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Let's face it: children have no idea what they're doing. So I'm sure you can name at least one example of a time you played a videogame in a way that's completely bizarre to modern sensibilities. Or maybe you still do! Whatever,  I'll start. As a kid I used to launch skirmish games of seminal RTS Total Annhilation before bed, construct an impregnable defence, then queue up hundreds of a single unit--usually aircraft, usually T2 gunships--and go to sleep. Then I'd wake up in the morning, select my army and immediately crush the hapless AI. This wasn't something I did just once or twice either, it probably became the main way I played that game for a while. Crazy.
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Mar 18, 2021 15:40
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| # ? May 3, 2024 05:41 |
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When I was a kid, I used to intentionally land on the guys in Choplifter (C64 version). It made sense to me at the time, that way there were fewer to rescue so I could win faster...
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Mar 18, 2021 15:49
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When I was 4 yers old I solo'ed my sister's Pokemon Gold just with the Chikorita line, at the very least until the league. Pokemon is easy and that but I still can't remember how I didn't quit in frustration.
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Mar 18, 2021 16:07
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When I played Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War I would start with a 1v1 as something like... space marines vs orkz. Then after that match I would escalate it to being a 1v2, with the 1 being a new faction and the 2 being whatever faction I was playing last. Then that would escalate to 1v3, then 1v4. So on and so forth until I would lose a game. Also, I would grind like a mofo in final fantasy games until I could just kill everything holding down basic attacks, but I think everyone did that.
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Mar 18, 2021 17:11
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When I was maybe 10 or 11 I'd play Ancient Art of War, and I'd set my guys on defence with their shields up and then wait while the enemy slowly walked across the screen towards me. When they were within sword distance I'd press attack so my guys suddenly all started hacking. I'd then sit back and watch the carnage without interfering further, even if it meant I lost.
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Mar 19, 2021 02:46
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When I was a teen in high school and Twisted Metal (2?) was still new me and my friends would play to see who could jump off the edge of the map the fastest. Just over and over again.
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Mar 19, 2021 04:45
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I used to turn the music off as soon as I installed a game. I did this for years for some reason. I vaguely remember thinking something along the lines of how I might miss hearing an important game sound if I had music on.
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Mar 19, 2021 06:00
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For the games I replayed a lot as a kid I would intentionally get hit or always use a specific weapon or do objectives in the same idiosyncratic order for I don’t know, dramatic effect or something. Even for the games that offered a lot of player choice and variety, I would always try to complete it in the same exact way on every run.
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Mar 19, 2021 06:06
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I used to play FPSes with my left hand on the cursor keys instead of WASD, under the logic that I could use the numpad for jumping and other commands! I was a dumb kid.
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Mar 19, 2021 06:21
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TOOT BOOT posted:I used to turn the music off as soon as I installed a game. I did this for years for some reason. I vaguely remember thinking something along the lines of how I might miss hearing an important game sound if I had music on. I used to to that, and instead put on my own Winamp playlist. Entire games are forever connected to certain albums or musicians. Only many years later did I realize that letting a soundtrack add depth to a game could be very good.
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Mar 19, 2021 06:28
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Whenever me and my friends would play Rampage on the N64, and one of the buildings had a razor blade in it we all had to try and eat it. This was under the reasoning that eating it and shooting it would cut you a new butthole. Whoever had the most buttholes at the end of the game was the winner and was crowned butt hole king
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Mar 19, 2021 06:29
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The Kins posted:I used to play FPSes with my left hand on the cursor keys instead of WASD, under the logic that I could use the numpad for jumping and other commands! I was a dumb kid. I still do this and it works fine. Delete is jump, RShift is sprint, numpad for weapons/abilities, etc. I know one other dude who does the same and we're generally the best players in our group of gaming friends by a significant margin. Don't consider it to be a disadvantage at all.
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Mar 19, 2021 07:13
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I knew a kid that played with the NES controller upside down. Never understood how that came to be. He could beat Kirby though.
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Mar 19, 2021 07:16
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Vargs posted:I still do this and it works fine. Delete is jump, RShift is sprint, numpad for weapons/abilities, etc. I know one other dude who does the same and we're generally the best players in our group of gaming friends by a significant margin. Don't consider it to be a disadvantage at all. You should try playing against people who aren't the same friends that you're able to beat with a clear handicap
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Mar 19, 2021 08:16
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I made up a variant of N64 smash bros called "puff harvest" where you and two friends teamed up against a difficulty 1, max handicap jigglypuff, and whoever got the most killing blows at the end of 5 minutes won. Pretty fun.
