|
I had well over 300 hours into Crusader Kings 2 when I found out you could merge troop transports, I had previously been dragging individual stacks into whatever fleet levies my vassals could provide individually. It was very tedious, albeit realistically frustrating for the era.
|
#
?
Aug 25, 2022 05:03
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 3, 2024 15:42 |
|
|
FlatOut 2 - play online with friends, everyone chooses Flatmobiles, we choose the city level with the giant straightway drainage area, and joust at one another so fast that we go airborne, trying to collide midair. Every time we did, everyone wins. Monster Truck Madness - I'd spend weeks at a time on the one level in the demo just completely ignoring the race and seeing how many of the mountains surrounding the map I could drive to the top of. Dinopark Tycoon - My attempts to seriously play this were few and far between, and given what I now understand of the game's difficulty balance it's unsurprising I never got anywhere. But I would spend inordinate amounts of time in the "buy food" menu where you can squash passing flies between the pages of the menu by flipping them while a fly is overhead. cartoon_splort_sfx.wav was just the funniest poo poo in the universe to me. Minecraft - even to this day, for a game I have spent untold thousands of hours in, I have never once been to The End. I never bothered to look up how and never gave a poo poo. It just does not interest me. To me it is a sandbox exploration/building game with light survival elements and any stinky progression beyond diamond gear and The Hell Dimension Used For Fast Travel (I'm already not overly fond of the Nether) is entirely missing the point of the original design doc. ...That said, I've also poured entirely too much time into multiple factory and automation-themed modpacks with explicit progression systems, so 
|
|
#
?
Aug 25, 2022 07:03
|
|
|
I'd only play The World Ends with You with a friend, so that one person could hold the stylus, and the other does the buttons. I'm not actually sure how else you would ever beat that game, but I'm sure it wasn't intended. I was too embarassed to talk to the DS in Nintendogs so I'd softly whisper to the dog in secret parts of the house, hidden away. When I played Guess Who with my mam, we would guess the other characters without any reference to their physical appearance, like 'does this character look like they would be interested in space' etc.
|
|
#
?
Aug 25, 2022 07:07
|
|
|
MonkeyforaHead posted:Monster Truck Madness - I'd spend weeks at a time on the one level in the demo just completely ignoring the race and seeing how many of the mountains surrounding the map I could drive to the top of. Demos versions of games are a whole 'nother source of anecdotes! Two that come to mind for me are BF1942 demo Wake Island, people played that like mad and even after the game came out there were demo-only servers and an active community of players. SimTower demo had a short tutorial then a timed freeplay mode before the game quit itself. I would play like mad trying to get as high as possible before the game ended.
|
|
#
?
Aug 25, 2022 07:55
|
|
|
I kind of played Ultima III in sync with my older brother. I was too young to really "get" the overall story and structure, but I did figure out the fighting. So he would do quests and story things and I would just get in fights and kill monsters. We didn't watch each other play or anything, just would do it completely separate on the same save.
|
|
#
?
Aug 25, 2022 18:53
|
|
|
When I was a kid I had a bad computer with no graphics card, so I played red alert 2 at about 1 frame every 2 seconds. For hours.
|
|
#
?
Aug 25, 2022 19:23
|
|
|
When I was really young I played with controllers like they had accelerometers in them. Every jump involved almost hitting myself in the face.
|
|
#
?
Aug 25, 2022 19:58
|
|
|
caleb posted:When I was really young I played with controllers like they had accelerometers in them. Every jump involved almost hitting myself in the face. I still do this, if I am really into a game or stressing out about a fight. Boss is at 5% health on my 20th attempt? You bet I am juking and yanking on the controller like it gives me extra invincibility frames. When I was really young, I would play Tetris on the NES as a color sorting games. The pieces came in 3 different colors, and so all the J and S blocks would go to the left, all the Z and L blocks would go to the right, and Ts, Os, and Is would go in the center. Obviously I would never clear any lines and would lose after 20 or 30 drops, but then I would start a new game and stack 'em back up.
|
|
#
?
