Are there any games you know well enough or play frequently enough that you tend to play more often with different kinds of self-imposed challenges in place?
example: playing pokemon with only a single monster or single type of monster, or playing shin megami tensei 1 with the hero as a pacifist or with as few demons as possible.
i’m interested in hearing about ways people challenge themselves in familiar games.
playing spelunky without paying for a single item (not so much a challenge, as killing shopkeepers is just a normal playstyle), and also I go for the hell route every time (I’ve beaten olmec enough already)
playing puyo story mode without rotating pieces
final fantasy 1 with all white mages
caves of qud melee-only build
downwell spinning-arms style (you only find weapon items and shops are much more rare)
tekken 7 with only right kick (which means you can’t tech throws either)
playing puyo at all in puyo puyo tetris ranked
it’s just a tetris game
I had a thought last week about trying to play an RPG, I guess any would work, where you can you only use the last weapon or piece of gear that you picked up. Once you pick up a new one you have to equip and use it until you find another one to replace it.
I was thinking it would be neat to play a game designed around that but it would also work very well as a self-imposed challenge. So keep it in mind the next time your favorite streamer asks the chat for any ideas to make the stream interesting.
For me personally my favorite self-imposed challenge is avoiding the pedestrians in GTA games.
I’ve also tried playing Mario games without picking up any coins but that is a totally different flow than what I’m used to so I don’t really try it very often.
Just remembered one I saw in college a long time ago: Two people playing Soul Calibur 3 on PS2 but they were only allowing the right side of the controller. So they were both holding their controllers in their right hands and doing a lot of sidestepping during the fight.
Playing Football Manager with a randomly assigned team from one of the lowest playable leagues in the game, with the bare minimum of attribute points for your manager.
When we played this at a party a couple months back, all the Puyo players seemed untouchable in mixed matches.
I tend to win at this game when playing Puyo against my wife’s Tetris (and sh’s pretty frickin good at Tetris). I am middle-of-the-road at Puyo.
I think there’s this weird thing where Puyo has advantages over Tetris when neither player is master level. Specifically, if you get a good long combo, you can send like 8-10 lines at once. And it’s also this long, drawn-out counter to whatever they send.
But when you’re both incredible, Tetris wins. It’s just way faster to get garbage out there, and Puyo gets garbage dropped from the top, so it’s much harder to recover.
I love playing megaten games (esp. nocturne) without doing any fusion
Past a certain point in Megaten, demons don’t even really matter, they’re hosts carrying your best skills. It’s a bummer
But if you never fuse, every demon feels unique and you are forced to constantly change your roster and use all the little obscure status skills like Hama, Mudo, Tentarafoo. Instead of using 3 great demons with 8 powerful skills, you use 10 demons with 4 weird skills
Any new dungeon is an exciting prospect because you get new demons! You don’t recruit them as fusion food, you recruit them to immediately make them fight by your side right now
You also get to keep one weak demon for way too long because he’s the only one with Tarunda, and then when you finally use him he dies on the first round
That makes sense. I consider myself pretty damn good at single player tetris, but completely awful at any kind of vs variant, so my barometer for what was going on is all kinds of broken.
Oh yeah, that’s a bit too much for me. Definitely not a sprinter, more of a marathon/high score player.
Yeah, it’s really weird for most tetris players whose previous experience is single player marathon modes. You either have to be able to know how to do 10-combos downstacking, or be able to do a shit ton of t-spin doubles/triples back to back. Neither of these skills are typically inherent to the average tetris player, so despite that the skill ceiling is incredibly high, it can be really hard to even know how to start reaching it. It’s very possible to deflect garbage by doing a lot of b2b tetrises, which IS in most players’ lexicons, but due to garbage being balanced around your stack height, this is ultimately a much less efficient way to play as a mid-level player. You can put down the exact same number of pieces in a b2b tetris stack, or in a center-well combo stack, and the center-well is almost impossible to top out (only the middle four squares of the matrix are the kill-zone), whereas the b2b tetris stack tops out the second it hits the top of the screen.
PPT kind of inherently says “fuck you” to the average tetris player and forces you to play a completely different way than most people are accustomed to. it just demands way too much from you. but once you bite the bullet and give what it demands, you’re kind of just better than puyo.
I’m sorry for multi posting and not really saying anything
Don’t be. This is interesting stuff to someone who is not good at either Puyo or Tetris.
