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[Droog]

The only ones I can remember off the top of my head feel more like exploits that anything else.

Command & Conquer: During several missions of the NOD campaign, the GDI would love to airstrike your base. I accidentally learned that the AI seems to scan the map for your base/units starting from the top left corner of the map. Once I learnt this, I would periodically sacrifice individual soldiers by sending them to the top corner thus saving my base from attack.

System Shock 2: You were meant to think that were was nowhere safe to hide in this game. Not true - the elevator that you reactivate on the Von Braun is a good hiding place. It's also perfect to stash all your spare weapons, food, ammo, etc. It felt a bit like cheating to be stockpiling so much junk in a room that was accessible from every floor essentially but hey.

Doom: Some of the levels (even more so in Doom 2) actually expected you to do this but I always loved tricking enemies into fighting each other whilst I conserved ammo and picked off the winner.

EDIT: X-Wing Alliance: (This is a total exploit) Towards the end of the game (if I remember correctly) there's an escort mission where you have to ensure another friendly craft isn't destroyed by pirates. The friendly craft hyperspaces to the area where the attacks take place but before I can follow I get called away from the game IRL. When I return I find the mission has been safely completed without my involvement. Why? The pirates are triggered by the player craft entering the second area of space and not by the craft you have to escort! Because I didn't hyper in, the friendly got home by themselves.

 

[Roubjon]

There were some block puzzles in Wild Arms 3 where you have to push blocks around in order to make a bridge, but instead of solving them properly, I just lined the blocks up diagonally and walked across them that way.

Basically, I did this:

[]
  []
    []

Instead of this:

[]
[]
[]

 

[The Albatross]

In GTA3, when you kill

Spoiler

Salvatore

I parked a load of cars in front of his entrance so he couldn't get through the fence and let rip with the RPG

I came to post stuff like this. The GTAIII engine was great in that cars that you drove and parked in places stayed for some amount of time through a mission, so you could booby trap missions ahead of time if you struggled.

I did similar with missions and would build up small fortresses around me. one of them in Vice City has you having to kill some biker gang early on, and I was getting house in that mission, getting swarmed by bikers, so I nabbed a car and parked it near their gang hideout... made them mad, they come out to kill you and all got trapped behind the car. One shot to the gas tank and, well, that was the end of them.

Sadly, in GTAIV, this sort of creative use of the world was all removed. If you staged anything, it just reset as soon as the game went to a cut scene. One of the biggest single gaffes by Rockstar on that game was sensitizing the whole world and eliminating the 'sandbox-y-ness' of it.

 

[Chuckie]

I cast Zanmato on Penance in FFX.

I felt ashamed after that, but I couldn't beat the bastard and I was just tired of the game (after 120 hours)

 

[kunonabi]

What? Bollocks, it's impossible, right? Since the game specifically threw you various puzzles that would block your advancement that require the use of the Dominion Rod.

No it is possible with careful use of the bow and the spiked ball. The only thing I didn't do was get past the final room to the boss without it although I think I could have if I had more time. My friend told me about the dominion rod once I hit the first floor so I didn't spend as much effort trying to clear it without the rod.

 

[The Albatross]

I hope that Rockstar reads this thread, and notes the abundance of "unconventional success" from GTAIII, VC, and SA... and also notes the complete lack of any mention of GTAIV, which removed the ability to do anything other than by the script.

 

[canebarbone]

in FFVIII i've arrived to the final boss without drawing any GF, but I never managed to defeat her

 

[Cannon Goose]

In Skyward Sword (endgame spoiler),

Spoiler

I defeated Demise without realizing you could Skyward Strike the lightning at him

.

I did the exact same thing! Oh man, how did I not realise you could do this? Would've made that part so much easier.

 

[gerudoman]

I cleared most of Xenoblade maps by passing through every damn inch of the area without knowing that you are only supposed to reach a near specific location, which clears the nearby area's map. It was specially painful in Eryth Sea, were I spent hours reaching every limit of the huuuge map by swimming instead of visiting a only a few bunch of islands using portals

 

[industrian]

in FFVIII i've arrived to the final boss without drawing any GF, but I never managed to defeat her

Draw Apocalypse from her and beat her with that magic.

IIRC she one-hit kills your GFs during casting time.

 

[Kuramu]

I used to spend many minutes creating random Metroid passwords and hitting start until something worked, then would complete the game I was given, assuming it was possible.

I discovered what I called the Snowball beam this way(a few times actually). Looks like a white wavebeam circle but acts like ice beam.

 

[badcrumble]

In Portal, there's one room toward the very end of the game where you have to redirect a rocket turret from one room to blast through a pane of glass in another room.

