Stolen from myself 6 months ago at https://lemmyverse.link/lemmy.zip/post/35616522
I know I remember seeing some people talk about how nice some of the environments in Hitman were, and that they’d just walk around as a tourist from time to time, treating it like a walking simulator/virtual tourism thing instead of the stealth assassination game it is. Curious about other things like that, where you play a game totally differently than it was meant to be played.
Not me, but there’s a great example of this in chess.
There’s an opening called the Bongcloud. You move the pawn in front of your king out for your first move, and then for your second move you move your king up a square. It’s memed as being the strongest opening possible, but it’s actually almost the worst 2 opening moves you can possibly make. Because modern chess does have a large online component and the current best players are young and like memes, it has been played in tournaments, which means that if you play it in an up to date chess programme the programme will name it as the Bongcloud.
A lot of people seem to think that it’s called the Bongcloud because you’d have to be stoned to play it. But almost all chess openings are named after one of three things: a person, a place, or an animal. In this case, the Bongcloud is named after a person - Lenny Bongcloud.
Lenny Bongcloud is a now-inactive user of chess.com. He would always open with the moves described above. That’s because, unbeknownst to them, Lenny wasn’t playing the same game as his opponents. They were trying to checkmate him. He was trying to walk his king to the opposite side of the board as quickly as possible. If he gets checkmated, he loses. If he gets his king to the other side of the board he counts it as a victory and resigns.
So, yeah. One of the oldest known games in the world has an opening the “official” name of which comes from a jokey alias adopted by someone who was deliberately playing the game wrong.
I knew about the Bongcloud but not that origin of the name!
remeember dueds, ghet KING LENNY, the mastir of chess to the othier side, dueds!
The Witcher 3 is just an RPG minigame you can play between rounds of Gwent.
Woman: My child! Please save my child!
Geralt: Care for a game of Gwent?
Woman: nodKingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is just a horse riding simulator in between games of Farkle. A beautiful deadly simulator.
Didn’t knights of the old republic have farkle in too? It’s a good game, and I guess just unfamiliar enough to bolt into a fantasy setting.
No it isn’t! ヽ( `д´*)ノ
Tap for spoiler
Jk, I suck at Gwent
Any game that has a fishing mechanic will be used as a fishing game.
This. So much this.
For me, the peak fishing game was Final Fantasy XV :D
Even if you don’t want it to to be…
Currently got my Sonic Adventure playthrough on pause because I can’t for the life of me catch that stupid frog in Big’s fishing mini game!
Ah yes, finally a break from this incessant combat to catch a weird fish.
(Speaking of Hades)
I spend a solid amount of time in RDR2 camping. I’ll go to town, gather some supplies, and head out in a random direction with no map.
Gather food as I go, hunt for game as I find it, craft supplies, and live off the land.
You can take multiple in-game days to get places and even better is choosing a mountain or similar in the distance and making that your destination.
You still come across plenty of side missions with this approach because of how much is going on in that game, but it feels quite genuine when you do.
I would argue this is an intended play style. They made camping and the natural world extremely detailed on purpose.
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Cyberpunk 2077 is also good for this IMO. Sometimes I deliberately avoid fast traveling and just drive to my destination to take in the sights on the way.
The driving mechanics also just feel so satisfying. Superjumping off a bike in a slide and throwing a knife, slowmo, clean headshot. Cooler than I will ever feel IRL.
I like to autopilot it so I have time to grab a beer/snack or go to the bathroom.
I haven’t really played V, but other GTA games I just treat like arcade games where I start by stealing some car and try to stay away from the cops and steal bigger/cooler shit for as long as I can without getting caught
Flying. In san andreas it was so cool, and then later in gtav I just boggled at how the old ‘fog’ trick wasn’t needed. Every time I got on, trying to steal the military jet was the first thing I’d do.
Going back a while - Monster Truck Madness 2 was a great game of exploration if you just drove off in a random direction rather than doing that silly racing stuff :-)
The maps were big, and there was no time limit, so you could just go and do your own thing … a favourite made-up mini-game was sliding around a frozen lake on the winter map.
Yes. I did this with Monster Truck Madness and still remember the opening announcer guy.
I also did this with Big Red Racing, Diddy Kong Racing, and Rallisport Challenge.
Also did this with the first Monster Truck Madness and Big Red Racing. And Motocross Madness. Seems these games were just built for that. Only had demo versions though, so just the one stage to explore.
