Are there any games you don't play as it was intended to be played? If so, what game and how?

The Witcher 3 is just an RPG minigame you can play between rounds of Gwent.

Woman: My child! Please save my child!
Geralt: Care for a game of Gwent?
Woman: nod
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is just a horse riding simulator in between games of Farkle. A beautiful deadly simulator.
- Didn't knights of the old republic have farkle in too? It's a good game, and I guess just unfamiliar enough to bolt into a fantasy setting.
No it isn't! ヽ( `д´*)ノ

Stellaris. I cheat and mod to put my empire in the middle of the galaxy and have extremely overpowered player-only technologies. Then I just explore the galaxy and guide the AI; usually picking a favorite and try to help them grow e.g. a peaceful uplifted species in a very hostile galaxy. I've also done this in multiplayer where I played a bit of a Game Master role. Built a quest line as part of my custom mod that had lore and let players slowly discover me and the galactic core (cut off from the hyperlane network; this was all custom scripted before mods like the birchworld existed on the workshop)

When I was a kid I would play driver 3 but I hated the driving part and would mostly walk. I also played a skateboard game and ditch the board, dress up like a spy or specops guy, and run around roleplaying various scenarios in my imagination (because I didn't have any games at the time that would let me stealth or run on rooftops, which is all I wanted)

That way of playing Stellaris sounds really cool! It makes me want to install Stellaris again
- Don't do it. It's a turned base game that artificially stretches itself into an RTS in order to fool you into thinking there's more complexity than there is. Each playthrough should take 30% of the time that it does because the devs are aware they've created a spreadsheet game and are trying to hide that fact.
Your way of playing Stellaris gives me similar vibes to this person on my original thread
I like to play crusader kings II from the point of view of God. Using console commands, sketchy cheat mod, and knowing the right game mechanics you can make characters do all types of crazy stuff. Using the “observe” console command let’s you play as a spectator, you can use the “play” command followed by a character ID and you will jump into playing as that character. I like to find a character, give them insane stats, and give them all of the best traits, make them immortal and then spectate for a few hundred years and see what my chosen one made the world into. I also like to try to determine before hand what I want them to do, like becoming emperor of brittania or whatever, and see how close I can get from just 1 or 2 interactions with them.
- I also like to try to determine before hand what I want them to do, like becoming emperor of brittania or whatever, and see how close I can get from just 1 or 2 interactions with them.
  Reminds me of the beginning of the book The Ellimist Chronicles.

Going back a while - Monster Truck Madness 2 was a great game of exploration if you just drove off in a random direction rather than doing that silly racing stuff :-)

The maps were big, and there was no time limit, so you could just go and do your own thing ... a favourite made-up mini-game was sliding around a frozen lake on the winter map.

Yes. I did this with Monster Truck Madness and still remember the opening announcer guy.
I also did this with Big Red Racing, Diddy Kong Racing, and Rallisport Challenge.
- Also did this with the first Monster Truck Madness and Big Red Racing. And Motocross Madness. Seems these games were just built for that. Only had demo versions though, so just the one stage to explore.
- Carmageddon was really good for it, too.
  In modern gaming I've clocked up about 400 hours on Snowrunner, half of the game is intentionally exploring with trucks (albeit a lot slower, lol)
Have you played Mario kart world?
- I haven't, can't say I've ever heard of it!
  (I've got Mario Kart 8 on the WiiU, that's about it!)

GTAV. I don't care for the story or the shooting aspect, I just love to drive or walk around. I can't do either irl, so I love it when games give me the option.

Cyberpunk 2077 is also good for this IMO. Sometimes I deliberately avoid fast traveling and just drive to my destination to take in the sights on the way.
- I'm not sure I've ever fast traveled in Cyberpunk or Spider-Man
Flying. In san andreas it was so cool, and then later in gtav I just boggled at how the old 'fog' trick wasn't needed. Every time I got on, trying to steal the military jet was the first thing I'd do.
I haven’t really played V, but other GTA games I just treat like arcade games where I start by stealing some car and try to stay away from the cops and steal bigger/cooler shit for as long as I can without getting caught

Just Cause 3

I fire it up just to drive aound / grapple-hook float for an hour or more

I like car surfing, for the scenery.
I also enjoy firing tethers to wreck other cars as we go along, for the entertainment.
Or tow a few, that's fun too.
And if you have the DLC that gets you the jet powered wing glider it gets really fun to just try to glide as close to the ground as possible!

