I’m a human and I don’t even know how to deal with being buried under mountains of dirt. Remind me, was there a weapon that cleared dirt but didn’t deal damage to tanks?
Wouldn’t surprise me—that game was full of bugs.
The Riot Bomb (projectile) and Riot Blast (cone originating on your tank) both cleared dirt without hurting tanks (except indirectly, by making them fall). And lasers hurt other tanks they hit, but wouldn’t hurt the originating tank. Or you could tunnel out from under the mountain (including possibly flying tunneling: Flying was one of those many bugs you mentioned). Usually, though, I just fired off tracers while waiting for the other tanks to do it for me: They’d usually get one or two hits on my shield in the process, but they did a lot more damage to themselves.
Ah, yes—it’s all coming back to me now.
My daughters used to play Mario Cart on (Super NES?) upside down. The TV faced our couch, and so they would lay on their backs with their legs and feet over the back of the couch and their heads hanging down near the floor, happily going around the tracks, albeit a little slower than normal. I had a hard enough time staying on the tracks playing right-side up, but somehow, they managed to do it upside down. They played a LOT of Mario Cart back in the day.
On Sega Genesis Greatest hits you can unlock various extra games by completing certain tasks. One of them is completing the first level of Sonic and Tails using two players. I tried doing it by myself but I’m not that good of a player to begin with.
When I was a kid, a friend had a Sega Genesis, and his dad had taken apart controllers and wired them up to custom-built chairs w/ steering wheels and pedals for use in auto-racing and flight games. We 10-year-olds thought it was the coolest thing ever, like a real arcade racer in your living room!
We also played a bunch of other games with the chairs. Some worked better than others. Mostly, you turn right a lot.
It’s a tangent, but this thread reminds me of when you’d encounter Psycho Mantis in Metal Gear Solid.
In one of the more innovative sequences at the time, the character would read the info on your memory card and talk about it (this was on the PS1/PS2). He could also predict your attacks.
The trick to beating him was to unplug your controller, and plug it into the Player 2 slot. He couldn’t predict your actions then.
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Here’s one that’s old school: somebody scored over a million points on the Atari 2600 version of Space Invaders - using the same hand for the left/right movement and the fire button.
I enjoyed watching this guy play through Half Life without using the HEV suit.
Nearly all of these are about self-imposed handicaps. Me, I’ve never had any desire to go that route, both because I don’t have extreme patience and aren’t interested in using video games as bragging rights (that and I’m really not that freaking good). Usually what happens is that, while working out my gameplan, I settle on something that’s a bit unorthodox, or settle for the “wrong way” of doing something because the “right way” is too damn hard.
In the NES Defender of the Crown, one of the extremely important tasks is to repeatedly call tournaments so you can win land from the Normans in jousts. If you don’t, they’re going to rampage all over the map, squash your Saxon buddies like ants, and send a colossal unstoppable army to your castle to snuff out whatever microscopic chances you ever had of defeating them. The problem is if you’re playing as Geoffrey Longsword, the worst jouster in the game. He can win, but it’s a huge struggle and really not worth calling tournaments with him. So I developed what I called the “twincastle gambit”. I take Glamorgan, Cambridge, or Lancashire and immediately put a castle on it (I think I have to take Yorkshire too if I’m starting at Cumbria), then let those Norman bastards run wild while I raid their castles, defend my own castles, and gradually build my forces. Since Geoffrey has Good Leadership, he can survive a castle defense with only 1 or 2 casualties, and none if the castle has 25 soldiers. That’s it: hunker down in my two little territories and raid, defend, and buy forces until the Normans’ treasuries and reputations have taken such a pounding that they don’t even have the will to do roll call anymore. Then I sally out and pick 'em off one by one. Never failed me once. 
In the first Assassin’s Creed, I think I followed that “strike from the shadows” garbage half the time at best. Against the executioner, I never did anything but charge in and carve up all his guards. Hey, it’s not like there’s any penalty for it, and it’s good to have experience fighting large groups when you reach the point where you have absolutely no choice. Oh, also he’s a punk and I didn’t want to listen to his self-righteous spiel a second longer than necessary.
In Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, once I got the train, I spent a lot of time doing nothing but going around opening chests, and once I got all I could safely, I stayed on the train and let the game run for hours to allow the safe to fill up. It wasn’t until I had all the income upgrades that I started cleaning up the city. Finding the music boxes and getting the special outfit was also one of the first things I did, mainly for the experience boost (skill points make a big difference in this game). Also, on my first attempt at the Maxwell Roth missions…y’know, the ones where you can’t kill anybody…I called up Rooks and let them lay waste to everyone, and it didn’t count as me killing them! (Later I discovered that a nonviolent approach was actually easier.)
There’s an arcade old wrestling game called “Blazing Tornado” by some obscure company. Because it’s really easy to get submissions (and I already played it to death), I did an “all pins” run with each of the 8 wrestlers. For the most part it wasn’t difficult, only a little inconvenient. However, one of the fighters is a submissions specialist…his signature move, as well as both his downed-opponent attacks, are submissions, and he has no aerial attacks. So what I ended up doing was when the opponent was nearly beaten, I picked him up, then, before he could recover, quickly grapple him from behind and do a “Dragon Suplex Pin”. If all went well, this would end the match. If not…well, no choice but to land another throw and do a boring 'ol cover (which I never did with this wrestler otherwise).
After beating the most recent edition of Sniper Elite, I went back and re-did the maps but avoiding headshots, only doing nut-shots, only using a pistol, only melee kills, etc. Killing Nazis just never gets old.
There’s this guy, who got to max level by picking flowers and mining in the Pandaren starting zone. Never chose a faction, never left the island. Just picked flowers and mined copper deposits.
That’s pretty unorthodox.
I read that article looking for an explanation of how the game breaks down when you don’t kill anyone… and I didn’t really find anything. It just says that in one quest, one where there is in fact a nonviolent option, when that guy chose the nonviolent option an enemy spawned for no reason. The article makes it sound like the game was just tired of his zero-killcount and wanted to screw him up, but that’s not the way computer games work. What actually caused that enemy to spawn? Would it have also happened if he had done the same thing in the hard parts, but gunned down a random nobody somewhere? Would it have happened if he hadn’t done whatever no-kill exploit he used on some other hard part? If so, which one was the key one? And why does that trick, whatever it was, cause this bug?
I was expecting something like “An NPC in dialog with you tries to guilt-trip you by naming some of the people you’ve killed, and if there’s nobody on that list, the pointer goes into invalid memory space”, or something. That really would be a bug caused by not killing anyone.
Back in the ‘90’s there was a video game based on the musical version of War of the Worlds written by Jeff Wayne, unironically called Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds. The game map was made up of England and Scotland, and I believe the Isle of Man, broken up into 30 or so different areas. The Martians have their base in the Scottish Highlands, while the humans’ base was London. The game only has one difficulty, which is way too easy. After a few play-throughs, I had gotten it down to winning in under 400 game days, and it only took that long because after capturing an area you have to build a command post there before you can attack from that area, and it takes at least 30 game days to build a command post. By winning that quick, I did not have time to unlock the whole technology tree, and never saw some of the most interesting upgrades in the game, so I was trying to figure out how to extend the length of the game. I decided to retreat all the way back to London. I would only keep control of London and a ring of areas around London, and allow the Martians to take all of the other territories. I would build up as much as I could, and only commence my attack after my ring of territories were invaded by the Martians. After the computer attacks, it pretty much blows its load and I can march all the way to Scotland pretty quickly, only having to pause to build command centers. The game is still way too easy, but at least I got to see what the Blimps and Digger Tanks looked like.
I’ve attempted to play 2v2 Clash Royale with two tablets side by side, playing both players on my team at the same time. It hurt my brain, so I stopped.
I’ve heard of people playing action video games with unconventional controllers, like a guitar peripheral from Rock Band or something.
Preach! I’m currently maxing out all the rifles/pistols/etc. Ricochet kills are my bane.