I somehow didn't think about the rocket turret, so I carried a chair from *several* rooms ago to the room with the glass pane, used a portal on the ceiling and on the floor to get the chair falling at terminal velocity, then shot an exit portal onto the wall. The chair flew through the air at blinding speed and successfully smashed through the glass. It took a while and was pretty frustrating, and I felt like such an idiot when I realized on my second playthrough that you're supposed to use the rocket.

 

[kamikaze]

i got stuck in metal gear on NES (there was a maze section that i couldn't get through and some items i couldn't find)...so i ended up messing with passcodes until i wound up with the stuff i needed and bypassed the maze.

I used to spend many minutes creating random Metroid passwords and hitting start until something worked, then would complete the game I was given, assuming it was possible.

I discovered what I called the Snowball beam this way(a few times actually). Looks like a white wavebeam circle but acts like ice beam.

nice. now i wish i'd played around with metroid passcodes more.

 

[blitzcloud]

get to cerberus on FF8, die 30 times. Skip him. Learn by mistake later how to actually link materia to stats.

Yeah, I skimmed the tutorial thinking "yet another tutorial"

 

[I H8 Memes]

Apparently may people didn't realize that you needed to use the turret to destroy the tubes with the blocks in them and ended up using a chair to get in the vent. You are the first person I've read of that didn't even use the rockets to break the glass as well.

I remember shortly after HL2 had come out there were a lot of people who accidentally left the airboat behind at the puzzle where you use the blue barrels to raise the ramp. Most people would eventually realize that they messed up and would restart the whole section. But there was a guy on gamefaqs that had left his airboat behind and used boxes and other materials together with a lot of quick saving and quick loading to get all the way to the last helicopter and was asking how he was supposed to beat the helicopter.

 

[AshMcCool]

The entirety of Half-Life 2 felt líke this. I'm still waiting for a game with a similar experience. HL3 where are you?

 

[Lord British]

I beat Shinobi 3 without knowing you could block. Who wants to touch me?

 

[Snuggles]

Climbing mountains in Elder Scrolls games. Paths? Fuck 'em, I'll just slowly jump my way up a 75 degree slope.

 

[ruxtpin]

IIRC she one-hit kills your GFs during casting time.

girlfriend?

 

[PetriP-TNT]

Well, I got the early Master Sword in Twilight Princess and sequence breaked all kinds of other games too.

 

[Philia]

I've played Legend of Grimrock without knowing you could save anywhere. I thought the blue crystals were the save points. :O (They are, but they're autosaves.)

 

[neeksleep]

Climbing mountains in Elder Scrolls games. Paths? Fuck 'em, I'll just slowly jump my way up a 75 degree slope.

This.

Being my first ES game, and thinking 'well, they must expect me to climb this mountain in a very difficult way, because that'd be 'real'', I thought I was pretty awesome when I got fairly high up. Then a dragon appeared. Then I stopped playing, and haven't played since.

 

[Dragnet]

In Portal, there's one room toward the very end of the game where you have to redirect a rocket turret from one room to blast through a pane of glass in another room.

I somehow didn't think about the rocket turret, so I carried a chair from *several* rooms ago to the room with the glass pane, used a portal on the ceiling and on the floor to get the chair falling at terminal velocity, then shot an exit portal onto the wall. The chair flew through the air at blinding speed and successfully smashed through the glass. It took a while and was pretty frustrating, and I felt like such an idiot when I realized on my second playthrough that you're supposed to use the rocket.

I did the exact same thing! Before that I tried just picking up chairs and flinging them really quickly at the window, even turned my sensitivity up to try and fling faster, ha.

 

[ramine]

In Twilight Princess, in the Sky Temple, I didn't realize you could get the dual hooks. Instead, I found that if you point your hook to the top of the wind platforms, you could climb them. You could repeat that and get to the next platform.

You can easily do 2/3 of the dungeon like this, until it breaks!

 

[Persona7]

I found a glitch in God Hand that allows me to bypass bosses easily and every time it triggers the scene as if I had beat them. I only used it on one boss but tried it out on my second play through.

 

[out0v0rder]

I beat skyrim using a PS3.

 

[Mr. Robot]

I dont really know if i did it in unconventional ways, but it felt like i beat many puzzles in Portal 2 in a way that i wasn't supposed to.... i always tried to use momentum in me or with objects to beat a level.

 

[Valhelm]

I skipped well over half Twilight Princess' Lakebed Temple by hookshooting to the chandelier in the center of the rotunda, and position myself in such a way that I'd fall in front of the boss door.