New Super Mario Bros. (For the Nintendo DS), in the multiplayer battle mode.

There is a multiplayer mode where you fight over collecting stars in 6 different maps, using the main game’s mechanics and powerups.

In one of these maps, there are bullet bill launchers. One of the powerups is a mini mushroom that makes you tiny, and when you are tiny you just harmlessly bounce of enemies when you jump on them instead of killing them. That lets you ride the bullet bill, repeatedly bouncing off it. The multiplayer maps loop, so you do this indefinitely, and every time you get back to the launcher, it will add another bullet to your train.

My brother and I would deliberately avoid collecting stars, and instead try to make the longest bullet train and try to stay in the air as long as possible.

Quake / Quake World was really the epitome of "not how it was intended to be played". It introduced zigzag, wallhug and bunny jump through some clever exploitation of game mechanics, and completely changed its game play plus that of future fps games of the time. And people would just come up with stupid maps where you could do fps-parkour. I often did it myself for hours on end, just jumping around a map alone or with friends while chatting or listening to music.

A very short demo of how crazy it could get, speed indicator top right. 320 was the default movement speed.

Q3Defrag vids still blow my mind. I can strafe jump somewhat consistently, but then I watch stuff like the team trick jumping in the "Event Horizon" series and it's just humbling. I tried some simpler strafe maps recently (there's surprisingly still a couple active Defrag servers out there) but I'm still awful at it - and rusty now to boot. Couldn't maintain speed to clear the larger hops, or when I did then I couldn't air strafe well enough to be heading the right way for the next. Air strafing was a lot easier to do in CounterStrike & Source.
I'm pretty sure the "bhop" and "surf" maps in CS/S directly benefited from the same physics quirks, being descendants of id's engines. I was a surf_skyworld addict for a while. Just the same it was easy to throw on some tunes and lose a few hours surfing with friends on some of the 24/7 servers, back when CS:S was in its prime.
- I was a CS player first and a Quake player second. VQ3 movement never really hit me the same because of my CS background, but CPMA movement got me into defrag.
  There is also a game called MomentumMod. Free on steam and it has all those quake and source engine movement minigames.
  Rocket jump, bhop, defraq, surf and others. It has lobbies to play with other people and keeps leaderboards. Highly recommend checking it out when you next want to play any of these gamemodes.
  Booting up the old defraq mod has its nostalgia tho, with the rabbit and all 😄
- Forgot to mention, back then we would optimize fps for refresh rate. 120Hz CRT monitors with 120 fps constant was the sweet spot for a while (until people started playing in multitudes of 60 fps on LED-based displays). It's entirely possible that if your fps is not optimal, you can't clear larger gaps or gain as much momentum in QW/Q3/CPMA or similar.
  I've never played HLDM or CS, so I'm not that familiar with derivatives in those games.

No Mans Sky exclusively in creative mode.

I don't care for getting resources or any of that. I just want to build stuff and explore. it would be 10x better if they made building regular ships as easy as the new ones and that's my only gripe, having to sit in a station to wait for a ship to show up with a part you want. It's an incredibly idiotic system for creative mode.

Not me but my friend. In any game that has a crafting component they will hone in, ignore the story, and just play the crafting. If it has a marketplace they will sell their creations and basically become an NPC shopkeeper for other people.

My friend and I got into Wurm Online and we went way too hard doing this. Like to the point we managed to upset half the server (and I'm not exaggerating, there were many forum threads about us lol).
Has your friend ever tried EVE Online? I guess a better question follows: should they ever try EVE Online?
- As far as I'm aware they haven't tried EVE online. It doesn't seem up their alley as they hate PvP but maybe I should suggest it if the crafting system is engaging.

I enjoyed playing Baldur's gate 3 as a rogue, playing it like a assassin's creed game. Nothing but stealth attacks and running away. Never get into a full combat if possible.

