What are some unorthodox ways of playing video games?

The Game Room
1

Of course, there’s speedrunning, and even those who play Oblivion as if it were real life.

One thing I thought of was trying to complete one of the GTA/Saints Row games without breaking the law…only killing someone, stealing etc. when the mission requires it, but otherwise – stopping at red lights, not breaking the speed limits etc.

Or how about finishing Ninja Gaiden black on “Master Ninja” difficulty with nothing but the wooden sword? (no, I haven’t…yet.)

Does anyone else do crazy stuff like this?

2

Sequence Breaking which is using glitches or tricks in order to access shortcuts and play the game out of order. Castlevania Symphony of the Night has a number of these. You can reach the ballroom and thus the Mist spell as soon as you get the wolf spell. You normally need the double jump to access the entrance in the upper left corner of the clock room, but the wolf can bounce off the candle and do the second jump that way. There, you just saved an hour. After you have the mist, you can immediately go after the bat spell, which is in a section of the library which ALSO requires the double jump…unless you use that same wolf bounce trick with a flying book to get to that ledge.

However; should you skip that whole section of the game, it will freeze if you later try to enter the door between the church and the lab backwards, due to Alucard being on the wrong side of the screen when a cut scene with Maria is supposed to trigger.

3

Different controllers. Some guys manage to get a Wii controller to work for some PC games, such as Trine.

Sequence breaking examples: Completing Mirrorwind in ten minutes, completing Super Mario 3 in ten minutes etc.

Variants: Was popular in the days of Diablo I and Diablo II. Basically, you impose certain conditions on your play-through. Ironman was popular, where you cannot buy any items (even healing/mana potions) and you can only use what you can find as loot. “Naked” characters are also another challenging variant, where you are forbidden to equip any item at all.

There are also ‘variant classes’, which restricts what equipment/skills you can use for a character. For example, the Venomancer is a Nercmancer restricted to posion skills and so on. There is the Pacifist Paladin which can only using healing/buffing auras. Or the Melee Soceress, the Singing Barbarain (good days, those).

4

Back in the days of Thief, one popular way of playing the game was called “Lytha style” (for the player who popularized it) : steal every single bit of loot, without being seen once. Do not steal keys from the guards, do not kill the guards, do not bop the guards’ heads. Close every door behind you, do not move any object, do no douse a single torch, don’t use moss arrows etc… If you have to use broadhead arrows as noise distractions, pick 'em up later. Essentially, leave the level exactly as it was, except all the cash is gone. Very difficult in the later stages.

I don’t recall what Lytha’s zombie policy was. They scared the holy bejeezus out of me, so I eradicated them all ASAP. Yes, I know, you could outwalk them. Still.

5

I enjoy trying to play party-based RPGs with one character. It’s possible to play through Baldur’s Gate II with just a mage, though it gets very repetitive very quickly.

I play Oblivion and Fallout 3 without using the fast-travel option. It makes the games a lot more immersive, IMO, you find thing you might otherwise have missed.

In Diablo 2 there were people who played through the game using only Wirt’s leg as a weapon.

6

I’ve tried to play GTA: Chinatown Wars without committing any crimes, but so far that hasn’t worked out. Actually, in all seriousness, I’ve been unable to drive any distance down the street without having the cops on me.

7

My brother and his girlfriend liked play Super Mario Galaxy together, one moving Mario with the nunchuk and the other doing the jumping, attacking, etc with the Wiimote.

8

Came here to post this. Damn, I remember the days on the Thief boards. You could pickpocket though - a lot of loot was only obtainable by pickpocketing, and some keys as well. You just couldn’t raise the alarm level of the victim.

9

In Mother 3, some people have taken to playing through the entire game with just one character, using the debug room. Solo Flint challenge (spoilers!).

There’s also the game-breaking Danger Mario set-up in Paper Mario where you take advantage of the guy that lets you decrease your HP in exchange for other stats, and the various Power Rush badges that boost your attack at low HP. With such low HP you pretty much have to win in one turn, but with enough badges, as shown in the video, that shouldn’t be a problem.

10

The speedrunners make frequent use of sequence breaking. I find it fascinating to see how a game’s AI responds to an unexpected state.

Not quite sequence breaking, but I found this comment hilarious: it’s from a review of trying to get Oblivion to run on Vista:

11

We have used a Dance Dance Revolution mat instead of hand-held controller to ply some ps2 games. It hs to be gme tht only uses those buttons, but is a great workout.

12

Some more craziness from the arcade.

Dual wield 2 guns at House of the Dead 2 at the arcade

Dual wield 2 machine-guns at House of the Dead 4 at the arcade (saw this myself once. The guy won the game on one credit).

Playing 2-players at Ikargura when you are only one person (video here)

13

The roguelike that Diablo and Diablo 2 were based on, NetHack and its clones, had a whole range of ironman-type optional ways of winning the game more difficult (as if NetHack and SLASH’EM weren’t difficult enough):

Atheist: win without praying to the gods or sacrificing a single item (except for the amulet in NetHack, which you had to sacrifice to win)
Meatless/vegetarian: win without eating a corpse or other meat item. Particularly difficult because eating certain corpses allowed your character to gain special resistances
Foodless: win without eating, only “feeding” yourself with scrolls or potions of food. Damn near impossible.
Drinkless: win without drinking a potion
Kill nothing: win without killing any creature, even by accident
Kill everything: kill every creature or person you see, even those who are neutral or friendly to you. Better hope you don’t see a shopkeeper on level 1.
Wear/wield nothing: win without ever wearing or wielding an item. Only really possible with the Monk class, but even then it’s very hard to go without specific resistances
Ironman: Never go back up a set of stairs, except after reaching the bottom of the dungeon…and after that point, never going back down the stairs
Powerman: Everytime you see a set of stairs, you have to go down it
Hawaiianman: Win as a Tourist, wearing only the Hawaiian shirt as armor
Karma-deprived: set the game clock so that it’s always on a new moon. Bad luck does bad things to you…

I’m sure there’s more where those came from, but those give you an idea of the complexity of different ways to play NetHack.

