The joys of game abuse
I’ve always had a special fondness in my heart for games that can be abused; games that allow you to do things you’re really not supposed to do, and get away with it.
Anyone who has tortured a Sim until he expired in a pile of his own shame will understand what I mean. In this post, I’m going to tell you about my favourite acts of gaming rebellion over the years. I would like to hear yours.
My litany of retardation began when I got my first real computer. I was eight years old, and it was an Atari 65XE. Always the underdog, Atari employed the amusing tactic of adding an extra increment onto their computer’s name so that buyers would shun its rival the Commodore 64, thinking “nah, I’m not buying that balls; Atari’s computer is one better“. Turns out the C64 pooped on the 65XE with both arses tied behind its back, but that didn’t stop me from falling in love with it.
Back in those creaky days, games came on tapes, and loading each one was an exercise in mental torture. They took a minimum of four minutes to load; no small length of time when your brain hadn’t yet melted from years of alcohol and solvent abuse. The cruellest punishment was reaching the end of that eternity only to find that there had been a smegging loading error, and you would have to start again. This happened with depressing regularity, and is the reason why so many of today’s adults have serious rage issues. I suspect it also triggered my taste for game abuse, as a kind of twisted revenge upon the Fickle Tape God, creator of a thousand sulks.
Right Up The Asteroid
The first game I played on the 65XE was called Star Raiders. It was the precursor to Elite, with graphics that looked like someone had eaten the contents of a shredder and then puked all over the TV. I quickly grasped the point of the game, which was to completely ignore the marauding aliens and instead attempt to kill myself in as many dumb ways as possible. A magical light sparkled in my eyes as I crashed my ship straight into an asteroid again and again, leaving the galaxy marvellously, blissfully unsaved. For some bizarre reason, the asteroids had human faces, which gave me a real sense of achievement when I totalled them in a blaze of idiocy. My posthumous rank was invariably “Garbage scow captain”, which seemed pretty rad to me. I was a Captain.
Apparently you’re looking at an enemy ship here. I wouldn’t know.
Pictures Of Matchstick Men (shitting themselves)
Later, I became infatuated with a game called Panther. This was a great title, though punshingly difficult. In your whizzy ship, you had to tear-ass across a war-ravaged land, shooting down enemy ships and stopping to pick up doomed civilians. One of my favourite pastimes was rescuing all the evacuees except one, then taking off with an evil laugh. A second later, I would land again and wait until the poor guy had almost caught up, and then fly off once more. I liked to imagine the little white stick figure pooping his pixellated pants in confused terror, with hope and desperation fighting for dominance of his tiny mind. I always picked him up in the end, of course; I’m not a total monster.
The evacuee is seen top centre, waving like a girl.
What A “Carrier” On!
Certainly not the kind of monster who would completely ruin his own aircraft carrier, as I did time and time again in Carrier Command for the Commodore Amiga. This was a real-time strategy game in which your aim was to take off, circle round and then pepper each part of your battleship with cannon fire until it was entirely out of operation but not actually sinking. This was a difficult and subtle challenge, and I applaud the designers for balancing the game so well. Sometimes it would end prematurely because the actual enemy had conquered the entire world in the meantime, but I always counted this as a win.
In the “strategy” game, the objective was to sink the carrier while simultaneously crashing it into an island.
Indy 500 And The Quest For Retardedness
My rebellion reached the peak of refinement with Indy 500 for the PC. The first time I played it, I sat on the starting grid listening to the synthetic farty whine of the racing cars revving up around me, and suddenly I felt a tremendous thirst for victory. Nothing, nothing would stand in my way. The moment the flag descended, I gunned my car into a power-slide and set off the wrong way around the track, howling with primeval joy. “YOU’RE GOING THE WRONG WAY” yelled the game, and it felt like a majestic call to arms. I don’t know what I enjoyed the most: playing chicken with the approaching cars, or deliberately ramming one at the worst possible moment and seeing how big I could make the resulting pile-up. The wheels would always fly off the cars at fantastic angles, and my crowning achievement was causing such an Armageddon of mangled horror that one wheel (it may even have been from my own car) hurtled vertically upwards like a rubbery rocket and vanished into the sky.
A typical race. I am the car in the middle.
The joy fades
For years, I chased that retarded dragon. When I bought Oblivion, I took up dog punching, but discovered quickly that there are only so many ways to punch a dog before boredom sets in. Throwing dead bears off cliffs was also pretty fun for a while, yet it lacked a certain je ne sais quoi. After I gave up games, I was forced to seek more healthy outlets for my wrong desires, but I realise now that no amount of killing hobos or deliberately putting too much vinegar in my salad dressings can recapture that old joy of ballsing a game up in the most creative way possible.
A bear comes to rest after a long and satisfying plummet.
Even when I played a game properly, I resented being herded down one particular route, because it denied me the option of saying “oh bugger this for a game of bastards” and doing something that the designers never intended. This stuff is important. Sometimes, it can make you confront terrifying truths. One time in Oblivion I removed the invisible barriers preventing me from leaving the habitable zones, and I vividly recall the existential terror of running, running until all the trees and animals had gone, and it was just me, butt naked, moving forever across a barren landscape with nothing ahead but infinity. This, I remarked to myself, is life in a fucking nutshell.
Half an hour later, I fell off the edge of the earth. That’s not a sentence I get to say very often, which is why I cherish the memory of the day I broke Oblivion.
Filed under: Gaming nostalgia
My heart is so full of gay love for you right now it is about to explode into rainbows. In Oblivion, I frequently used to run down deer and punch them to death. It was fulfilling, in it’s own way.
In Urban Chaos, I liked to arrest pedestrians near a gang of thugs, and leave the poor sods in handcuffs while they got the shit kicked out of them.
Don’t try and tell me that’s wrong.
The Spiderman 2 game remains the best superhero game ever made, not least because when a construction worker is about to fall to his death from a tall building, you can scoop him up in your arms, swing across the city, get to the top of a much taller building and throw him off it. Once I was just chillin’ on the wall near the roof of one skyscraper and a gang of thugs turned up, presumably to rob the top of the building. Naturally I captured every single one, picked them up, jumped as high as I could and threw them. The very last one got an extra special treat: that motherfucker got taken to the top of the Empire State Building and thrown off.
You can do similar things in the Hulk game that came out around the same time, but it’s less satisfying because the Hulk would probably do that anyway.
I remember going over a friends house to play that Indy 500 game, and we never actually raced. We just sat there going the wrong way on the track and causing massive pile-ups all afternoon. It never got boring. I was disappointed when I had to go home.
I had an old Nascar game for the PC (I dont remember the name), and i would spend hours running one of the courses the wrong way and trying to hit one of the barriers just the right way to get the gar to flip over into the pit area. Then one day i found the prefect angle that not only sent me over the barrier between the track and the pits, but also tipped me over the invisible wall and into the grandstands section. It was an amazing experience. I felt like i had gotten away with something, like some sort of trespasser in an area of the game the designers never thought i would find a way into. I was never able to get back to that section again, although i spent countless hours trying, and had to content myself to jumping off hills and getting the car stuck in the invisible wall.
One of my favourite deer-related moments was when I realised I could make them fight for me if I charmed them. Such gentle, harmless creatures, and yet I could turn them into ravening killmachines with a flick of the hand. Of course, they took 0.0004 seconds to die, which made me snort with laughter and then slump in self-hatred.
My ambition was always to start a deer / tramp turf war, but I could never get enough of them together at once.
It would have been the ultimate battle. DvT: WHOEVER LOSES, I WIN.
My sister and I used to play Streets of Sim City, where you drive around in the cities you’ve constructed and deliver packages to earn money to upgrade your car. Most of the time, though, we’d just use the missile launcher to blow up buildings, and then ruin the tires of the car by driving over all the rubble. Then we’d crash the car into buildings until smoke poured out from under the hood, and it wouldn’t drive any faster than about 40 mph. It also had a flying feature, so we’d just fly it out over the ocean until it ran out of gas and drowned, or drop it from a great height directly into a building. (The game’s physics resulted in the car being trapped there, gaining ever more damage without being able to move.
The best thing, though, was driving into cows at high speeds and watching them explode. You could also gently nudge them into the water, where they’d bob around helplessly, but nothing was more satisfying than blasting them into dozens of poorly rendered fragments.
I think we’re all demonstrating exactly why the GTA games are bestsellers.
I used to play as Germany versus England on FIFA and just score own goal after own goal and then shit myself laughing as England won the World Cup with a resounding 52-0 victory.
Who am I kidding, I still do that now.
After a particularly poor run at Galaga, I played a game where I just allowed all my ships to get captured.
The joke was on the aliens.
I shat in those ships.
Dungeonkeeper and Evil Genius were kind of designed for you to do retarded things, but I never got tired of building needlessly complicated traps to kill intruders in horrible ways.
Of course, when your entire dungeon or lair is composed of traps and nothing of actual interest, one wonders why intruders continue to try their hand at infiltration. None too smart, those heroes.
Tony Hawk pro cool skater thingy game (don’t remember which number) had a cheat that let you have perfect balance while skating. So naturally I put the skater on the lip of a circular ledge and let him grind for hours, scoring points…
The funnies part was when it started being negative scores, because the Int has wrapped… Ahhh, the magic…
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve drowned Mario. That’s why the Mario games were always better than Sonic. With the hedgehog, he’d die as soon as he even touched the water; but with Mario you could slowly hold him underwater, merrily teasing him with the prospect of life, before ultimately leaving him to die.
My favourite part of playing any FPS is trying to take the vehicles places they aren’t meant to go.
In FarCry I’ve sat there for 15 minutes rubbing against a log with my jeep on two wheels, jiggling back and forth on the stick just right while gently alternating between gas and brake until finally, the sweet, loving release as I fly valiantly through the trees and then proceed to run over a dozen unsuspecting soldiers.
I’m also disappointed by the lack of Crysis in this article.
I thought of including Crysis, but it would have been like shooting chickens in a barrel.
Exactly like that, in fact.
Wow, this article reminds me of my old gaming days. (Don’t get me wrong, there’s still new gaming days…just more PC related than console now.)
Ah, I remember Road Rash 2 for Sega Genesis…I figured out how to break that game through the simplest and most ass-backwards of ways…instead of fleeing, I actually pulled over and let the motorcycle cop arrest me.
THEN I beat the hell out of him faster than you could imagine.
Killing the guy after he busts you causes the screen to zoom out forever, leaving you with nothing but background sky after a while. A truly serene reward for a brutal act…the irony was not lost on me.
But Nascar is where it was at for pure f’d up gaming pleasure.
In 2002 or 2003 or something, Playstation came out with a Nascar game that had realistic damage (unlike a lot of the games afterwards).
My friend and I would spend the entire race trying to take out every other player in the race. If the car took too much damage, it was over…we lost. It really required careful, smart attacks in order to succeed and more often than not it didn’t.
In the end though, you couldn’t have paid us to play it the correct way. Driving in circles? No thanks. Closed-track car mayhem? Count us in!
Oh and Mario 64…I can’t forget that - saving the little baby penguin in the ice level, making the mama penguin all happy, then picking the penguin up and dropping it over the side of the cliff.
Good times.
Wow this is bringing up a lot of memories, haha.
I used to like playing about with Lemmings and killing them in all manner of nasty ways. It was quite satisfying watching them fall off into a ravine that you had created by blowing up several Lemmings. Especially if you built some stairs to make them fall further.
Oh and I think it was level 7 of the original Prince of Persia game for the PC where it starts with him falling for a good 10 seconds if you don’t manage to grab hold of a ledge. He lands on nasty spikes at the bottom. I used to let him fall repeatedly just to hear him scream and see his broken and bloodied body at the bottom.
Hmmm good alliteration there.
A second later, I would land again and wait until the poor guy had almost caught up, and then fly off once more. I liked to imagine the little white stick figure pooping his pixellated pants in confused terror, with hope and desperation fighting for dominance of his tiny mind.
Oh dear god this makes me feel so much better, knowing that I wasn’t the only semi-psychopathic kid torturing small fictional -
I always picked him up in the end, of course; I’m not a total monster.
- oh. Never mind, then.
One thing me and my sister quite liked doing in Sim City was the thrill of building a huge city using cheat codes and then deliberately running it down to the point that a single small incident - say, a fire - could actually destroy the whole city. We’d then start the fire and go off and eat lunch or something, returning to find a desolated burnt wasteland and, we liked to imagine, the ghosts of the inhabitants screaming and wailing ‘Why did the mayor knock down all the fire departments? Dear god WHY?’
See, this is why the newer GTA games always left me a little…ehn. I’d spent so long trying to kill innocent bystanders that when the game actually let, nay, encouraged me, it felt kind of hollow. Without that frisson of “This isn’t allowed!”, killing people in games became like the first time you can legally go into a pub and it seems all exciting for a little while, but eventually you’re just out of money and drunk going “Oh.”
Of course, much like getting drunk, it turns out all you need to make killing sprees fun again is a little creativity. And some fire.
I knew there was a reason why GTA always seemed a bit lame to me. It’s kind of like the gaming equivalent of corporate graffiti. It’s not the same when they practically want you to do it.
Now, building an elaborate mansion for a Sim and then removing all the doors so that he starves to death surrounded by his ultimately useless worldly goods? That is satisfying.
I always wished there could have been a Schitzophrenia Sim mod, where you were able to drive your Sim slowly insane by talking in his head and moving all his stuff round when he’s not looking. This would have taught kid gamers valuable lessons about not judging other people because they seem crazy.
+1 to Disco Stu
Right when I read the headline i thought of my beloved GTA. The hours that I have spend randomly killing innocent people for no reason.
*sigh of relief* haaa
What would you have whispered in your Sim’s ear Tim? Wybervynava or crast?
Your overuse of the words “retard” and “addiction,” and of diminutive forms of those words, is juvenile and makes you come across like a ten-year-old who’s partaken of too much coffee and too many message boards.
Silly Addiction?
More like Silly A-DICK-tion.