 

[Jintor]

One more thing in GTA:VC: there's a mission in a taxi-yard where you have to more or less take part in a destruction derby with a bunch of cabs trying to ram you out. But you can take any vehicle in that you want... so I took a truck with a ramp on the back, parked it by the water, and watched as all the cabs tried to ram me, flew up my back, and plunged into the sea.

 

[LakeEarth]

Actually beating ghost bosses in final fantasy games, instead of just using a pheonix down.

 

[Mike M]

One more thing in GTA:VC: there's a mission in a taxi-yard where you have to more or less take part in a destruction derby with a bunch of cabs trying to ram you out. But you can take any vehicle in that you want... so I took a truck with a ramp on the back, parked it by the water, and watched as all the cabs tried to ram me, flew up my back, and plunged into the sea.

I have vague memories of beating a similar destruction derby mission by just not driving the car off the starting position while all the other contenders battered themselves to pieces.

 

[Henry Jones Jr]

The first time I played through Ocarina of Time, I beat Ganondorf by reflecting his shit back with a empty bottle. This happened because I didn't know how to kill him, so I went though my inventory trying everything to damage him. I got the bottle out and happened to accidently reflect his shit back at him. I saw like: "WTF, you have to beat him with the bottle!?!" I really thought it was the only way to do it.

 

[Muffdraul]

FFVIII- I had the sudden mind blowing realization that if I allowed my characters' HP to go down to critical and then *NOT* heal them, I could use their limit breaks all the time and just blew through the rest of the game. It became standard practice for everyone but at the time I felt like a supragenius for doing something so counter-intuitive.

 

[industrian]

FFVIII- I had the sudden mind blowing realization that if I allowed my characters' HP to go down to critical and then *NOT* heal them, I could use their limit breaks all the time and just blew through the rest of the game. It became standard practice for everyone but at the time I felt like a supragenius for doing something so counter-intuitive.

In a similar style whenever I play FFVII I just constantly put my characters into "Fury" status so they get their limit breaks quicker.

 

[abstract alien]

I killed Ganondorf in Ocarina of Time using an empty bottle. I have no idea why, but it never crossed my mind to use to sword to counter his spell, instead I tried catching it with a bottle and ended up countering it.

Amazing

 

[arglebargle]

i am not surprised to see a lot of portal mentions in this thread. the thing about those games is that you generally know when your solution isnt the "right" one. i had one of those in portal 2.

Spoiler

i think you were supposed to get white paint on successively higher areas on two pillars in order to get on a catwalk, but instead i put a portal directly above and below me, built up some speed and then flung myself up there.

I have vague memories of beating a similar destruction derby mission by just not driving the car off the starting position while all the other contenders battered themselves to pieces.

this was a viable strategy in the ps1 game destruction derby.

 

[Island]

In NHL Stanley Cup for the SNES:

Would press the "dump the puck" button between centre and blue line towards the net. The shot would arc perfectly and over the goalie everytime. Pissed my brother off to no end until he figured it out; then it was a race to the most goals.

(I also used it to win the Stanley Cup, the first and only time Vancouver won it.) *Rimshot*

 

[Papercuts]

One more thing in GTA:VC: there's a mission in a taxi-yard where you have to more or less take part in a destruction derby with a bunch of cabs trying to ram you out. But you can take any vehicle in that you want... so I took a truck with a ramp on the back, parked it by the water, and watched as all the cabs tried to ram me, flew up my back, and plunged into the sea.

Hahah, that's great. The old GTAs were amazing for this sort of thing, I always blocked roads with trucks when I knew there was a chase coming up so they'd ram right into it. I really hope V gives players the freedom back that IV robbed.

 

[red731]

Leveling my character and not putting any stat or skill till the game gets hard.

Diablo 2 /players 8

In Diablo 2, me and my friend could not defeat Diablo in Nightmare. So we decided to try and have fun. You can open portals from the home area to wherever, and the portal only closes when the creator goes through it. So me and my friend both made a portal, took off all of our gear, and dropped all of our loot. I kept going through his portal and he kept going through mine. We'd run through the portals right to Diablo and just punch him. After maybe 30 minutes he was defeated.

That is madness. I love it!

I start every Call of Duty match by lobbing my grenades as far away as I can.

Counter Strike roots, haha? Right? I mean, I did that in matches when I didn't know anyone.

 

[Scarecrow]

I went through Link to the Past trying to get as few upgrades as possible. Had to face Ganon with the green tunic and basic master sword. I was a little worried when my hits were just bouncing off of him until I realized I had to charge up the sword to do any damage.

