Best? Worst? Who cares about trifling things like that. What’s the weirdest game you’ve ever played.
Feel free to define weird anyway you feel is convenient and any type of game you want.
I had to think long and hard for the weirdest game I’ve ever played. There’s lots of games with weird premises but for the actual “Huh?” factor in the game mechanics I have to pick Captain Blood where you are hunting down rogue clones of your self and trying to communicate with alien species through a linguistic icon board. The complication is that different aliens have different views of what the icons mean. I can’t think of another game where linguistics and anthropology (of a kind) were major factors in the game.
And on weird premises they don’t get any weirder than Devil Bunny Needs a Ham. To quote the text of the game description:
Linger in Shadows for the PS3. It’s… weird. I’m not even sure it really qualifies as a game, per se, more like a semi-interactive movie-ish thing. You have to figure out for yourself what the controller does in the context of this program. There are gorgeous but menacing images, and… well, I’m at a loss to explain it further. There’s a chunk of it here (the first quarter or so is the credits, then the images really start up), and if you think it looks neat and you have a PS3 with access to the PlayStation Network, it might be worth the $3.
I don’t know if this counts, but some buddies and I used to pull this at parties back in the day. We stole this from Bang the Drum Slowly, a movie starring Robert DiNiro as baseball player with a terminal illness … but I digress.
The name of the game is TEGWAR, which stands for The Exciting Game Without Any Rules. What you do is you get a few people who know about TEGWAR and you sit down at the table and just start making shit up.
“Three cards for you, one for me, and ooops, that’s a four of spades, that’s a bauer. That means you have to be the left Queen-Guard for two rounds, unless of course you’d prefer to sacrifice a pawn card … then you’ll just have to deal with the fact that your all your kings will only be worth 32 points on even rounds. Your turn to draw two, provided you’ve discarded at least one of your fitzbinders already.”
You ask people to sit in and play, but you aren’t allowed to tell them how to play … only that one has to learn as one goes. The beauty of it is twofold … one, obviously, the people who try to make sense of the rules will be eternally baffled until … two, they get it and become “in on it” at which point it’s time to rope in another of the uninitiated.
Well, Psychonauts is the weirdest game, especially the level that takes place inside the mind of a mentally disturbed Milkman.
I nominated that for best level of all time, and pretty much see it as one of the weirdest as well. Basically, the chaotic mind of the Milkman consists of a warped neighborhood filled with G-men that have assumed various community roles, such as baking pies and working on the sewers.
To finish the level, one must run around the neighborhood and collect objects that let you fit in with various community roles and gain further access to the level.
It’s more confusing than it sounds and way weirder.
Uhhh, yeah so I’m a Cardinal, but I really can’t see why one would play that game with water.
As far as strangest game that actually has rules, Mao comes to mind. It starts out to the uninitiated as a game with everything made up, but it really isn’t. There are rules, and they can be discovered.
There are also umpteen variations out there, so usually those who played before need to come to some agreement on the rules so that consistency is enforced, at least for that given play of the game.
Psychonauts has been mentioned already. But I’ll also add Killer7. It’s an … interesting game, with some very odd visuals, intriguing plot, and just some out and out bizarro moments. I actually really enjoyed it and it’s a game that sticks with you.
I can’t help but notice returning to this thread that Katamari Damacy has not even rated a mention. I can only take this to mean that the game is perfectly normal, something which validates my worldview.
FWIW, I never finished Bad Day on the Midway myself.
Sure, Yume Nikki is a mentally disturbed girl’s journey through her own dreams. You travel through places like: The Eye Room, an endless void filled with disembodied eyes, hands, and eyes on hands. The Musical Tiles Room, another endless void, filled giant floating bacterial like shapes, and tiles that make unusual sounds. The Neon Room, a series of rooms and hallways featuring Incan monkey gods of various sizes, done entirely in neon. The Earthbound Room, a large area that resembles the world map of the original earthbound game. I think
You also collect effects like the knife, bicycle, poop hair, and the stoplight, which turns you into a stoplight.
Yume Nikki is almost entirely about exploration, with very little in the way of plot… or sense.
Yep, it’s free. Getting it in English is a bit harder… let me look…
Here. Just follow the download link. Yume Nikki is a bit disturbing, so I wouldn’t play it this late at night. Well, unless you like that sort of thing.
At summer (nerd) camp we constantly played a game called Ha! You played Ha! by getting a group of people together and laying down on the ground, preferably on grass outside. Person 2 placed their head on person 1’s stomach. Person 3 placed their head on person 2’s stomach, and so on. Person 1 said “Ha!” Person 2 said “Ha!” And so on, until someone actually laughed.
We also played Calvinball, from Calvin & Hobbes. About twenty 14-year-olds, two counselors, a big open field, and two enormous sacks of Sporting Goods, assorted.
I have also played this turn-based card-based game in which you sack Troy.