Aug 25, 2022 20:15
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:When I was a kid I had a bad computer with no graphics card, so I played red alert 2 at about 1 frame every 2 seconds. For hours. You've reminded me this is pretty much how I initially experienced both SNES and GBA emulation. To this day Wario Land 4 still seems like it's running weirdly fast when I dig it out to play it. On a similar note the desktop I was using either during or after that period had a horrible habit of randomly IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL bluescreening. One of the few things I really do not miss about the WinXP era, as it was basically the "an error has occurred" of those days and could be a very simple fix, or something completely undiagnosable. In my case the latter, other than it was probably some weird driver conflict with my GPU and some other mandatory piece of hardware, neither of which could I afford to replace even if I could identify the problem. It could trip on me once in a blue moon while just sitting idle, like I'd get up for a drink and come back to a freshly rebooted desktop, but it would massively increase in frequency while playing anything that made use of hardware acceleration. Usually. I could get 2 minutes of playtime, more commonly ~45, or on rare occasions, maybe 3-4 hours, but eventually it'd slap me in the face again. I still remember getting all the way through the campaign of GTA:SA and then, after finally beating the anal prolapse of a final mission, it of course conked out on me during the outro cutscene and didn't save my progress so I got to do that all over again. That machine was, of course, extra nightmarish whenever I was working on any creative projects but it managed to instill in me the habit of saving regularly, and the funny thing is, when I finally got a desktop without those issues years later, I discovered that my average session time with most games shortened dramatically. Turns out the experience of fighting through random BSODs to play a game and having no other choice was actually weirdly motivating as a challenge to work through and without that, it was like, "Huh, yep, I can just... play the game. On its own terms. For however long I want. ...Wow this is dull." I think that stupid machine broke my brain. Arbetor posted:When I was really young, I would play Tetris on the NES as a color sorting games. The pieces came in 3 different colors, and so all the J and S blocks would go to the left, all the Z and L blocks would go to the right, and Ts, Os, and Is would go in the center. Obviously I would never clear any lines and would lose after 20 or 30 drops, but then I would start a new game and stack 'em back up. I remember multiple shopping malls having original brick Game Boys running Tetris on them in weirdly random places, which was my first Dumb Child Experience with the game, and not understanding whatsoever what the goal was. Stack blocks, they eventually stack to the top, game bleats at me and I lose. Try again, same thing. I didn't think I liked Tetris. Finally learned how it worked some time later with the Windows 3.1 port, but was never any good at it at all. MonkeyforaHead fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Aug 25, 2022 |
|
#
?
Aug 25, 2022 21:33
|
|
|
Oh yes for the first couple of computers I owned they all crashed a bunch, I think they had bad memory or something, the first time I got a computer that didn't bluescreen randomly was an awakening.
|
|
#
?
Aug 25, 2022 21:41
|
|
|
MonkeyforaHead posted:You've reminded me this is pretty much how I initially experienced both SNES and GBA emulation. To this day Wario Land 4 still seems like it's running weirdly fast when I dig it out to play it. I can relate to this, a family member put an SNES emulator with a bunch of games on my computer when I was like 7 or 8 or something I was still able to play a lot of SNES classics despite only having an N64. They ran terribly on my computer (in particular, Yoshi’s island running at its correct frame rate just looks wrong to me) but I was able to make it through them anyway, and many of them remain some of my favorite games. I really overused savestates, though. I saved constantly, even multiple times per battle in RPGs. These days I try to avoid overly relying on savestates or similar systems because I find if use them too much I start playing worse and having less fun, but back then I didn’t care. Another weird thing I did: when I played super Mario sunshine I would put a lot effort into cleaning up the goo, well beyond what the game actually expected you to do. I just found it satisfying for some reason, like some kind of 2002 powerwash simulator (I have not actually played powerwash simulator). Zinkraptor fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Aug 25, 2022 |
|
#
?
Aug 25, 2022 22:04
|
|
|
Zinkraptor posted:Another weird thing I did: when I played super Mario sunshine I would put a lot effort into cleaning up the goo, well beyond what the game actually expected you to do. I just found it satisfying for some reason, like some kind of 2002 powerwash simulator (I have not actually played powerwash simulator). Yes! This was me too! I was actually really disappointed with the game because I wanted it to be more about cleaning up goop and less about demanding platforming.
|
|
#
?
