I’ve been thinking about the PS1 game ‘Driver’ a lot recently. It’s a game I spent a lot of time on during my youth, and whilst I’m sure it doesn’t hold up some 20 years later, it was still a highlight from my ‘gaming youth’.
As much as I know I enjoyed it however, I don’t remember all that much about it. Aside from pulling the perfect reverse hand-break-turn in order to leave the garage/lockup area and begin the game proper. I didn’t need to pull this manoeuvre of course, I could just, you know…drive out, but something felt so incredibly satisfying about it that I couldn’t stop myself.
Which brings me to this point of this thread. What’s something you do in a game for no reason other than it feels damn good?
I love to boot up Red Dead Redemption 2 and go on little hunting / fishing trips as Arthur. I play it as close to real life as I can, meaning I don’t just sprint across the map on horseback and get to my destination in five minutes or less. I have Arthur eat breakfast, ride the trails for a few in game hours, eat lunch, ride until dark, set up camp, eat dinner, brush / feed the horse, sleep, repeat. If I go through a town on my way, I’ll usually stop for a day to experience some entertainment or do a bit of gambling. It can take multiple in game days to reach a hunting / fishing spot. I’ll set up a camp once there, do some hunting / fishing for a few days, and then ride back home. It’s just super relaxing for me and helps me appreciate the little details in the game even more.
I never got anywhere near finishing the story due to this. Its a beautifully relaxing game if you just drink it all in and immerse yourself. I’m a big fan of the daily routine at the camp and if I don’t make it back one night, spend the return catching up with everyone and doing some chores.
I used to like to get gently stoned, fire up GTA 5, put on FlyLo FM in the car and just drive around. My brother and I would sit for hours, and it was basically like we were in a real car. I didn’t drive super fast, took most reasonable precautions against wrecking and killing people. It was just…nice. A sort of cut-rate flow state where the thing I’m doing is something that I have to pay attention to, but not something I’m occupied by to the point of not being able to bs with somebody.
With the spiderman games, I almost always swing around instead of using fast travel. I’ll do the little tricks and stuff too.
They did such a good job making the basic traversal mechanism satisfying that it’s almost weird they included fast travel.
Shooting out of a cannon with the wings hat and flying around in Mario 64 was such a pure fun experience for my kid brain. The switch in music and just soaring around a 3d level was really something special at the time.
Yeah, that was great! I always wished that you could fly longer.
That level in the clouds when you look up in the entrance was so magical. Always a little sad when it ended.
But yeah that and the slide behind the stained glass window were so awesome
Man, I have a buncha people giving me shit on my thread for BG3 asking if one of the encounters can be cheesed because the way it would be cheesed is hilarious. It’s a clone fight and I was curious if you could make the clone spawn naked and make the fight a non-issue. Now some people are upset and tell me I should just “play the game.” Is that not what I am doing? I was gonna do it anyway, I just wanted to know if I should save before hand if it fucked me over completely.
I like breaking games. It’s fun. I’ll play them the way they were “intended” once or twice; but after that I’m doing everything but that. Just to see what I can actually get away with. I thought that was the point of an interactive experience. Why the hell would I want to just do the canned ‘canon’ shit? I want to do all the things you can’t do in reality because they would hurt yourself or others. I want to test the limits of the game designer’s imagination. If I can think of it and they missed it or if they actually put that little detail in.
You may already know this because it’s a big and recent game, but you can do this exact thing to a clone fight in Elden Ring
That was what gave me the idea. I love Fromsoft games. :)
While I do enjoy cheesing fights in BG3, I’ve run into a few which seemed impossible if I didn’t find a way to cheese it, which is kind of a bummer. Shoving the big bad off a cliff should be a strategy, but shouldn’t be the only one.
I don’t even really want to push the BBG off a cliff. I can’t loot him if I do that!
I enjoyed the ship battles in Assassin’s Creed 4 way more than the platforming and main story. I probably spent twice as much time at sea as I did on land.
This was such a good game because the sea stuff was definitely more interesting than the assassins creedy stuff. Letting the men finish their sea shanty before getting into something was always a personal pleasure!
Riding around in GTA San Andreas. Like taking a truck and making long trips while listening to K-DST radio.
Cyberpunk 2077 is purely an escapist game for me. The game itself sort of sucks, the side missions are mostly “go and kill this dude” or “go and steal this thing”, nothing you do has an effect on anything and it’s generally pretty uninspired and blah, but I bought it because I got it for under 20€ so I figured why the hell not.