Shareware!
Are you saying you can still find these titles?
Carmageddon was really good for it, too.
In modern gaming I’ve clocked up about 400 hours on Snowrunner, half of the game is intentionally exploring with trucks (albeit a lot slower, lol)
Ah yeah Carmageddon! They definitely encouraged exploration. I remember never winning by racing, but instead killing the other drivers.
Oh yeah, that was often the easiest way to progress.
I used to be a bit of a Carmageddon nut, I think I have original copies of all the games (1 with the Splat Pack expansion was the best for exploration) … but my old PC can’t run the latest version at more than 1fps unfortunately :-/
Have you played Mario kart world?
I haven’t, can’t say I’ve ever heard of it!
(I’ve got Mario Kart 8 on the WiiU, that’s about it!)
Haven’t played it, but the concept is being able to drive around after, between, or even during races to do exploring and side adventures
Sounds nice, provided you’re in the Nintendo ecosystem
Just Cause 3
I fire it up just to drive aound / grapple-hook float for an hour or more
I like car surfing, for the scenery.
I also enjoy firing tethers to wreck other cars as we go along, for the entertainment.
Or tow a few, that’s fun too.
In Rust you can host your own server, and if you do that on your own local network with nobody else connected, then you have a very large world, with only like a couple of things that can kill you, and you can have a very fun, laid-back, relaxing, you know, builder, simulator, survival thing.
And also Skyrim. I have been trying to complete every single side quest and every single add-on side quest that I can, while basically not advancing the game at all. My current game is easily 40 hours in, and I only recently defeated the first dragon that you can kill as part of the main quest.
The only thing with Rust is you need to pay for your own server on top of paying for the game. I want to play it, I want to try it because I like survival crafting games; but I’ve also seen and heard all the horror stories about Rust players, so I really wouldn’t want to just jump into any server
Many computers have enough spare compute power to run the server in addition to the game all on the same system.
I know I’m coming from a position of privilege because I was playing it on a 5950X with 64 gigs of RAM and a 3090, but even so, like it barely even broke a sweat.
Many games that have multiplayer and singleplayer options run singleplayer by hosting a server and then joining it.
And then you’ve got the new Battlefield 6 which requires you to wait your turn to connect to their remote server so you can pay the Singleplayer campaign.
Not me but my friend. In any game that has a crafting component they will hone in, ignore the story, and just play the crafting. If it has a marketplace they will sell their creations and basically become an NPC shopkeeper for other people.
My friend and I got into Wurm Online and we went way too hard doing this. Like to the point we managed to upset half the server (and I’m not exaggerating, there were many forum threads about us lol).
Has your friend ever tried EVE Online? I guess a better question follows: should they ever try EVE Online?
As far as I’m aware they haven’t tried EVE online. It doesn’t seem up their alley as they hate PvP but maybe I should suggest it if the crafting system is engaging.
I honestly have concerns about recommending EVE, it has changed a lot including a lot more real-money transactions.
Wurm Online, Vintage Story, Eco, and some of the Minecraft servers (typically with “civilization” or somethong in the title) are all very crafting focused games. Beware that Wurm Online is a subscription game.
If you’ve got questions let me know: I haven’t played a lot of Eco and Minecraft civs yet but I understand the basics. I have a decent chunk of hours in Wurm and Vintage Story.
Quake / Quake World was really the epitome of “not how it was intended to be played”. It introduced zigzag, wallhug and bunny jump through some clever exploitation of game mechanics, and completely changed its game play plus that of future fps games of the time. And people would just come up with stupid maps where you could do fps-parkour. I often did it myself for hours on end, just jumping around a map alone or with friends while chatting or listening to music.
A very short demo of how crazy it could get, speed indicator top right. 320 was the default movement speed.
Yeah, we can basically just put every speedrunner of every game into this topic. “Man, I love this game so much. Let’s see if I can break it so I can 100% it in under a minute!”/“This is the best shooter ever made! Let’s see if I can complete it without hurting anybody!”
Q3Defrag vids still blow my mind. I can strafe jump somewhat consistently, but then I watch stuff like the team trick jumping in the “Event Horizon” series and it’s just humbling. I tried some simpler strafe maps recently (there’s surprisingly still a couple active Defrag servers out there) but I’m still awful at it - and rusty now to boot. Couldn’t maintain speed to clear the larger hops, or when I did then I couldn’t air strafe well enough to be heading the right way for the next. Air strafing was a lot easier to do in CounterStrike & Source.
