Had Monster Hunter World not been as good about documenting things like monster elemental weaknesses I think I might’ve been that way about that, I have checked the wiki at times to make sure I don’t go into a fight with a bad weapon, but it’s been quite nice about laying things out for you.
I used to do some of that for Dark Souls, I’ve made google doc lists for my current progress on bosses / areas, looked up upgrade paths / how to make boss weapons on the wiki and similar stuff the game doesn’t really tell you.
I can’t quite remember other examples of exhaustive lists or notes though, I feel like many games I’ve played it either doesn’t matter as much or it’s easy enough to figure it out on your own.
I will also attest to the gunlance, just started using it for the first time when starting over on the PC and I love it. Remember the Y+B > Yx3 combo, it hits real hard, and the super charged Wyvern shot by blocking and holding Y+B.
You can also block nearly any attack, you become a defence beast.
I also fall into the habit of being a bit too serious about other peoples opinions on games, like when people say Mass Effect 2 is the best in the series, or that MGS 1 and 3 are the only good ones, or that Dark Souls II is better than 1 etc. It’s something I need to work at.
Same thing makes me salty when I remember Bloodborne barely even getting mentioned in Giant Bomb’s GOTY discussions despite GOTY lists not mattering at all.
But, as Rob said, that’s all complete nonsense and I don’t do that anymore (from the pic above, I don’t even remember what tire compound each game was on anymore).
I didn’t stop there though. Instead, I went in a little deeper and read Springer Books about vehicle dynamics and tire simulation rented from our university library now.
But from time to time I still do some game physics tests, only stuff that holds up scientifically though (reliable, objective, valid).
For example, a test how realistic grooved tires in games:
To get these, I recorded video, typed the speed values from every frame under braking into a spreadsheet, used Wolfram Mathematica to get an interpolated formula form, then integrated that formula. The area under a speed/time graph equals covered distance. Edit: Though for PC2 and AC, I didn’t do it with video and just used the telemetry data stream from the games’ shared memory data.
Oh, and in case Rob is reading this:
Sector 3 (makers of RaceRoom and also the largest part of what used to be SimBin) had a leak a free days ago:
There will be a GTR3 game published under the SimBin banner and it will have the official World Endurance Championship license! Official unveiling will be at Gamescom
The API provides a feed of activities per character, and while it technically supports pagination, the feed returns enough records with a single request that I don’t mess with that part, and I don’t have to scrape it constantly. (I do have to fetch a separate stream per character, for each of PVP and PVE.) I just fetch it, store the activity list, and then compare it to the previous stored list. I can run that retrieval every few days of play and I think it’s capturing everything. I don’t get to play enough to exceed the pagination limit!
I take that diff and fetch each individual activity record — where the actual gameplay data is. I store all of those so that I can do more with them later, so right now I have a gigantic directory full of activity data text files. I parse those to make summary stats which I can dump into R for further visualization or crunching, but otherwise the whole thing runs as a few shell scripts.
(FWIW I posted about another D2 API project last winter: I also capture a diff of my inventory periodically so I can make a sort of low-budget Destiny Diary of my loot. I’m really curious if the new “collections” launching with Forsaken will add drop date field to items, which would simplify this process a ton.)
It was more out of necessity than taking it too seriously, because we didn’t have the internet yet, but mid- or early 1990s I played Hugo House of Horrors, and two of the three games have a part with trivia questions. As I said, since we didn’t have internet yet, I ended up going through books in the attic, phoning friends and relatives, and at some point a friend of a friend of a friend, who had no idea who I was but was happy to help me.
I remember playing these types if games with my dad and we would draw maps and look up phrases in the dictionary (English is not our native language) or theory crafting while we were out doing something else, how to get through certain rooms, puzzles or dialogues.
I had this weird habit of building my own progression bars & goals into games that otherwise don’t feature them. As some context, I got really into first-person shooters when I was a teenager and was specifically interested in the games that featured bots that I could play against on my own. I’ve grown up with pretty poor access to internet by way of living out in the middle of nowhere, so most of my experience playing online against real players wasn’t especially enjoyable. If I wasn’t disconnecting from matches I was having to put up with high ping. That’s partially why playing against bots applied to me, though it also just removed the anxiety of dealing with players far better (or more toxic) than me.