Aug 25, 2022 22:11
|
|
|
It's not strictly games related but I also used to have a problem where I would chew the wire on my controller while I was playing videogames. So all my controllers had this frayed bit at the top of the wire like I had very weirdly specific mice. I broke a couple but some of them hit an equilibrium where I would stop doing it because every time I tried I electrocuted my teeth.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2022 01:11
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:It's not strictly games related but I also used to have a problem where I would chew the wire on my controller while I was playing videogames. So all my controllers had this frayed bit at the top of the wire like I had very weirdly specific mice. i had totally forgotten that i did this until i read your post. wtf
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2022 03:19
|
|
|
MonkeyforaHead posted:You've reminded me this is pretty much how I initially experienced both SNES and GBA emulation. To this day Wario Land 4 still seems like it's running weirdly fast when I dig it out to play it. Megaman Battle Network 3's Internet theme still to this day sounds oddly upbeat instead of a proto-vaporwave tune.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2022 05:53
|
|
|
An old racing game Slicks and Slide had a 4 player mode, everyone on the same keyboard. The logistics of both reaching the keyboard and seeing the screen were a bit challenging. Usually someone had to sit on the floor and peek under someone else's arm while the one using the arrow keys tried to use their left hand.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2022 06:11
|
|
|
Like others, I used Morrowind to steal houses from other people, but also used the editing tools to create my own. It was great how you could have a Narnia style thing where any sized door could open up to a much larger space, and could be placed anywhere, and also act as a hub to fast travel around the world. In the game Motorcross Madness, I would just drive to the border of the level because the invisible barrier would launch you back toward the middle. It was funny  . I don't think I ever tried to play the game properly.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIzR-Rwiqg8&t=147s - Turok 2, I never played the game properly, just used the all weapons and level unlock cheats. It was a fun game to share with friends and giggle at the N64 quality violence. - Future Cop LAPD had a story mode, but I never played it beyond the first couple of levels, instead I just played the tower defense mode where you have to stop enemy tanks getting inside your base. - Despite the rarity and popularity of certain pokemon cards, I would just trade for things I personally liked the look of. I think I traded a Charizard for this Abra. I also traded something else for the pokemon center support card, which healed them during a turn or something, because I wanted my pokemon to have a place to rest. The cards were each individual toys to me represented by pictures, and not part of a game.  - I had a similar experience with WH40k minis. They were toys, not part of an actual game, though I know a lot of people who buy them don't ever play the actual game. As a child I couldn't be screwed doing all of the work to make them look as good as the advertising, and they were so much more expensive. TheMostFrench fucked around with this message at 09:42 on Aug 26, 2022 |
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2022 09:11
|
|
|
I would skip every random encounter in FF games, unintentionally making the games harder so I had to come up with cheese strats to get through bosses or grind to make up for lost exp.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2022 17:50
|
|
|
I once played final fantasy 7 and not only I did that, I stopped to write about the game, making socio-political comments about it, for five loving years.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2022 19:40
|
|
|
Not a particular game, but when I was a kid, I had a Chinese famicom clone (official NES wasn't really a thing in eastern europe, but rather clones, like Russian Dendy, Chinese Zhiliton and Subor and such). Being a PC/arcade gamer, I never figured out gamepad, so instead of pressing A & B buttons on the right side with my thumb like a normie, I kept index and middle finger on them, sort of like holding a computer mouse. It worked quite well, really. I still do this, whenever I play on some console, although it makes shoulder/trigger buttons hard to use. E: Also, I was the rear end in a top hat that always dug into the ground for half of the game whenever I played Worms! with my friends. And then used grenades with pinpoint, inhuman accuracy. I'm totally aware that I will go to hell for this. Woohoo fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Aug 26, 2022 |
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2022 23:20
|
|
|
Amongst all the other peripherals and other junk made for the NES, there was actually a plastic tray you could slot the controller into in order to make it a little more comfortable to use it in exactly that sort of way. So clearly somebody else had the same inclination.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2022 23:27
|
|
|
In Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4, particularly in the games we were clearly losing, I would devote the entire match towards taking a jeep, finding whatever hill miles away from the objectives that every sniper on the enemy team would spend the whole round lying down on, and start to butcher those fuckers. If they came back, so would I. I definitely did it less in BF1 (the last in the series I've played) I guess because the map design made them less egregious and because the jeeps were harder to come by?