It’s definitely competitively viable to just do back to back tetrises, but then you’re solely reliant on speed, as you have zero leeway at the top of the field.
T-spin triples were significantly nerfed, but they’re still really powerful if you can set up a tower fast enough. They used to send as much garbage as a b2b tetris, and I think they realized what a terrible idea that was.
Combos and T-spin doubles remain efficient ways to send garbage, but combos were nerfed as well, so you really have to commit to a 3/4-wide center well. 3-wide is common, and the easiest form to combo from, but it can top out, so it really doesn’t make a difference wether you do a side well or center well. UNLESS, you build a center well that funnels from 3 to 4.
4-wide is significantly harder and requires a lot of foresight, but can’t top out until the very bottom of your stack hits the top of the screen. You can eke out a 14 combo this way, and I don’t know how much garbage that sends. These are just spitball numbers, I haven’t played PPT in ages.
Okay, so I do know how much garbage Tetris sends. I don’t know the exact numbers that Puyo sends to Tetris, HOWEVER…
If we’re going by PP2 damage numbers, a perfect 6 chain (4 puyos per chain) sends 123 damage. Okay? A 6 chain is a baby chain. I can do a 6 chain in my sleep.
A 14-combo consisting of only single-line clears sends 152 Puyo garbage.
you have to do at least a 14 combo to counter a 6-chain
4 back-to-back tetrises counters a Puyo 6-chain, if these numbers are correct.
That’s fucking ludicrous. Normal people don’t play Tetris that fast lol
So yeah, the sheer damage Tetris sends to Puyo isn’t a lot. Doing combos is really difficult and it doesn’t send a lot of damage.
HOWEVER.
Tetris always has the extreme advantage of being able to resolve and send damage AT ANY TIME. The second the Tetris player drops a piece without clearing a line, all of their stacked damage is sent over to Puyo. This hurts Puyo so much.
The time it takes Puyo to send garbage is approximately a second per chain. Puyo chains resolve very slowly. Puyo battles are all about observing the opponent and trying to predict exactly when your 2/3 chain will land in such a way that your opponent can’t react to it, or doesn’t have the right colors to pop in response. This takes a few seconds to do. Tetris can just completely ignore this resolution time and send a 2/3 chain’s worth of damage literally any moment they want. This is nerfed in PvT by allowing Puyo a significant amount of time (about enough time to drop two pieces) before the resolved damage falls as garbage, but Tetris still has a considerable amount of control over this that Puyo can never have
TL;DR Sega took a tremendous undertaking in trying to balance two completely different video games in pvp and I commend their efforts but they will never get it right. There is no middle-of-the-road way to balance it such that both average skill and high skill players can enjoy a balanced game, because gauging the skill of a Tetris player is not only significantly more difficult than gauging the skill of a puyo player, but there are significantly more ways a Tetris player can be skilled in their own game. See: Mickey’s Magical Bullshit Tetris
pistol starting in DOOM and DOOM II (e.g. playing each level from scratch, with just a pistol, 50 bullets and your fists). The original levels were designed to be beatable that way and it enforces more of a survival horror mentality. i’ve gotten through ep 1 of DOOM playing that way and i want to do eps 2 & 3 and II sometime (i wouldn’t pistol start Thy Flesh Consumed if you paid me)
i solo’d Dragon Quest IX on what i decided was my final playthrough ever. it of course entailed a lot of metal slime grinding, but it was pretty satisfying to fight the last couple bosses – i used paladin as my primary vocation so physical attacks were a joke, but there are a few mage-type endbosses and they were pretty grueling. i had to count turns to make sure my buffs wouldn’t wear off at an inopportune time. protip: max out shields asap and cycle through every job constantly to pick up those sweet skill points
Tried to solo DQIII as well but last time i did, i got hung up on Baramos. Until then it was fairly easy.
Soloing Pokemon Blue by just using your starter is so trivial it’s not even fun. The way stats scale in those games, it’s yours to lose if your level is 10+ higher than what you’re fighting. Dunno if the later games would be tougher but i’m betting no.
SL1 challenges in the Souls games are cool to me but ive only taken a serious try at DkS1, which is very fun especially if you upgrade your pyromancy a lot. i’d guess that’s probably the easiest game in the series to SL1 just because of how robust your options are