Another thing that became big around that time was progression systems in multiplayer, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare perhaps being the first to truly popularise it. The more you play, the more you unlock to play with. Cynically you could look at it as a Skinner Box, drip-feeding you rewards to ensure you continue to engage with a thing that otherwise wouldn’t be very appealing, but the feeling of always having something to work towards and being given a new toy to play with certainly appealed to me at the time. The thing is, games that offered bot matches were pretty rare as it was, and those that allowed you to make progress in multiplayer would often disable that for those bot matches.
So that’s when I just started writing up my own. I’d make up these systems that would reward me for “x matches completed”, “y shotgun kills” and so on, slowly doling out all the items that you would normally unlock through standard online play. Soon I was taking the idea and applying it to several other games beyond those where I played against bots. I’d start writing up my own achievements or trying to fit faux xp bars into games that didn’t have them. It was pretty weird tbh, but I was making my own fun.
I don’t do that nearly as much today. Not having as much time to play games has meant that I often baulk at those that demand that I play hours & hours before I can unlock most of the items in their toolbox, and as we see games shifting to being billed as a service, I’ve started to tire of progression grinds all together. But every now and then I’ll find a game that inspires me to open up an excel spreadsheet and start crunching numbers, figuring out how I can turn the experience into a series of goalposts.
Dragon Warrior Monsters 1 + 2 on the Gameboy Color. I printed out full colour coded breeding guides from the internet and spent hours back tracking a breeding path from Darkdrium (The strongest boss monster) to the most basic critters I had at the start of the game. I also kept a family tree for the creatures I bred as the game only recorded parents and maybe grand parents.
I always felt tempted to come up with some sort of notation for “zone of teleport influence/lines of ship and teleportation travel” on a digital version of that map…
Me and my friends, sorry FIRETEAM, have definitely been questioning how serious we have been taking Destiny recently with all the grinding for the Solstice armour. Trying to get Redrix’s Claymore before Season 4 comes (yeah, think I may just wait for that one given latest news).Thing is last Sunday, we finally completed Whisper of the Worm, did the Spire of Stars Raid Lair and our first ever prestige nightfall with modifiers. The first and third activity are some of the hardest things we’ve ever done in the game and we got so co-ordinated throughout that day it felt kind of awesome - like we reached another level of strategic play. Usually we treat Destiny as a forum where we all log on and talk casually one another. When you’re up against it but knuckle down on strategy and playing co-operatively - the game just has a new level of satisfaction.
The only time I got this obsessive with a game was when I played the original Guild Wars (then again, everything I did in that game was obsessive).
I got really into creating my own character builds and could spend hours shifting different skill and class combinations around, just to find a new, exciting way to deal large amounts of damage. The game gave you so many different ways to combine stuff and create synergies not only between your own skills, but also between the skills of the rest of your party.
Not videogames but back when I was a wee guy I had dozens of pieces of paper documenting the history of every championship my WWE action figures were contesting.
This didn’t involve spreadsheets or corkboards with red thread. But when Skyrim first launched, I went through the escape from Helgen with each race, one by one. It ruined the intro for me. And I settled on playing through with a vanilla Nord anyway.
My first time playing a video game competitively was Overwatch in maybe the first 3-6 months it was out. Ruined my life, tanked my mood, made me feel like absolute shit because of how garbage people would be to each other on there. Completely dropped the game for several months after that. I’ve come back to it, but I’m never touching Competitive again.
Another bad story is about the time I got genuinely hurt feelings upset about Dragon Age: Inquisition because I played a dwarf character while every single one of my friends played an elf. They were really happy about the amount of story they got and Cullen (???) and it sucked because as a dwarf, what you get in that game is essentially less than nothing in terms of lore to invest yourself in w/ regards to the race you picked. I don’t have conversations about that game anymore because I simply Can Not Relate.
A month later but HUGO’S HOUSE OF HORRORS!! Oh gosh I’m pretty sure I played all three of those games! Totally forgot they existed until this very moment.
Boy, some of the people in this thread are intense.
The worst I’ve ever gotten is playing Kingdom Hearts 1 in high school. I printed out the gamefaqs guide for getting the ultima weapon, skipped 3 days of school and just grinded for items. It was a lot of fun.
