Making Your Own Fun
January 14, 2014 8:19 AM   Subscribe

 
There's something wrong with you that you found this worthy of an FPP. There's something wrong with me that I had to immediately drop what I was doing and start consuming everything there once I realized what you'd posted.
posted by Ickster at 8:27 AM on January 14, 2014 [2 favorites]


Ah, they found the tale of Nightshade the Dragon on the Nethack Usenet group! That's a great one.
posted by JHarris at 8:51 AM on January 14, 2014


A few years ago, I was at AggieCon. Very late in the evening, I watched a young fan play the Wii version of Samba de Amigo. (The game was relatively new on the Wii at that point, which would make this 2008 or 2009.)

For those of you not familiar with the game in question, it's a guitar-hero-esque rhythm game, but instead of a guitar, you control it with maracas (each of which has a Wiimote inside). And instead of pop or rock, the music is funky Latin beats. And instead of your common-or-garden video game play, the action involves POUNDING BOILING-HOT CANDY-COLORED JOY into your EYE-HOLES non-stop.

Anyway, I witnessed the gentleman in question achieve near-perfect scores on several songs in a row, whilst he was lying flat on his back, legs in the air, with plastic maracas duct-taped to his feet.

And in one perfect moment, I knew that no matter how big a basement-dwelling neckbearded geek I was or might become, I would never, ever be his equal.
posted by sourcequench at 8:52 AM on January 14, 2014 [10 favorites]


Oh hey, that's by Anthony Burch of HAWP (previously), and writer for Borderlands 2.
posted by figurant at 8:53 AM on January 14, 2014




* The Mario 64 mushroom chase I've seen before (and may have been on Metafilter before, I couldn't find the link though).
* I myself have written about the Nethack Dragon run for @Play.
* Of course the Skyrim Illusionist was posted here a couple of months ago (and in fact this Tumblr appeared in its comments).
* Zelda without a sword I posted, for a previous Zelda Day.
* The Spelunky Eggplant Run was posted here very recently.
* The Perpetual Mario video appeared back in 2008, although the link goes to a Kotaku post about it instead of directly there, and the post seems to have lost its embed of the video.
posted by JHarris at 9:15 AM on January 14, 2014 [1 favorite]


Oh hey, that's by Anthony Burch of HAWP

Which is why the absence of Left 4 Friends seems shocking. SHOCKING!
posted by Panjandrum at 9:19 AM on January 14, 2014


I've always wanted to try a Nuzlocke run on Pokemon, it sounds great.
posted by jason_steakums at 9:24 AM on January 14, 2014


Upon hearing about this concept, I found myself wondering if I could somehow convince some stalwart YouTubing gamer out there to do a run of Assassin's Creed 4 which, excepting those circumstances where the game absolutely does not give you the choice, is done without using the boat.

"Oh, Edward Kenway? Yeah, interesting guy. Ran into him in Nassau. We had some business, so I told him to meet me in Kingston. He nodded and then turned around and ran off the pier and started swimming out into open water until he was nothing but a tiny black dot on the horizon. And then, not even that. I mean, we're still going to meet, but I figure I can kind of take my time getting there."
posted by FAMOUS MONSTER at 9:39 AM on January 14, 2014 [3 favorites]


Ha, I've been giving the Illusionist run in Skyrim a go. It's actually fun as hell, especially since the Fury spell doesn't work on the undead (at my level, anyway), so clearing a dungeon of Draugr usually means finding ways to make them run into their own traps. I've cheated a bit by conjuring Atronachs occasionally. The rest of the time I just run like hell.

Even so, my abject coward of a character has managed to buy a house, get married, have a family and, so it's not all bad. Having mostly completed the game's main quests with another character, it's fun to jump in for some random mayhem. My hiatus was so long that I'm running into places of which I have absolutely zero memory.
posted by jquinby at 10:02 AM on January 14, 2014 [2 favorites]


Thanks for the linkage - this is great...I myself turned my version of Mini Ninjas (PC) into "Mini Ninja Fishing Challenge"..a no-kill, no-detection romp through the fish populated waterways of that enchanting little game.

Disappointed by the lack of fish in several of the levels, particularly the entrancing "Distress Signal" (a night-time river) I ended up tracking down the environment designer to find out if there was a way to encode fish..he did respond eventually, cool guy, but the answer was unfortunately "no".

