When I was younger I cheated in every game. It started with the likes of Warcraft 2 and Duke Nukem 3D. I cheated because I was about 11 and wasn’t all that good at games. I liked to cheat because that way I was in control of the game. I could do whatever I wanted, mostly. I’d get really annoyed if a game didn’t have God Mode because I’d have to worry about using a code to restore health or armour. Now I rarely cheat at games, but cheating was a gateway into another form of play. Cheating got me accustomed to playing games wrong. Doing things the developers hadn’t intended. Playing games wrong gives you a different perspective on something you love. I present some of my favourite instances of games played wrong, with some musings about why it was so fun.
Jedi Knight is an excellent game, but for a while my good friend and I only had the demo, the Fuel Station to play in, so naturally we played the crap out of it. Right near the beginning of the level there was a solitary ugnaught working on a console. He’d get spooked if you shot near him, or at him. But you could go near him and plant motion mines behind him. Through the magic of cheating you could have about 30 motion mines and the only way to place them all without a huge explosion was to start directly behind him and place them in a line going away from him. After all had been placed it was as simple as one shot right next to him to spook him and BOOM! He’d die, mines would explode, you’d fly backwards. Right behind the start point of the level was a huge chasm. It became a game to see how Kyle Katarn would catapult backwards into the chasm, which way the ugnaught would go, if you screwed up and tripped your mines by accident, etc. At the time we didn’t really think about what we were doing, but most my my memories of that demo are within the context of our invented mine laying/ugnaught harassing meta-game.
Another favourite around that time was Monster Truck Madness. It didn’t have any damage physics and all we did was drove around backwards smashing into things, until we discovered the helicopter! The helicopter was the manifestation of the “put me back on the track, I screwed up” button. A chopper would come and lift your truck back onto the track, dropping it nicely in the middle of the road. BUT if you hit the chopper button again, the helicopter would disappear, leaving you suspended above the track, and another one would be called. This new helicopter would lift you just a little bit higher than the last. If you kept at it you could slowly lift yourself so high that the draw distance made the map completely disappear. Then you’d let yourself fall neatly back onto the track, with absolutely no damage. This felt strangely empowering: One solitary repeated action could lift you completely out of the game the developers had created, and with no consequences, except losing the race, you could drop right back in.
In contrast to the lack of destruction in Monster Truck Madness was Viper Racing, a racing simulation featuring only the Dodge Viper. It was too realistic for me to find fun so I literally spent all my time playing it incorrectly. The developers were kind enough to facilitate this by including a “wheelie” button, which, when tapped, would cause your car to do a wheelie. If you held the button down, however, your car would continually spin on an axis approximately along the rear axle. Your car would take damage from overly forceful wheelie use and this was coupled with the most realistic car damage I’d ever seen. The wheelie worked even when your car no longer did (broken axles, collapsed roof, smashed everything else, that sort of thing). Additionally the wheelie was so forceful that you could actually propel your car around the track, constantly smashing it into a smaller and smaller mass until all 4 wheels were compressed into the physical space of 1 and your car’s body was 1 rectangular polygon. It got even better, though! The tracks were giant squares with literal edges of the world off which you could fall. So, you could take your smashed car/wheel monstrosity and hurl it off the edge of the world. What fun! That game still stand out in my mind as the best game to play wrong, where I found no part of playing it properly to be any fun at all. I put hours into smashing my car. It stands out as this bizarre marriage of realistic and unrealistic. The driving was too realistic for me to want to try, so I spent all my time catapulting a wrecked hunk of metal off the edge of the world. Not so realistic now, are you Viper Racing?
After this there was a pretty good streak of doing everything but the missions in Grand Theft Auto 3, then some of the same in Vice City, but I played the story for it as well. Vice City has 1 particular oddity that everyone should try. There’s a cheat to remove your wanted level. Figure out what it is, and then shoot out all the tires on a police car. Just before you get busted put in the no wanted level cheat. The cop will forget about you and go back to patrolling, not realizing how difficult driving his squad car has suddenly become. He’ll careen around the city hitting pedestrians, driving on sidewalks and getting into all manner of trouble. It’s so odd to follow this police officer through a fairly realistic open city as he careens around making the whole place untidy, unrealistic and hilarious.
After I’d largely worked out my cheating streak, the fantastic Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max came along. It was a great game in and of itself, especially due to the Havok Physics, but in it lurked a fantastic “wrong game” combining cheating and game glitches for ultimate hilarity. The Prologue for Part 2 of the game is a purely expository level where you have no weapons and just talk to people to advance the plot. You can, however cheat to get weapons and kill various police officers. No one notices including people engaged in conversations with now deceased NPCs. Characters will carry on conversations, but half the dialogue will be really long, awkward pauses. In the main lobby of the police station is the dispatch lady, sitting at a desk in front of a giant radio thing. She’s got a bit of a problem. If you shoot her in the head with the pistol, as well as dying, from the knees down she loses collision detection and her knees just fall through the floor. It’s pretty amusing to find a glitch like that, but it gets even better. If you save and reload your game her collision detection will be restored NO MATTER WHERE SHE IS. SO, lob a grenade at her and hit ESC and save just as her legs are arcing through the ceiling. Your newly saved game will feature a lady hanging out of the ceiling permanently. It was highly entertaining to reduce the gritty, and dark Max Payne 2 to this bizarre carnival of police officers talking to themselves and crazy physics.
As games have become more open and there are more sandbox games there are more fun ways to play them wrong. Games like Fallout 3 and Grand Theft Auto IV practically beg you to mess around. Old or new, playing games wrong is a lot of fun. Everyone should try it. As a medium you love it’s really interesting, entertaining and sometimes enlightening to deconstruct it in ways developers never imagined. I mean conceptually deconstruct and deconstruct with explosives. So get out there and play through your games the wrong way. It’ll be surprisingly fun. If you’re already on board with this tell us all about how you broke your games in the comments.