which easily kill anything in one or two (or 4 or 5 if it's a tank which have 800HP). If it's a more normal game, I can take control of one of these and abandon my Sarge under the protection of the rest of my army.

Anyway, explaining all that you can imagine four armies with these units, running around a map obliterating each other. Dead bodies take a long while to disappear, so a map will be littered with them. Even more so if there's zombies spawning after every normal unit death. Taking it up to eleven, on a more normal game again, other armies will have many more units for the full 20 and not a bunch of the best ones like I do. Heck, the Grey Army AI will always pick a mass amount of spiders if they're allowed (costing 50) for some reason. Basically what I'm saying is, me running around with 12 aliens (13 if I pick a lesser one for 200) and killing every enemy and zombies to fill the map up with bodies, while slightly focusing on the main objective of a match.

[Kyng]

I did this quite a lot on LEGO Racers, when I was about 10 years old. Since I was a fan of LEGO and a fan of motorsport, I loved this game, and played it to death: I soon got to the point where I could easily win every race I entered. So, instead of putting the game down, I developed a different goal for myself: try to sabotage the boss as much as possible. I allowed myself to lose individual races if it would help me to push the boss further down the order; however, I would still aim to win the overall championship.

It was frustrating when it went wrong (which it quite often did), but quite rewarding on the few occasions when I managed to push the final boss into last place !

[Moonface]

I can't recall what games I've tried it in, but reading your post Kyng reminded me of times where I've tried to push AI off course entirely to see how the computer handles it.

However, typing that did just remind me of sabotaging races in Destruction Derby 2 where I would try to block an area of the track to create a massive pileup. Chalk Canyon was the easiest because of the thin stretch of road at the starting point, but pushing flipped or wrecked cars into the path of the AI to create problems is always something I like doing in that game. I would do it in DD1 as well, but the race ends once any racer finishes all their laps, so you get limited on how much time you have to mess about. RAW just has vastly different physics to make it work at all.

There's a few videos on YouTube of the Chalk Canyon pileup: https://youtu.be/QvFfLRDAmrg?t=201

[Kyng]

I can't recall what games I've tried it in, but reading your post Kyng reminded me of times where I've tried to push AI off course entirely to see how the computer handles it.

However, typing that did just remind me of sabotaging races in Destruction Derby 2 where I would try to block an area of the track to create a massive pileup. Chalk Canyon was the easiest because of the thin stretch of road at the starting point, but pushing flipped or wrecked cars into the path of the AI to create problems is always something I like doing in that game. I would do it in DD1 as well, but the race ends once any racer finishes all their laps, so you get limited on how much time you have to mess about. RAW just has vastly different physics to make it work at all.

There's a few videos on YouTube of the Chalk Canyon pileup: https://youtu.be/QvFfLRDAmrg?t=201

Wow, reminds me of the Grand Prix series of games, where I would leave the 'Indestructible' driver aid turned on, and 'win' the race simply by crashing into everyone else. Sometimes I would even take the course backwards, and crash into cars head-on as I encountered them!

Granted, that did get boring very quickly - but, the first couple of times I did it, it was great fun .

[Moonface]

You keep reminding me of similar things I've done in games Kyng! XD

Crashing into people head-on was something I spent a few hours doing in the original Midnight Club with the Marauder vehicle since the scoop would send them flying. I also spent time in that game trying to knock down every light pole in the map to make all the streets darker.

[ShiraNoMai]

I mowed down people on GTA San Andreas with the Rhino Tank cheat code. The civilians would fly at the screen in amusing ways

[Dragon Lord]

Back when I was heavy into playing Final Fantasy Tactics, after playing the game for like the 100th time, I decided to start having some fun by grinding my starting party to level 99 and master all jobs/learning all skills at the first random battle location in the game, before advancing the story any further than I had to. I found it to be a fun challenge in the game, because in FFT, random encounters scale to your level. So once you started getting to the higher levels (70+), you had enemies that were the same level, but had stats more in line with their levels, while you were stuck in beginning of the game gear. This made the enemies do a lot of damage to you, while you couldn't do a whole lot of damage back to them.

The challenge was being able to survive through these battles until you started running into human enemies, which you could then steal end-game gear from. I probably spent hundreds of hours doing this grinding, if not thousands of hours. What was the point of doing it that early? There wasn't one. I just did it because why the fuck not?

[Moonface]

The challenge was being able to survive through these battles until you started running into human enemies, which you could then steal end-game gear from. I probably spent hundreds of hours doing this grinding, if not thousands of hours. What was the point of doing it that early? There wasn't one. I just did it because why the fuck not?

So was the rest of the game easier once you got to this point, or was it like playing the game normally with battles going the same way except everyone just dishes out higher numbers?

[Dragon Lord]

The story battles were all easier, because they are at fixed levels. Random battles would be more difficult though, due to the limited equipment you have access to and how strong enemies would be.

Mind you, this was after I had played through and beaten the game like... I don't even know how many times. So I wasn't missing out on anything by the story battles being easier, since I had already gone through them the normal way countless times.