I won't do the main quest in Starfield. I don't want any special powers, and those Foundation guys are lame. I'm like level 58 and I've never found an artifact. I do enjoy killing people and stealing ships tho. Miner character, exclusively Cutter, Arc Welder, and Rivet Gun.

I won't stick the chip in my head in Cyberpunk. Nope. I know its got a virus on it. Just seems like a really really bad idea. That leaves me stuck in the first part of the game, because you can't break out of it anymore since the patches. I might mod it someday. (Any mod suggestions are welcome, plz!)

Wait, really? You have to choose to put the chip in your head for the game to continue? That's literally as far as I got and I was like "yeah no fuck that, why would I put that in my brain"... I stopped playing shortly after so I never realized.
- There's like 700 Cyberpunk mods. I looked through some last night. Surely there must be one that jailbreaks me past that. I haven't found it tho.

I was never a fan of how StarCraft 1 is supposed to be played.

It had a map editor that allowed scripting and people used it to make tons of other games inside of StarCraft like tower defense games, drawing party games like you would see decades later on mobile, and RPGs of every franchise imaginable. There's literally thousands of unique games out there on archive websites.

That's also how DotA started, except in Warcraft 3.
Yeah, the 'use map settings' was by far the most fun I had in starcraft. Eventually someone showed me how to play the actual game well, and I went and steamrolled the campaign, and then it was back to the fun.
"Paintball"
Everyone is a ghost, no cloaking/energy, everyone dies in one hit, FFA / All vs All, fog of war on, forested map, last alive wins.
Maybe a proto MOBA, by today's nomenclature?
People would argue that playing as green or a color close to green was an unfair advantage.
I also remember various... basically obstacle course maps, which were races to the finish, but... you had to understand various game glitches to be able to pass many of these obstacles.
I'm absolutely ass at RTS, but I really really love Starcraft and Warcraft lore. Every few years, I'll replay WC3 and Starcraft 1 and 2 using cheats. I use as few cheats as possible so that I still experience as much of the game as intended, but I still make sure I can't lose.

I've never completed the main quest line in any Elder Scrolls game.

The majority of my playtime in Oblivion was spent breaking into NPC houses and stealing their shit. I'd stalk targets based on who had the most valuables in their pockets when I'd see them wandering in the cities. I basically played the game as a stealing simulator, only ever completing the Thieves guild quest line and the Dark Brotherhood line when I wanted to be add some murder to my thieving.

I don't think this is uncommon with the Elder Scrolls games.

I'm kind of similar in that I basically always "subclass" as a kleptomaniac.

I love just driving around doing nothing in Cyberpunk 2077.

It's also accidentally a good trainer for motorcycle skills. Not that its physics are good. They're not. It does have one thing that is really useful: traffic tends to pull out on you and do unpredictable things.
That makes it a pretty good simulator for training against target fixation. You tend to drive/ride towards whatever you're looking at. When someone pulls out on you, then you will tend to look at the car and hit it. If you train yourself to look to the side, you will tend to miss it. This is a good skill for drivers, and can make the difference between life and death on motorcycles (and motorcycles pretending to be ebikes).
Most other games with a driving element don't have cars pulling out on you a lot the way Cyberpunk 2077 does. Makes it worse as an overall game, but it does have some value.
It is a beautiful map

The Bongcloud chess story reminded me of the StarCraft 2 player printf. Theoretically it is intended play, but he will start every single game with a cannon rush.

A cannon rush is when you attack your enemy's base with immobile cannons that are actually meant to be used defensively. When the enemy doesn't know that they are being cannon rushed it can be devastating, especially for inexperienced players. But when you halfway know what you're doing and spot it quickly enough it is easy to defend.

But printf plays at a level where he's not likely to encounter inexperienced opponents. And anyone who has any interest in the game is very likely to know who printf is. And he never hides his identity and he always opens with a cannon rush. And he's still super successful with it.

He's played it so often with so many variations he can probably (maybe he does) teach the top players a few things about that strategy. And although it's always the same it's still interesting to watch him play.

This is wild. I watch a ton of professional Starcraft on YouTube and had no idea! I'll look up some matches, tonight.
- Look for Pig's King of Cannons series.
Another somewhat similar story is WolfeyVCG and Perish Song in competitive Pokémon.