The Moon Monster fucked around with this message at 11:54 on Mar 19, 2021 |
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Mar 19, 2021 11:31
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I cannot tell you how many times I played through Halo 2 doing a pistol whip challenge. There's only a few areas where you just have to use guns due to aerial shenanigans or some other reason. I think I managed to make it about a third of the way through Hard before stopping
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Mar 19, 2021 12:25
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I dunno how weird it really is but I played the entirety of Planetfall, the Infocom one, over the phone with my aunt when I was a kid. It was incredibly inefficient, shockingly.
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Mar 19, 2021 12:45
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The Moon Monster posted:I made up a variant of N64 smash bros called "puff harvest" where you and two friends teamed up against a difficulty 1, max handicap jigglypuff, and whoever got the most killing blows at the end of 5 minutes won. Pretty fun. Me and my friends did a similar idea in the Smash Bros Melee. Each person got one of the 4 Pokémon, played on the Pokémon stadium stage with all items off, except the Pokeball which was set to very high spawn. Was a total clusterfuck but a lot of fun.
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Mar 19, 2021 14:48
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I used to hold the N64 controller by both outer prongs and just painfully lean my left thumb over to the analog stick
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Mar 19, 2021 15:54
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Kite Pride Worldwide posted:I used to hold the N64 controller by both outer prongs and just painfully lean my left thumb over to the analog stick 
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Mar 19, 2021 15:55
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I used to exclusively play JRPGs with a strategy guide open making sure I did every single thing. Thank God I was dumb enough to buy the FF9 one and that broke me from the habit.
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Mar 22, 2021 15:29
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Kite Pride Worldwide posted:I used to hold the N64 controller by both outer prongs and just painfully lean my left thumb over to the analog stick Came here to post exactly this 
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Mar 23, 2021 05:02
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The claw grip.
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Mar 23, 2021 05:08
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Saint Freak posted:I used to exclusively play JRPGs with a strategy guide open making sure I did every single thing. This seems to be incredibly common and I have no idea why...
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Mar 23, 2021 05:17
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my brother and i, in smash melee, routinely set the level to that huge zelda temple and the match time to an hour and the damage to like 0.8 and turned off items so killing each other took forever. at the time we felt it led to epic battles but looking back idk why we wasted so much time that way
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Mar 23, 2021 05:18
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Canine Blues Arooo posted:This seems to be incredibly common and I have no idea why... jrpgs tend to be really long, which discourages replays, and you want to make sure you see everything on your one time through. it makes sense imo though i've broken myself of that habit
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Mar 23, 2021 05:19
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Overwatch Porn posted:jrpgs tend to be really long, which discourages replays, and you want to make sure you see everything on your one time through. it makes sense imo though i've broken myself of that habit Yeah I agree with that. Nothing more annoying than something like not rescuing Ninja on FF6 and then finding out about it later.
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Mar 23, 2021 05:47
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I just thought of one: in games with factions where you can join the pirates/bandits, I never do, because while it's probably a lot of fun, I always think of other games I played where they were an ever-present thorn in my side and go into a frothing rage of annihilation 
Mordja fucked around with this message at 20:33 on Apr 3, 2021 |
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Apr 3, 2021 20:12
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I was a big fan of the tiny skeletons your troops left in Age of Empires (probably number 2) and so I would make custom maps where my 50 elite warriors defended the walls against a map full of the most basic enemy unit and then watch the giant battle and then going back and looking over the results with a grim facination
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Apr 3, 2021 20:29
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I had a zelda: OoT 3-heart run with biggoron's sword save set aside in the shadow temple because I loved doing that 3 stafos knight series of duels in there over and over. Goldeneye showed records of where you shot enemies at the end of levels, so the existence of an "other" category meant we did a couple runs exclusively shooting dudes in the dick. I feel sure there was something else a friend and I used to do a lot in vs. mode for some other game, but I can't recall what.The Kins posted:I used to play FPSes with my left hand on the cursor keys instead of WASD, under the logic that I could use the numpad for jumping and other commands! I was a dumb kid. For WoW I wound up moving from WASD to RDFG just so I'd have a couple more pinky accessible hotkeys. Arrrthritis posted:When I played Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War I would start with a 1v1 as something like... space marines vs orkz. Then after that match I would escalate it to being a 1v2, with the 1 being a new faction and the 2 being whatever faction I was playing last. Then that would escalate to 1v3, then 1v4. So on and so forth until I would lose a game.
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Apr 3, 2021 22:01
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I played Warcraft and Command & Conquer as city builders.
