Is The Best Game One You Were Never Intended To Play? 156
Wired has an interesting look at the sport of pushing proscribed boundaries in video games. Easter eggs in games have been around for years, but now finding surprises, intended or otherwise, is becoming a driving force behind the enjoyment of games. "In games as diverse as Fallout 3 and Mirror's Edge, players are pushing to find or create unexpected ways to break past the game horizon, and turn the designers' intentions on their heads. It's only a matter of time before someone releases a game where the best version is the one you were never intended to play. That's only to be expected, says David Michicich, CEO and creative director of Robomodo, the developers of Activision's new Tony Hawk: Ride, and a 14-year veteran game designer. 'Today's news gets old quick — we Twitter, blog, pass viral video. We thrive off the sudden excitement of the latest and most buzzworthy,' Michicich says. 'It's exciting to still feel like you can discover something new. It's stimulation, plain and simple.'"
Already Happened (Score:5, Informative)
See Warcraft 3 and DoTa. The DoTa mod is vastly more popular than the original game.
Good examples of this (Score:2, Informative)
..Include "surfing" in Counter Strike (there seems to be a whole community of guys creating maps just for this purpose, check them out on Youtube) and "stunting" in the GTA series, most notable Vice City and San Andreas (there's also a pretty thrivig community, it seems).
I also remember spending hours playing Lemmings, just having fun doing crazy tunnels/bridges and totally disregarding the actual goal.
It was called TRIBES (Score:5, Informative)
There was a bug in the game that allowed you to "ski" by hitting the jump button repeatedly. Skiing let you gain a lot of momentum and using your jetpack to climb hills would let you maintain it.
That bug completely changed the way the game was played and made crossing large open environments effortless. The developers never fixed the bug and instead made it a feature of Tribes 2.
Re:Already Happened (Score:5, Informative)
I recommend "Thief - the Metal Age". Arguably the biggest modding community on the net. Hop over to Thief: The Circle [thief-thecircle.com] for more info.
Re:Desert Combat (Score:5, Informative)
I remember back in the days of Desert Combat when I was in early high school, getting the idea of parking mobile AA on the hillside, allowing you to get the gun pointed down farther than being level and using the AA guns against people - was great stuff,
I mean, I doubt I was the first person to do it, but I'd never seen or heard of anybody else doing it before after playing it for months myself...
Oh for the lack of history education now a days ... I suspect the great desert fox himself might have invented the technique circa 1941...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/88_mm_gun [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Rommel [wikipedia.org]
Re:Team Fortress Classic (Score:4, Informative)
The only game devs which did not know about the RJ were... ID Software when the released Quake 1
scar3crow: Quake has always had wonderful deathmatch, and it certainly popularized something many take for granted these days - rocketjumping. Aside from your lateral use of it in Mt Erebus in Doom, did you foresee it in the way it came about in deathmatch? John Romero: We had no idea until after the game was released and I started hearing the word being used... Even then I thought it meant jumping over someone's rocket! When I saw it in action i was amazed and immediately starting doing it all the time.
scar3crow: It certainly makes for a different dynamic in the flow of maps, in some cases completely circumventing the pace the mapper may have intended (such as in DM4 where it makes the map even tighter).
John Romero: Yeah, most of the single-player maps break with rocket-jumping. E2M1 in 11 seconds. Heh
src: http://qexpo.quakedev.com/interview_romero.php?page=2 [quakedev.com]
Counter Strike (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Team Fortress Classic (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Team Fortress Classic (Score:2, Informative)
Please. Rise of the Triad had the rocket jump back when Doom 2 was new.
The first Marathon [wikipedia.org] had it two months previous to RotT. And it was necessary to reach many of the secrets.
Re:Desert Combat (Score:1, Informative)