Picking up taxi passengers in GTA V is fun. Especially when I drive them off a cliff.

I have spent days up on days of irl time looking for bigfoot in that and san Andreas.

I grew up with Zelda Ocarina of Time, so now every time I feel like playing it I use a randomiser to put all the items in random locations. It makes every playthrough more unique and interesting.

Neat, which emulator do you use and how does the mod work? The master quest version was amazing to me because it changed things up like that.
- Last time I used the recomp, which has the randomiser built in. The game looks and runs much nicer through it.
  https://www.shipofharkinian.com/

Sorta along the same lines, but, I love how differently my husband and I play Rust. He's on his official server doing what the game is meant for, and I'm just on my pVE building a villa/farm.

We need the farm update on console. I need pies and chickens. With the jungle update, my Lenovo Go can no longer handle Rust at all, so I'm back on console. It's missing some of my favorite features for farm build. I want to chase a chicken for that elusive egg fresh after wipe! And the flowers! Oh...

You've inspired me to play Rust after dropping the game due to its toxicity
- PvE is a completely different story. It did take me a bit to find a server I liked though. I just like building things. I always put out a "take what you need" box for passerbys, and I've had folks just come into my house to check it out, and drop me skinned Aks and I'll drop em teas and shit. It's fun.
Exactly! Rust has so many deep mechanics that aren't PvP. I have over 3k hours myself, and I'd bet 1/3 of that is with a wire tool in my hand making logic circuits.
- On console, we dont have art painting. I've seen people do different things with colored wire, and make signs/art that way. I haven't tried it myself yet, but it seems really cool. I've gotten very fast at hooking up electricity/water for a farm. I forget you can color the wire.
  I've probably 500 hours or so, maybe more of I combine my PC/Console time. But there are monuments I still have never visited lol

Yes! Action RPGs and I ignore all the RPG because, despite my thorough research, I've been bamboozled by COMBO MAD videos.

Fuck you, NieR:Automata—I'm not collecting 5 mushroom and 3 pyrite or whatever else you want me to collect. I paid for an action game and I'm getting one!

I feel that one. Let me search every corner for some bullshit small item while this super emotional chick wails in an epic aria in the background, fraught with the magnitude of the world's destiny at stake...

Back when I first played Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, I spent way too much time atop some stairs and jump-kicking an orc down, who'd ragdoll down, get up then come back up, only to get another jump kick to the face. I spent several minutes laughing

When I was ~7 years old, I had a Nascar 94 demo for PC, my main mode of play was running the wrong way and crashing as hard as I could on another car, watching all the pieces flying was fun

I also wonder whether there's a "wrong" way to play dorf fortress, since I've tried a lot of stupid shit (it's only stupid if it doesn't work, so...)

Lastly, there's Skyrim with, uh, specific mods

Dwarf Fortress, so much. But I agree; I don't think that type of play is unintended. It's a fantasy world simulator first and game second (if at all). There are absolutely no objectives in the game at all; it's entirely self generated.
Like, what's more fun than chopping down all the trees, getting the elves raging mad at you, then holing up in your giant underground+inverted pyramid "hourglass" base while completely ignoring the siege going on above/below you while digging deep to get magma pumps set up all the way to the inverted pyramid so you can flood the surface with magma and kiil all the elves with fire, without having a single military dwarf the entire time because you can't be bothered to figure out the military menus/training when it's not as much !!!FUN!!! as mechanical defense options (lava traps.)
Is that a game, or just a sandbox? idk, but I love it. I haven't played in a while b/c of life commitments (kids, mostly), but I look forward to playing again.
Apparently military is a lot simpler, now, but I can't be bothered. Traps are so much more !!!FUN!!! and I totally haven't drowned my complete base with a failed water trap design killing all my dwarves. Not recently. (Mostly because I haven't played recently.)
- without having a single military dwarf the entire time because you can't be bothered to figure out the military menus/training when it's not as much !!!FUN!!! as mechanical defense options (lava traps.)
  Are you me? Lol
- Since magma would often kill my FPS, I'd sometimes settle for the next best trap: zig-zagging corridors full of dwarven atom smashers to deal with sieges

This probably isn't what you mean, but I usually only make like, 3 or 4 military units in Civ 6 and play entirely peaceful, zero war games. And yes I play on deity difficult

I doubt it. I can say I played a ridiculous amount of blitzball in final fantasy 10. Like I very well may have spent more time playing blitzball than the main game.

