Vidya Game Pride

this is like the most IC thread on SB in years

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Every video game is for 7 year olds, Ufouria just happens to be very well designed.

I effortlessly conquered Endless Space, starting my first game on Normal and beating every successive difficulty up to the highest, switching to a new race every game, without losing (barring one loss midway where I purposely poked the system in a way I knew would probably be disastrous just to test it out). Endless Space is an easy game.

My friend and I, during the probably hundreds of hours we played of two-player Raven Shield in college, had an agreement whereby if one person died during a mission, the other would pull out his pistol and go on a rampage until death (in order to make death come quickly so the other didnā€™t have to wait interminably). I won many missions with my Mk23 like some kind of John Wick death god. But even better, one day I was playing with an M60. The M60 in Raven Shield is a joke weapon, its battlefield uses have no application in a CQB situation, RS maps literally arenā€™t even long enough to make its range and power advantage worth anything. My buddy died almost instantly. For the rest of the level, I literally held down sprint and held down the trigger, pausing only to reload. I opened doors by shredding them with 7.62mm rounds. I killed something like 25 or 30 guys of the 40 total on the level.

This sounds yawnworthy in like a CoD context, but if youā€™ve ever played a Rainbow Six game you know that this is stars aligning, a crowning life achievement. I lived as John Matrix and touched Valhalla.

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this sort of reminds me of the time me and my friend tried to co-op all of the original Halo on legendary with the stipulation that we would never be allowed to stop walking forward for any reason. we cameā€¦a lot closer to beating it than should have been possible. we couldnā€™t get past some bridge.

I played through all of Protostar when I was a child

I find this game incomprehensible as an adult

Thatā€™s the basic ship interface. I donā€™t know how I figured out what anything did when I was young, but I managed it. Children arenā€™t good at anything but have endless reserves of patience for figuring stuff out.

I just canā€™t be bothered to solve this kind of game anymore (Iā€™m full of shit because Iā€™m literally playing Darklands right now, PS should I make a Dark Selectlands thread where I fill my party with selectbutton posters and play an ironman game?)

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Yes, this is A Thing on the forums right now and it is actually the Greatest Thing.

Oh! That reminds me that on the first Left 4 Dead, my regular play group got crushingly good at Versus against randos (not even close to good against actual competition teams though). So we changed all our Steam names and icons to rice-burner car culture Fast & Furious stuff (I was Type R, my buddy was V-Dubs, etc) and resolved to run through every level without stopping ever. We also played on alltalk servers and had car-sound soundboards and would play loud RRRRKK sounds as we went around corners and nnnnNNNNROOOOOWWWwwwwwws as we juked Tanks and so forth. It worked spectacularly.

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The only video game accomplishment Iā€™ve got that I think is worthwhile is the time I finally 1CCā€™d Ikaruga. Took about a hundred hours but ended up with a solid score of about 26 million, was quite the journey.

Inspired by Chun-Li I did tabata sets of roundhouse kicks, made it up to 19 kicks in each 20 second interval.

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I found a minus world in the NES rygar and it was the coolest thing Iā€™ve ever done probably

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My best expert-level Minesweeper score would have placed second in the 2007 Minesweeper World Championship.

Then I switched to a touchpad and lost my skills forever.

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itt I learned that there was a 2007 minesweeper world championship

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Itā€™s a well-designed metrovania in an open environment in which you switch between different characters with unique abilities and fight charming bosses. I remember the bosses being pretty straightforward, so I guess it would be cooler if they were, like, Zelda bosses with a trick to them or something.

But basically, itā€™s a good game in a genre that was pretty rare until the indie game boom of the last decade (and is still relatively rare).

Iā€™m not really sure why the blue skies feel is a negative. Obviously a matter of taste, but I probably prefer ā€œkiddieā€ appeal to just about every other established video game aesthetic. Like I said, with a default Easy Mode, Gimmick! would be in the kiddie game category along with Kirbie or Starfy.

Completed every damn thing in F-Zero GX. Beating the mission where you had to outrun a self destruct timer was probably my proudest achievement there.

I played a 1v1v1 Starcraft game with my friend and a rando, but we secretly allied to beat the guy because we were assholes. He figured it out early on and whipped us entirely. It was pretty amazing, if not exactly a proud moment.

Mario Kart Double Dash had a final GP mode where you had to go through every single course in the game in a row. I was on the last course and pretty solidly in first place overall. I did the math and determined that I would win if I got any place except for last. I had not gotten last in any race up to that point, so figured it was pretty solid. Three blue shells later, I got last and second overall.

Thatā€™s not the proud moment. The proud moment was (and continues to be) that I turned off the game and have never played it again.

I honestly think losing is better than winning.

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Halfway through, I thought this anecdote was going to be that you brilliantly realized that you should maintain second place for the entire race, so you wouldnā€™t be brought down by a blue shell.

Is that a thing that people do in Mario Kart? It probably should be, right?

This works in F-Zero GX too because the AI cheats and catches up when youā€™re the pack leader, but if you stay behind itā€™s a lot easier to just gun it at the end.

God, I would love it if high level Mario Kart play involved everyone racing to be second, to the point that they were nudging people in front of them.

I love when shit game design leads to invention.

But Iā€™m guess that in tournaments (or whatever) they just turn off the blue shells?

fucking wii-mariokart basically made it necessary to do this, and itā€™s one of the reasons why I love Sanic Kart 2, which is pretty obvious about how it wants you to fight for honors, instead of making-everyone-a-winner-mario-kart.

Halo(s) on legendary are one of the few times Iā€™ve found a higher difficulty setting rewarding. Iā€™ve soloed all of the Bungie ones on legendary and itā€™s a different game. Reach and ODST in particular feel great on legendary because theyā€™re reinforcing the narrative of desperation. Absolutely worth it and the only thing that comes to mind as far as skill goes for me.

Iā€™m also proud of cheesing Raithwallā€™s tomb in FFXII to auto-level my party but thatā€™s not quite the accomplishment.

Oh hey: hereā€™s something.

Basically as soon as the Mario vs. Airman Hack came out, I put it on my PSP emulator, stayed home from all my college classes that day, and kept playing until I had muscle-memorized how to beat it without save states.

I was pretty proud of this, because at the time, the only videos online of people beating it involved completely abusing save states; and I only used one in the entire process of learning the game. After that, I would pull it out when I had a minute or two and enjoy the flow state of beating it. I even discovered that as you beat it successively it seems to turn the clock speed up or something? Enemies move faster, so the MegaMan flying things tend to pile up, and you have to vary your jump pattern to land on the floating platforms. By the sixth play-through, you have to make some leaps of faith.

To this day, Mario vs. Airman Hack is one of my favorite games, and it inspired a fascination with the idea of something that Iā€™m going to call ā€œcounter-design.ā€ I really like the idea of designing a game so that the player characterā€™s skill set is not perfectly matched to the situation. Instead of their jumps perfectly clearing a gorge, they tend to go a little too high and a little too long. There gun is stuck on spread shot, but the enemies never attack in that pattern, forcing you to do weird things to line up the shot. You have a grappling hook, but there arenā€™t any platforms that are particularly high. Basically, I think it would be cool to play a game where youā€™re stranded on an alien world that is not designed for you to traverse it. Thatā€™s what makes it alien. Youā€™d incorporate ā€œbadā€ design tropes, but employ them in such a way that they could only be intentionalā€“Thelonious Monk style.

Anyway.

Yeah.

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