It looks damn purdy though, and Night City is intricately built and has lots of small fun details. I love just wandering around the city, stopping at hole-in-the-wall noodle places (even though they might just be “window dressing”, and even if they’re not the restaurants in the game are totally pointless), or browsing the stuff at some market, etc. etc. etc. So even though I don’t like it as a game, I like the environment it provides (although honestly the constant in-your-face sexism gets pretty old…)
I personally really like cyberpunk, I wish the launch went better. Adding more features would have made it truly great.
I’m an achievement hunter. Normally once beating a game I uninstall and move on to the next game. But cyberpunk, I did three full playthroughs on very hard with different builds.
The story is really great the first playthrough, but for my second and third playthrough, I rush to level 14, grab the double jump, and just go exploring. I hit level 50 before talking to Takemura at the diner.
My favorite character is my third one, my corpo netrunner. Pre-patched contagion was just bonkers. You could walk into an enemy stronghold, look at someone, and command the whole building to die.
The game becomes a whole lot less fun when you’re that OP, but it felt like a reward, since the early stages of a netrunner build is the weakest build in the game.
It’s absolutely got a lot of good things about it. While I don’t necessarily like it as such, I don’t dislike it either 😁 mainly the things that bug me are that the mechanics are a pretty generic sneak’n’hack clone and it’s very linear: nothing you do actually influences anything very big in the world except for some fairly inconsequential things, and you have no real choice in the larger picture of how things turn out.
I’m hoping the DLC, whatchamacallit, delivers on its promises of remaking some of the game to deliver more of what they originally promised.
Have you tried Cloudpunk?
I have not! I was actually just eyeballing it in Steam the other day thinking about whether I’d want to buy it, so I think I’ll take this as a recommendation
Cloudpunk has really nice atmosphere but is highly linear, almost to the point of belonging to the “walking simulator” genre. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it, but just don’t go in expecting much in terms of gameplay.
That’s probably why I recommended it. I spent more time with it going around aimlessly, hamging out in places than actually following the story.
I just want a Blade Runner sim so badly…
I just want a Blade Runner sim so badly…
Right‽ I just started playing Cloudpunk and I’ve really liked it so far, and I had this exact thought. Cloudpunk is close and it’s great fun, but I would commit light treason if it meant getting a (good…) 1st person Blade Runner game on the market
edit: oh and thank you for the tip, it’s exactly what I was looking for
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Noita: building wands with horrendous recoil. I know it’s going to get me killed when I launch myself in to something dangerous, but it’s just funny to be able to fly by the power of destroying everything in a given direction
In Minecraft I run in one direction for half an hour and build little forts. I don’t sleep in the bed and when I die I die. There’s a neat sense of satisfaction finding all the little things I’ve left behind.
I used to do pixel art too so I’ve run into giant glowstone Pikachus in the past
More than ten years ago, I played with coworkers in a Minecraft beta server at a place I used to work.
Recently I was told that the server still existed and one of my ex-coworkers still maintained and played actively on it being the only one left.
He built around whatever others did, so I could (theoretically) still find all the cubic dirt houses we made.
In the game Crackdown - you had to increase your agility and strength, and weapons proficiencies to be strong enough to move onto the next area.
You could get the xp by doing things like killing guys while jumping or whatever, or you could find “agility orbs” at the tops of a lot of buildings (and smokestacks, billboards, factories, etc.) and get extra xp from finding them. As you level up your agility, you can get to taller places. Eventually I’d just climb places because I could not because I saw an orb.
That and blowing shit up with a rocket launcher, getting a faction really pissed at me, and then quietly leaving the scene after I get ran out of rockets. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I would always play AVP2 as an Alien. I loved the mobility of being able to traverse walls and the unique challenges/opportunities it presented. I played it a lot and got quite good at it (would easily be the top player in most games I played), but would more often focus on making use of those unique mechanics for novelty situations.
One map (the forge, or something similar) had high ceilings with ridges built in to it, perfect for hiding an Alien. Instead of running around the map tearing up victims and moving up the leaderboard, I would cling up on that ceiling and wait for an unsuspecting human to pass underneath. I would drop down like a spider, paralyze them with my tail, and immediately headbite them. The glee that I would get from perfectly executing that surpassed any MVP received from high scores. It was fun to just play an Alien like an Alien.
Running over pedestrians and crashing motorcycles in Sleeping Dogs.
I completed every mission with an insanely low cop score because I killed so many civillians. This game is the poster child of ludonarrative dissonance in 7th gen AAA games.
The game tracks how many people you run over in a “combo” and assigns a high score. Mine is 647.
In Diablo 3, I always saved the NPCs in Act 2 while doing bounties, even though there was no incentive to do so. Dunno if it counts as feeling good, but could never bring myself to ignore their cries.