 

[Melchiah]

This thread was made for Mass Effect article/review on 1up. The one where some guy (Dan Hsu) didn't know he could raise his stats. :lol

Speaks volumes about the staff of 1UP.

 

[Clydefrog]

Ultima Online. Tailored thousands of fancy shirts and dresses to get enough money to buy a small house.

 

[Roto13]

My first time through Link's Awakening, I used the map glitch to sequence break a LOT. I totally broke that game.

My first time playing Viewtiful Joe, I skipped half of the submarine level. I don't remember exactly how it went, but I didn't fight Another Joe. I didn't shut off the torpedoes. I used Air Joe to hover over them so I wouldn't get hit by them. I managed to make my way to the exit somehow.

Also, in Nier, in that dungeon where you meet Emil, I made my way through a lot of those rooms with the blocks firing balls of light at you by just jumping on top of them so they couldn't reach me. Some of those rooms have rules against jumping, but some don't.

Megaman 9

One of Wily's Stages, I think the first one, where there's red beams of doom that you are supposed to freeze with Concrete.

Well, I tried every weapon, and none worked, and I really had to get to that ladder that was high up in the sky but alas no time to get there in time.

So I propelled myself there using Rush Jump, quickly pressing start, using the Tornado weapon of the game to give yourself an extra boost, and getting that ladder.

Took me like 20 minutes to get past that part.

And I feel stupid.

That's how I did it, though you don't need to use the tornado weapon. Just have Rush ready when you enter the screen.

 

[90sRobots]

Climbing mountains in Elder Scrolls games. Paths? Fuck 'em, I'll just slowly jump my way up a 75 degree slope.

Fuuuuuuuck yes. The shortest distance between two points is always a straight line in those games.

In NHL Stanley Cup for the SNES:

Would press the "dump the puck" button between centre and blue line towards the net. The shot would arc perfectly and over the goalie everytime. Pissed my brother off to no end until he figured it out; then it was a race to the most goals.

(I also used it to win the Stanley Cup, the first and only time Vancouver won it.) *Rimshot*

Yuck. I never spent enough time with that game to figure out any quirks. Just a shitty, clunky game.

 

[Mr. Fix]

Pretty much all of Dragon Quest 9. Using exploits, special calculators, and the like to get certain equipment, certain types of enemies to spawn and so on. But when you see that items have a 1% chance to drop, you gotta resort to these things.

Oh and Resident Evil 4/5. The grenade/striker speed glitch works wonders. It helped me skip the double Gigante fight and sprint through the entire 2nd half of the game. Resident Evil 5 let's me reload in the middle of a melee attack and allows me to use the pickup invincibility to avoid getting hit.

 

[Mr_Zombie]

Resident Evil 5 let's me reload in the middle of a melee attack and allows me to use the pickup invincibility to avoid getting hit.

Yeah, learning that you are invincible during various animations in RE5 (melee attacks, climbing ladders, opening doors etc.) and that you can open the inventory during those animations was a game changer, especially in Mercenaries. After finding this out I don't think I ever needed to reload my guns in the middle of the battle again .

 

[Magnus]

Pokémon Blue. Blastoise. Just motored through everything with him and rarely any other Pokemon. HYDRO PUMP, BITE, SKULL BASH.

 

[FormallyFamicom]

Whenever I played a season in Ken Griffey Jr's Winning Run, I would always select either the Mariners or the White Sox. Why? Well, besides being two of my favorite teams, they had the advantage of playing Opening Day before any other team. This is important because the game's trade value system is based off of skill level (base value) plus in-game achievements. Basically, all you had to do was have a great game with the average joes on those teams and their value skyrockets before any other team gets to play. Then you just trade them for true all-stars. Super cool game-breaking stuff. In a 162 game season all of my starting nine had over 200 home runs each (the game stops counting at some point randomly over 140).

I also knew of two (at least?) pitchers in the game that could throw an unhittable pitch. Find a lefty with a Super Changeup, and from a specific spot on the mound you can throw it and the CPU will not swing at it 99.999% of the time. One was on the White Sox and one was on the Rockies.

 

[industrian]

In Premier Manager 1998 for the PlayStation, young players (18-20 years old) could be sold for ridiculous sums of money regardless of their talent level (with the 5-star players getting £10+ million iirc.)

Also, when an old player retired they were immediately replaced by an identical 18-20 year old player from your non-in-game Youth Squad.

So basically what you do is hire a sizeable amount of old players who have just been released from their club, keep them on the books until they retire, then immediately sell their replacement. You eventually get enough money to just Manchester City your way to the title.

 

[Splatt]

Trine 1 & 2. I always use the wizard and his plank and box magic to get over every obstacle.