Before Minecraft had an endgame or a proper hardcore mode, Tom Francis played through the game with a single, simple rule: upon death, he has to delete the entire world.
This may sound kind of passe given that Minecraft ultimately got a proper hardcore mode, but the chronicles of Tom’s experiments are still very much worth reading if only because I can accurately describe them with the following sentence: at one point, Tom fails to eat a cake.
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Kotaku AU writer Rohan Harris tried to play GTA V as the nonlinear crime simulator it claims to be. He avoided all missions (both plot and side), enforced permadeath, and tried to get as much money as possible just by robbing people and places in the overworld.
I tried this myself, and found it nowhere near as fun as Harris makes it sound. There are only a handful of places to rob, and the economy is way too skewed toward completing missions rather than dorking around in the overworld.
(Every day I pray to Dan Houser that the next Rockstar game take a few pages from Red Faction Guerilla.)
Illusion magic in Skyrim is the equivalent of the Swimming skill in Deus Ex – it’s hypothetically useful, but practically worthless.
Tom Francis decided to play Skyrim only using illusion magic. He also refused to wear any armor, wield any weapons, or attack anyone directly.
Tom’s chronicles of this playthrough are not only very funny, but surprisingly dramatic as well: the climax of the series turns the mundane act of turning in a quest into a hugely suspenseful (if nonviolent) battle.
Yes, look. It’s Tom Francis, again putting together a spectacularly funny story of his attempts to play a videogame in some quirky way. How lovely. How droll.
Oh, what’s that? This one is actually book length, and tells the story of how one’s attempts to bring peace can go suddenly, horrifyingly, and hilariously awry?
Crap. Guess you’ll have to read this one, as well.
I love taking over outposts in Far Cry 3 and 4. Allowing for a variety of tactics and often devolving into highly improvisatory pyrotechnics, the outposts represent everything I like about the Far Cry series’ unpredictable gunplay.
After beating the main plot and defeating all the outposts and strongholds, I wanted to replay the game with some random restrictions. I knew I wanted to play it permadeath – that’s kinda my thing – but for the other restrictions, I turned to twitter.
I just successfully completed this run a few hours ago, and it was surprisingly fun.
Basically, just try to get through the entire game without dying, and only snagging the basically mandatory tier 1 upgrades (execute people from stealth, shoot fires and barrels to make them explode). You can also upgrade the rune slots on your weapons, because killing orcs to get powerful runes is one of the most fun parts of the game.
More notes after the jump.
Skyblock is a Minecraft mod where you must survive with only a single tree, a few blocks of dirt, a bucket, a block of lava, and a block of water.
You are also suspended in a void of infinite space, so if you ever fall, you die.
Can you build and irrigate a farm with the very limited space and resources you have? Can you make the tools you need without exhausting the single tree you’ve been given?
Skyblock turns Minecraft into a half-puzzle, half-survival sim.
Thanks to tumblr user skyler150 for suggesting this!
My wife Ashley Davis once accidentally invented a new type of Minecraft playthrough.
One night, while out foraging for coal, she got lost and couldn’t find her way home. She knew she’d build enough monuments and torch trails to be seen from a pretty decent distance, so she came up with a new goal: to find her home at all costs.
That said, she did this before you could craft maps, so she never found her home and died alone and frightened a few hours later.
But the idea is pretty neat.
This Kotaku article summarizes the quest of CezoramLHS, who decided to capture and contain an Elder Guardian instead of outright killing or fleeing from him.
This involved crafting a TON of invisibility potions to avoid being targeted by the Guardian (who can, of course, kill you in one hit), shoving the Guardian into an inescapable hole, building an aquarium, and then building a minecart track to transport the Guardian from his temporary holding cell into the far snazzier aquatic holding cell.
I now want to play Minecraft again.
Active Worlds is an old, abandoned MMO.
Youtuber vinesauce visited it for fun.
He met what seemed to be an NPC.