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2022 00:10
|
|
|
WaltherFeng posted:I would skip every random encounter in FF games, unintentionally making the games harder so I had to come up with cheese strats to get through bosses or grind to make up for lost exp. Oh god, THAT was what I was forgetting. On my first go through Mario RPG I avoided every battle I possibly could because I did not whatsoever understand the concept of exp grinding or character levels. The bosses were a loving nightmare that I often only managed to get through by practicing the Super Jump move until I got good enough at it to legitimately hit the maximum of 100 jumps.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2022 00:18
|
|
|
MonkeyforaHead posted:Minecraft - even to this day, for a game I have spent untold thousands of hours in, I have never once been to The End. I never bothered to look up how and never gave a poo poo. It just does not interest me. To me it is a sandbox exploration/building game with light survival elements and any stinky progression beyond diamond gear and The Hell Dimension Used For Fast Travel (I'm already not overly fond of the Nether) is entirely missing the point of the original design doc. ...That said, I've also poured entirely too much time into multiple factory and automation-themed modpacks with explicit progression systems, so Oh nooo, does this mean you've never played Minecraft while having an Elytra? I hear you not wanting to "progress" or whatever, but like, Elytra is almost like a core movement feature that exists to make the movement in game bearable. Maybe cheat yourself one in because drat man, that's like playing Super Mario Bros and never pressing the B button. TheMostFrench posted:- Despite the rarity and popularity of certain pokemon cards, I would just trade for things I personally liked the look of. I think I traded a Charizard for this Abra. I also traded something else for the pokemon center support card, which healed them during a turn or something, because I wanted my pokemon to have a place to rest. The cards were each individual toys to me represented by pictures, and not part of a game. This is pretty cute, I wish I had that attitude at the time. Instead I really liked making the kind of trade's you made, in my mind not thinking of it as parts of a game but just to "catch em all" especially the rare ones. In middle school I was called into the principal's office twice over trades I made, once forcing me to untrade. Khanstant fucked around with this message at 00:55 on Aug 27, 2022 |
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2022 00:39
|
|
|
Khanstant posted:Oh nooo, does this mean you've never played Minecraft while having an Elytra? I hear you not wanting to "progress" or whatever, but like, Elytra is almost like a core movement feature that exists to make the movement in game bearable. MAybe cheat yourself one in because drat man, that's like playing Super Mario Bros and never pressing the B button. I have played an Elytrian in the Origins mod several times. The tradeoff is that I can't wear armor above chainmail quality but honestly it's worth it. I think gliding around with the knowledge that my wings are gradually wearing out simply from airtime and I only get a limited number of repairs on them that require the use of phantom membranes, would drive me batty and I'd never actually use them.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2022 01:00
|
|
|
Khanstant posted:Oh nooo, does this mean you've never played Minecraft while having an Elytra? I hear you not wanting to "progress" or whatever, but like, Elytra is almost like a core movement feature that exists to make the movement in game bearable. Maybe cheat yourself one in because drat man, that's like playing Super Mario Bros and never pressing the B button. I'm in the same boat honestly, I get too busy just building nice houses and never actually get much in the way of progression done. E: ^ also yes I am terrible for hoarding stuff with limited lifespans, even used to use mostly stone pickaxes because I couldn't be bothered to mine more iron. Yes I do have a chest in skyrim full of every potion I ever picked up and no I don't have a problem they're for later.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2022 01:45
|
|
|
I used to be a potion hoarder but I finally broke the habit in a game and no amount of security from potion stockpile feels as good as dumping on enemies using the full slew of tools. Curiously this strategy doesn't actually leave you with any fewer potions than if you had hoarded them, you go from more than you can possibly use to really, truly, more than you can use & you tried.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2022 03:18
|
|
|
Back before Steam managed installations, I would meticulously document the "perfect" way to install a game from CD, apply no-CD cracks, apply patches, a sprinkling of essential mods, then burn everything to a backup CD. Then I'd uninstall the game after testing it to make sure it worked. Then, if I felt like actually playing the game, I'd install a "clean" version of it and start playing. Installation and cracking and all that was a significant part of the hobby all on its own, since I was always on a budget, had ancient ersatz hardware, and the games were usually old. I wouldn't say this process was all that fun, but it did instill a sort of pride.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2022 07:03
|
|
|
When I was a kid playing Age of Empires 2, I used to like to give myself lots of allies who would act as a buffer and get destroyed by the AI enemies while I gradually teched up and blissfully built up my little sim city. I would really get into it in my head and type to the AI over chat and even use my speakers as a "microphone" to give "orders" to my army to head out and defend them after awhile, until at one points my parents saw me and asked me what I was doing and I had no answer.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2022 13:43
|
|
|
I somehow managed to not figure out drag selection of units in the original c&c. I selected every unit individually and moved them that way. Made it trough at least a couple of missions that way. I also refused to use the mouse to aim in Jedi Knight, moving and aiming with the arrow keys, page up and page down. Computer mice were difficult to figure out I guess
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2022 17:05
|
|
|
I dunno if this is weird or not but I'd always play multiplayer maps in advance wars against myself because I didn't really have anyone I played with.
|
|
#
?