14

How could I forget to mention doing a swordless playthrough of the original Zelda? I first tried this years before there were videos of it on the internet. It’s even possible to BEAT the game without ever getting the sword, because the magic wand will also double as a white sword (before you get the wand, you need to be really good with bombs and the bow&arrow) and there’s a glitch where if you use the potion right as you enter Ganon’s room, it will skip the battle completely.

A less extreme version of this is beating Zelda with only the wooden sword. I’m scratching my head here as to why, but I think there’s a reason that you HAVE to get the sword upgraded by the dwarves in order to beat Zelda 3, but you can still stick with the green armor in both 1 & 3.

15

I’ve played just about every wild character concept conceivable in Diablo II, including the singing barb (only attack being yelling at people; you basically end up being limited by how fast you can digest mana potions, since you’re continually drinking them), melee sorc (do it right, with really good gear, and you can do an average of over 30k damage per hit, at five hits per second) and John Henry (paladin who never uses any attack skill except Sacrifice, and uses the Steeldriver as his weapon). I must admit, though, that I’ve never yet (and probably never will) run Irene the Infirm.

I’ve also done a variety of self-imposed restrictions in the original Final Fantasy, including but not limited to never grinding, and playing with a party of four White Mages. I also always refuse to let my party members’ XP get out of synch, which means that if anyone dies, I either run from everything until I have a chance to res them, or I reload.

In Civilization, one popular limitation is the One City Challenge: You’re only allowed to ever build or otherwise control one city, for the entire game. It’s actually easier than you’d think, provided you choose the right victory condition, and it goes a lot quicker than a regular game. Another restriction is Always War, where you have to immediately declare war with everyone you meet, and never make peace, though I’ve never done that one.

In good old Minesweeper, I usually either don’t mark any mines at all, or mark all mines and clear spaces only by using the left-right-click “clear all around this space” function.

Finally, there’s a classic DOS-era game called Sherlock that I play a lot. It’s basically those logic puzzles with clues like “The man who owns the dog lives in the house next to the violin player”, but in a standardized form and with randomly-generated puzzles. After you’re done with a clue, you can right-click it to make that clue disappear, so as to reduce clutter. Well, I restrict myself to never actually using information from a clue until after I’ve disappeared it, to force myself to remember them.

16

Warning, very teeny minor spoilage for KotOR, for something fun that happens after the first world you start on. (The game would suck if this didn’t happen.)

In Knights of the Old Republic, you start the game as a grunt. You’re a level 1 Republic soldier, or a ‘scoundrel’ type, or… something else that I can’t recall, but it’s Republic-centered. You fight your way through a ship in what is the game’s tutorial mode, including how to level up. Doing the level-up is required to proceed. Finally you get off the ship and onto a planet, you meet more helpers, and you get out of there.

Big surprise (spoiler!), you’re Strong in the Force and even though you’re an adult, the Jedi Council decides that times are desperate enough, you should be trained as a Jedi to help battle the Sith menace. So you level up and go to train - as a dual-class ‘scrub’ (whatever it was you started as, Republic dude or scoundrel) and… level 1 Jedi. :smack:

By the end of the game, I think the level cap is 20 combined levels. You’ve probably blown 7 on whatever it was before you became Jedi-fied, which blocks you from some hardcore Jedi power.

I’m sure other people have done this, but on my second or so playthrough, I decided - why level up? Oh sure, there’s the one required time where you have to do level 2 during the tutorial, but otherwise, you can save them! You don’t get more health points, skills, etc., if you don’t level, but with judicious use of your other companions as [del]human shields[/del] your major character, with your intentionally-weakened main character hanging out in back, behind corners, sniping with a laser pistol (and the advantage that if one character survives a fight, your party comes back ‘from unconsciousness’ afterwards) - you can actually make it to the point where you become a Jedi without going past level 2, and dump all your level-ups into being a Jedi. :smiley:

17

Apparently it’s possible to play World of Warcraft without killing anything, just doing messenger and “pick stuff up off the ground” quests.

18

In RPGs I often like doing single character runs. Where you only have one character in your party(in a game where you typically have more, of course) or always leave all but one character dead if the game doesn’t let you customize your party to that extent.

There’s low level games where you try to gain as few XP as possible throughout a game. In some of the Final Fantasy games it’s possible to gain no levels all the way through.

There’s all sorts of challenges and odd play styles specific to certain games. In Super Metroid, for example, you can do a no suit upgrade run where you grab neither the Varia or Gravity suits.

19

There is any other way to play minesweeper? :wink:

I did a knock-every-enemy-unconscious - run in Deus Ex once. The Commandos and MIBs made that a little interesting. And I carried an unconscious Simons around with me to the end.

20

You can also duel wield two Wii remotes and play two player by yourself in House of the Dead: Overkill and Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles.