51–60 of 62 posts
The ASCII art that these folks did to set up their chapter headings was beautiful. I remember seeing them making huge block lettering, scenery, and even characters drawn in ASCII art just to give an intro to like a GameBoy game walkthrough. The love and effort poured into these showed
I thought those were auto-generated somehow. Never suspected that people actually put effort into them!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or they enjoy dissecting games as they play through, and the author is over here shouting no, you’re enjoying it wrong!
I would argue this the most likely case - I do similar with movies. It's usually not until the 2nd or even 3rd time through a movie I'll really pay attention and 'understand' the plot, I spend a lot of time focused on the background and technical aspects, trying to pick up on Easter eggs for instance, or marvelling at how well something was shot. You can ask me how I liked the movie, but it's highly unlikely I'll hav…
https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B07PB7BK7L/
Spoiler warning: don't read the reviews until after you watch it. And then read a few of the one-star reviews for some hilarity.
Two words: "continuity errors"
I remember one of the other players created a game guide for the game that was published and made a couple million off it. So there's that too.
The ASCII art that these folks did to set up their chapter headings was beautiful. I remember seeing them making huge block lettering, scenery, and even characters drawn in ASCII art just to give an intro to like a GameBoy game walkthrough. The love and effort poured into these showed
Clients were scepticall at first because they wanted to make sure that the user was seeing all the visual branding in the html+images. To convince them, I started using gamefaq style ASCII typography tricks to make a visual representation of the layout. It worked great.
The ASCII art that these folks did to set up their chapter headings was beautiful. I remember seeing them making huge block lettering, scenery, and even characters drawn in ASCII art just to give an intro to like a GameBoy game walkthrough. The love and effort poured into these showed
I thought those were auto-generated somehow. Never suspected that people actually put effort into them!
See if you can spot why this walkthrough is noteworthy: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/snes/588741-super-metroid/faqs...
[...guide authors approach games with the mindset of a medical examiner. They do not play games so much as dissect them, which erodes enjoyment of the hobby they like best. Rarely can authors “just enjoy the game;” instead they must “stop every 20 seconds to write something.” ...] Is this really the case? I would rather believe that the writers are gamers too. It's quite common for gamers to play a [fun] game through…
And dissecting (or tangentially related, speedrunning) the game is its own fun.
I felt it when I was playing Diablo 3 a few years ago; the 'core' game is a four chapter story (5th added with DLC) where you go through it with your character. But after that you can replay it at higher difficulties - again, nothing new there. But there are a dozen difficulty levels after 'normal', so you can keep going. And the goals shift. You no longer play to get through the game's story, you start to play to find better gear, gather materials, cross your fingers and hope to find a rare enemy that gives you access to a secret area. Eventually, the levels became a blur, the story something you just skip over because the in-game writing / voice acting is pretty poor (cutscenes are on point though). Later on they added Adventure Mode, allowing you to skip through the game world out of order and pursue different goals (e.g. "kill this enemy in this area") across the maps to work towards a reward, and Rifts, (semi)randomly generated dungeons that you are challenged to run as fast and frequently as possible. Finally there's Greater Rifts, challenge modes where the global goal for all players is to get to the highest, most difficult level. They further extended the lifetime and replayability of the game by adding Seasons, where you create a new character to get through the game for unique / one-off rewards.
I'm not sure where I'm going with that but long story short, there are many ways to enjoy a game that are not limited to the game itself as it's meant to be played.
Disclaimer: I run a fan website for a long-running game franchise where some of our members have gone really deep into the game(s), destructuring it, learning to and writing code to read and edit save files, going through the internet archive and contacting people to try and find and salvage old, defunct instalments and side projects of said series (like online modes, mobile games on feature phones), etcetera. Others (re)translate the games, write down novelized versions of games and movies, create art, discuss theories, make predictions about future instalments, etcetera.
I wouldn't have met my girlfriend if I had 'just' played a game.
I used to LOVE reading GameFAQs walkthroughs for RPGs as a kid. The fact it was just a big text document made it super easy to hide in my "computer typing" classes too. I'm kind of sad that the whole scene has largely slowed down, at least for modern games... Now you can just find video guides on any subsection of a game you're playing; or follow an IGN guide. I have huge respect for authors of the oldschool guides t…
See if you can spot why this walkthrough is noteworthy: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/snes/588741-super-metroid/faqs...
Will you tell us?
[...guide authors approach games with the mindset of a medical examiner. They do not play games so much as dissect them, which erodes enjoyment of the hobby they like best. Rarely can authors “just enjoy the game;” instead they must “stop every 20 seconds to write something.” ...] Is this really the case? I would rather believe that the writers are gamers too. It's quite common for gamers to play a [fun] game through…