Sep 20, 2022 19:57
|
|
|
Playing Earthsiege back at 10 or so years old. One friend would use the joystick, and control the torso/cockpit of the mech, and the other of us would use the keyboard for locomotion and systems control.
|
|
#
?
Sep 20, 2022 20:38
|
|
|
When Total War: Shogun came out, my computer could barely run the strategy mode on lowest settings, but immediately crashed if I tried to do a battle with more than a tiny handful of units involved. To work around this, I avoided most battles altogether, used autoresolve for the rest, and generally turtled until I could start building Geishas to take out rivals one dynasty at a time. It took a lot of save scumming, but people with potato computers can't be choosers.
|
|
#
?
Sep 20, 2022 21:13
|
|
|
Rogue AI Goddess posted:When Total War: Shogun came out, my computer could barely run the strategy mode on lowest settings, but immediately crashed if I tried to do a battle with more than a tiny handful of units involved. To work around this, I avoided most battles altogether, used autoresolve for the rest, and generally turtled until I could start building Geishas to take out rivals one dynasty at a time. It took a lot of save scumming, but people with potato computers can't be choosers. Wow that's a lot more resourceful than I'm used to my younger self being. I still just run through games like ds2 with no soul loss on so I can just relax with soulfind gear and level up a bunch.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2022 01:23
|
|
|
doctorfrog posted:Back before Steam managed installations, I would meticulously document the "perfect" way to install a game from CD, apply no-CD cracks, apply patches, a sprinkling of essential mods, then burn everything to a backup CD. Then I'd uninstall the game after testing it to make sure it worked. this was a PROCESS back in the day. downloading/ripping images, patches, cracks, burning the results to cdr, all painfully slow processes that could just fail midway through because ????? and our great prize was a worse and less accessible collection than was available on abandonware sites over broadband within a few short years.
|
|
#
?
Sep 25, 2022 20:21
|
|
|
I was on satellite internet even when Fallout 3 came out, it took all night to download a patch to make that poo poo halfway playable. 
|
|
#
?
Sep 25, 2022 21:57
|
|
|
chairface posted:this was a PROCESS back in the day. downloading/ripping images, patches, cracks, burning the results to cdr, all painfully slow processes that could just fail midway through because ????? Yeah, how could we know? I remember being converted away from pirating pre-broadband after downloading a game whose voice acting and music had been completely removed, and the remaining sound effects had to be converted from lossy 90's-compressed mp3's to the game's native wav files. It was an inventive way to save space, but it was worth spending the twenty bucks at Fry's to just buy the drat thing. And then find the patches and no-cd files. And then documenting and archiving it. This might have been Citizen Kabuto or something. A lot of those older games wouldn't show up online until GOG launched in 2008, though.
|
|
#
?
Sep 25, 2022 22:55
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 3, 2024 15:42 |
|
|
Fister Roboto posted:I played Warcraft and Command & Conquer as city builders. I used to play with all cheat codes available in basically every strategy game I could. I just wanted to build aesthetically pleasing bases, explore with minimal friction, and get through the story. The god mode in Starcraft/Warcraft was especially nice, but I remember just entering the movement point + casting point refill code over and over in Disciples 2, so I didn't have to wait for other players to move and just dropped strategic scale attack spells on enemy stacks over and over again so I didn't have to fight them. Probably ended up dodging like 95% of the combat, because I wanted to see what the deal with the demons was and fighting cultists was just padding to me. I also remember using noclip + god mode for Doom, Heretic, a bunch of Build Engine shooters. Wandered around the environment for a while, too young to understand half the puzzles and secrets, and then used noclip to check out all the cool hidden areas I didn't know how to access.
|
|
#
?
Sep 26, 2022 21:31
|
|