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Aug 21, 2022 20:28
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I never really owned all that many RTSes, at least as a kid, but I was definitely always way more interested in the base building aspect than the competitive army murder aspect.TOOT BOOT posted:I used to turn the music off as soon as I installed a game. I did this for years for some reason. I vaguely remember thinking something along the lines of how I might miss hearing an important game sound if I had music on. I rarely if ever turn stuff completely off unless I'm outright listening to podcasts in the background or w/e, but I still glance at the sound settings in every game before I start because I have sound processing issues and games often have dismal sound mixing so I still nudge things around so it's music < sound effects < dialogue. Subtitles always on as well, of course. Saint Freak posted:I used to exclusively play JRPGs with a strategy guide open making sure I did every single thing. This was me all the time as a kid. Strategy guides were not there to help me if I got stuck, they were step by step instructions on how to play the entire game. A Let's Play in text form. So I'd sit there and dutifully follow along. Not every game, and not every time, but I was a deeply unconfident child but really good at following directions.  And to whit:exquisite tea posted:For the games I replayed a lot as a kid I would intentionally get hit or always use a specific weapon or do objectives in the same idiosyncratic order for I don’t know, dramatic effect or something. Even for the games that offered a lot of player choice and variety, I would always try to complete it in the same exact way on every run. Even after the dawn of Let's Play, I'd often get into a game thanks to one and then gravitate to the same build/gimmick/whatever I had seen in the LP. The Kins posted:I used to play FPSes with my left hand on the cursor keys instead of WASD, under the logic that I could use the numpad for jumping and other commands! I was a dumb kid. This is how I played like 2000 hours of TF2 back in the day. The numpad came in handy for Spy disguises and home/insert/etc. were bound to various voice callouts. Worked really well.
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Aug 21, 2022 20:40
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Confused as to why my thread is suddenly stickied well over a year later but I'll take it.
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Aug 21, 2022 20:57
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I think the mods have been picking out random older threads with cool premises and stickying them to spark a bit of discussion, and I think that's super cool. The one thing I can think of for this topic right now is my valuable collecting in Bethesda games... In Morrowind I had several wicker bowls full of diamonds and rubies and emeralds on a shelf by the door of my house. I thought of them as my "petty cash" drawer. And in New Vegas I filled the bathtub in my motel room with pre-war money, which I always thought looked like something out of a Tarantino movie...
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Aug 21, 2022 23:49
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I have always been a big fan of RTS from the original Starcraft (the N64 port and shortly after the PC one) and onwards. Never did it occur to my brain that I could make more than 1 barracks, 1 factory or whatever building produced units until I was like 22 and 10 years had gone by wondering why my opponents always had more units than I did.
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Aug 22, 2022 01:26
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the first time I played DOOM it was at a cousin's house on a joystick, which was badly calibrated, so the view was perpetually spinning. I thought that was just how the game was
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Aug 22, 2022 01:39
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1st: When I was a little kid at my babysitters they let me play Mario 3 and I beat it with the controller upside down. Not to be hardcore or anything stupid- I just didn't know how to hold the thing properly and babysitters I guess wanted to see how far I'd go before correcting me. When they did fix it when I wanted to play again I remember even though I was young still being startled at how much better it felt 2nd: When the twin towers got hit my teacher didn't know what to do and dug a super nintendo out of our classroom closet (I have no idea why she had one in there) and a copy of super mario kart. we were going to watch a movie but she set it up and told us just to have fun. A group of kids were doing 'winner stays loser leaves' and I was winning nonstop so this rivalry between me and the classroom began to build. Teacher came in crying and tried to tell us not to panic but we didn't give a poo poo because Mario Kart time. I remember at the time being asked how we didn't care and we just didn't understand what happened and I was too focused on trying to stay the winner. Now whenever I hear Mario Kart SNES music a part of me *has* to recall the fact that I prioritized it as a kid over caring about a terrorist attack 
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Aug 22, 2022 06:31
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I owned A Bug's Life for the PSX as a kid. For some reason, I never played the second level in it. I'd just 100% the first level over and over again. I don't know why.
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Aug 22, 2022 08:04
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papersack posted:I knew a kid that played with the NES controller upside down. Never understood how that came to be. He could beat Kirby though. Holding the NES controller at an angle to play QBert. Someone told me it was a secret tip to make him move faster or some nonsense. I thought that was pretty stupid. Then after renting the game a few times I was gifted it for Christmas. Lo and behold... It says to hold the controller at a 45 degree angle right in the manual! It didn't actually make him move faster or dodge enemies better, just the implication being it might be easier for some players. But that didn't matter. For about a year I was convinced there were magic ways to hold the controller or push buttons to make different games "play" better. I can't help but wonder if your friend and I did this for the same reason.
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Aug 22, 2022 08:55
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I played guitar hero with a controller instead of a guitar. It was incredibly expensive here in Brazil so that it was.
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Aug 22, 2022 11:12
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