Good fun however a real missed opportunity I always thought as there were no extra points for playing the game in a fully realized stealth mode.
posted by bird internet at 10:08 AM on January 14, 2014 [1 favorite]


In college some of my friends used DDR pads to play fighting games, in particular Soul Calibur. The ultimate achievement was to pull off Ivy's special throws, Summon Suffering and Criminal Symphony, which require you to be in a certain stance and then enter eight or nine consecutive, non-adjacent direction inputs, followed by two simultaneous attack buttons. Actually winning a match was entirely secondary.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 10:10 AM on January 14, 2014 [1 favorite]


This reminds me of cult UK teletext computer game magazine Digitiser's "Old Game: Here" reviews, which would always suggest an improvement via improper gameplay
posted by doiheartwentyone at 10:22 AM on January 14, 2014 [2 favorites]


I've been playing the tar out of Rogue Legacy the last few days, coming back to it after many months away after beating it the first time. I was just talking with someone on mefightclub about the idea of a pacifism run, though I'm not sure it's possible in the purest sense since while I think it's be totally doable to avoid killing scrubs, the bosses are must-kills to beat the game. But I wonder if there's some tricks I could pull.
posted by cortex at 10:52 AM on January 14, 2014


That Skyrim Illusionist story is a work of art. Thanks for posting this.
posted by Rock Steady at 11:27 AM on January 14, 2014


It's funny. Given the option to complete a game non-violently, I'll do my best to take it. If it's 2D I'm generally fine with wholesale pixel slaughter, but start making things crawl through the Uncanny Valley and I really don't want to kill.

Here's the story of my mostly-pacififist Skyrim playthrough. Killing undead was allowed for a while, as was save-scumming to pretty much ghost everything I could. Eventually I stopped killing undead, too.

I've done a couple more characters and none of them has been a combat type. Tried the pacifist mage for a bit, abandoned that for an assassin - whose kill count through the entire Assassin's Guild quest chain was, well, exactly as many targets as it gives you. Now I'm playing it via Boot Camp and considering a stealthy succubus run as soon as I can get all the sex mods installed and working.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is "please send more games that let you stealth through them and play in third person". Because if playing a modern game no-kill is "wrong", I think I'm incapable of being "right".

except when playing SR III/IV because it's such a candy-coated funhouse that constantly reminds you It's Only A Game, It's Okay To Go Nuts.
posted by egypturnash at 4:35 PM on January 14, 2014 [3 favorites]


Not much love for the mountain climbers, ever. Fallout 3 was okay, NV was the closest I've ever seen to just letting you go places. Nearly everything else I've played is always "What do you mean I can't get purchase on that slope, I just climbed something twice as steep to get here?" and "C'mon man that rock is .5' tall you're telling me I can take multiple bullets and still sprint yet that puny rock is going to block my path now?"

I usually find holes that will let me get behind/outside the map, sometimes without immediately falling and dying, and I never report them because it's better that only a few people ever know about them than the developer going back and "fixing" them and then noone else ever gets to make that discovery again. That's on SP/COOP games mind you. Although that one skywalk on "The Edge" was a known thing to pretty much everyone and eventually our Q2 gang pretty much just learned to accept that it was going to get used from time to time.
posted by mcrandello at 12:31 AM on January 15, 2014


I love this stuff, thanks for posting. Nondrick is an absolute classic of the genre (and his Skyrim descendant wasn't half bad either).
posted by Acey at 4:57 AM on January 15, 2014 [2 favorites]


Super Mario Bros finished with 600 points (has to collect one coin in 8-1)

Super Mario Bros. finished with 500 points (takes advantage of a bug in the game, and not a little luck, to avoid that coin)
posted by JHarris at 6:22 AM on January 15, 2014


Super Mario Bros finished with 600 points (has to collect one coin in 8-1)
Wait, where/when does this happen?
posted by dhens at 4:05 PM on January 15, 2014


Aah, my memory was faulty. (I didn't watch the whole thing before linking it -- I saw it some months ago.) It wasn't a coin collection that gave him the extra 100 points but a stomped goomba, where the 500-point game uses the jump-off-wall glitch, probably achieved by laborious trial and error, to avoid earning those points.
posted by JHarris at 4:49 PM on January 15, 2014


Both tricks of course are to avoid collecting those coins in the air over that jump, which are each worth 200 points.
posted by JHarris at 8:47 PM on January 15, 2014 [1 favorite]


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