I’m pretty sure the “bhop” and “surf” maps in CS/S directly benefited from the same physics quirks, being descendants of id’s engines. I was a surf_skyworld addict for a while. Just the same it was easy to throw on some tunes and lose a few hours surfing with friends on some of the 24/7 servers, back when CS:S was in its prime.
I was a CS player first and a Quake player second. VQ3 movement never really hit me the same because of my CS background, but CPMA movement got me into defrag.
There is also a game called MomentumMod. Free on steam and it has all those quake and source engine movement minigames.
Rocket jump, bhop, defraq, surf and others. It has lobbies to play with other people and keeps leaderboards. Highly recommend checking it out when you next want to play any of these gamemodes.
Booting up the old defraq mod has its nostalgia tho, with the rabbit and all 😄
I hadn’t heard of Momentum. First video I load up has Apex’s “Just One Second” for the background music and now I’m gonna end up on a Hospital Records binge. It looks really cool. I can’t find any videos on how they handle tricksurf (maybe not implemented yet?) but I like seeing that they have intentions to support it. I just need to finally build that new gaming rig I keep putting off.
Yeah I checked the discord and they plan on supporting it but it is as the devs put it “very low priority right now so will be a while before its added”.
This is definately one of those projects I hope will bring the community together and preserve and group up people playing these more niche game modes.
But im sure there will always be the HC players that say if a record is not surfed on KSF servers in source its not considered a record.
But im not a wr player anyway so im cool with that. And the good players seem to dominate the momentum leaderboards all the same so they are definately playing momentum as well.
Forgot to mention, back then we would optimize fps for refresh rate. 120Hz CRT monitors with 120 fps constant was the sweet spot for a while (until people started playing in multitudes of 60 fps on LED-based displays). It’s entirely possible that if your fps is not optimal, you can’t clear larger gaps or gain as much momentum in QW/Q3/CPMA or similar.
I’ve never played HLDM or CS, so I’m not that familiar with derivatives in those games.
I’ve never finished FF7 because there is a snowboarding mini game that gave me SSX vibes so good I put like 15 hours into it and then stopped playing FF7. No idea what happens in the story but man that Bits and Chitz style mega arcade was fun.
I almost forgot about the storyline for FFX because I played so much blitzball.
Basically the rest of the game is all about the snowboarding game. One character does so bad at it she actually gets stabbed by another and tossed in a lake. Anyway snowboard kids for the n64 is good too
No Mans Sky exclusively in creative mode.
I don’t care for getting resources or any of that. I just want to build stuff and explore. it would be 10x better if they made building regular ships as easy as the new ones and that’s my only gripe, having to sit in a station to wait for a ship to show up with a part you want. It’s an incredibly idiotic system for creative mode.
I’d argue that that is one of the expected/intended ways to play.
New Super Mario Bros. (For the Nintendo DS), in the multiplayer battle mode.
There is a multiplayer mode where you fight over collecting stars in 6 different maps, using the main game’s mechanics and powerups.
In one of these maps, there are bullet bill launchers. One of the powerups is a mini mushroom that makes you tiny, and when you are tiny you just harmlessly bounce of enemies when you jump on them instead of killing them. That lets you ride the bullet bill, repeatedly bouncing off it. The multiplayer maps loop, so you do this indefinitely, and every time you get back to the launcher, it will add another bullet to your train.
My brother and I would deliberately avoid collecting stars, and instead try to make the longest bullet train and try to stay in the air as long as possible.
I love just driving around doing nothing in Cyberpunk 2077.
It is a beautiful map
It’s also accidentally a good trainer for motorcycle skills. Not that its physics are good. They’re not. It does have one thing that is really useful: traffic tends to pull out on you and do unpredictable things.
That makes it a pretty good simulator for training against target fixation. You tend to drive/ride towards whatever you’re looking at. When someone pulls out on you, then you will tend to look at the car and hit it. If you train yourself to look to the side, you will tend to miss it. This is a good skill for drivers, and can make the difference between life and death on motorcycles (and motorcycles pretending to be ebikes).
Most other games with a driving element don’t have cars pulling out on you a lot the way Cyberpunk 2077 does. Makes it worse as an overall game, but it does have some value.
Picking up taxi passengers in GTA V is fun. Especially when I drive them off a cliff.
I have spent days up on days of irl time looking for bigfoot in that and san Andreas.