I used to just drive around in GTA: Vice City with an appropriate 80s soundtrack.

Edit: drop some recommendations if you're of a mind for "appropriate 80s soundtrack". Note: Crockett's Theme and In The Air Tonight are already locked in the playlist.

'Temptation' by Heaven 17

I wanted to play a Mass Effect game, but I suck at cover-shooters. So I put it on easy and ran around punching my way through the game.

I make custom maps in Civilization that essentially turn it into a tower defense

Very interesting. Are those custom maps on the Steam Workshop?

Civilization VI, I usually make "multiplayer" games so that I can set every AI's team and difficulty, and I'll make a somewhat large map with way too many players, each on teams of two or three, and then one AI will be the god-emperor-king that we all have to band together to defeat.

I like to look for secrets in Action Half-Life maps

I just remembered another one - the original Car and Driver game (way before Need for Speed 1) was a vector 3D affair that ran at full speed on a 386.

One of the courses was the San Dimas Mall parking lot - I worked out that I could use the "drop camera" command in one spot, and then it became a radio control car simulator since the 'dropped' camera followed the car being driven :-)

Deus Ex, I play as a superpowered & auhmented supersoldier

I beat X-COM: Enemy Unknown by sniping the final boss in the first turn with an 8% headshot through a door. In the process, I skipped what I discovered later was a room full of aliens you were supposed to fight before taking out that enemy.

any rpg I can just grind the starting are y to max level, I do. otherwise I grind to max-reasonable level in each area before progressing.

I don't like to lose.

I'm currently experience grinding random low level encounters the wilderness in Arcanum. As a speech/lockpicking character, I need high success rates with those skills in the actual quest areas since I'm no good in combat (and the combat feels pretty terrible anyway).

I remember doing the warthog jump an awful lot in Halo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGQIQljaAc0

Beamng drive.

I don't actually know the point of this game but it's awesome.

Well, given that a lot of people in this thread are basically just saying " go sight seeing / abandon storyline and embrace roleplaying "...

I'm gonna go with basically "do anything" in Kenshi.

There is no thing you are supposed to be doing, beyond possibly 'don't die'.

There is no main storyline to follow.

You... just exist.

You can sure find a lot of things to do, places to see, and people to meet, basically quests to undertake... but that is all entirely up to you.

So there is no wrong, or right way to play Kenshi.

The world just kind of... happens to you, and then you react.

Or, maybe you have some notion of what you want to do, and then you try to do, and then the world happens to you during that.

Imagine either a single player MMO, or an immersive sim that focuses on an immerisive world of factions and individuals, which can play out many possible ways, which you can guide and steer those outcomes... but nothing 'has' to happen, there are no threads of prophecy that cannot be severed.

Theoretically, you could kill basically everyone... maybe?

You could build a city, run some kind of farm or mining operation, become a warlord, raise and command an army, wander as a trader or trading caravan, hunt for lore and artefacts, become the strongest warrior, best thief or assassin...

... or be eaten by cannibals or beak things, experience robot racism, be taken captive and forced into literal slavery at a prison camp, have your limbs peeled off, replace them with robot limbs, get incinerated by a misfiring orbital laser platform... or befriend a mentally challenged ... sort of bugmanthing who has been outcast from his hive, but is very endearing...

Or just be friends with a bonedog.

I have actually seen one Japanese youtuber basically just turn their playthrough of Kenshi into a kind of semi-improvised anime.

They'll have 15 to 30 minute episodes and write in some dialogue for their 2 person party, and then have a vocaloid type thing speak it, and they'll do like ren py visual novel framing / blocking, overlaid on top of the game, with more detailed drawn art of the characters.

Unexpected shit happens fairly frequently, and they just roll their characterization along with it, into a semi ad libbed plot/narrative.

That... is a 'way' to play Kenshi.

I really like Dark Souls/Elden Ring multiplayer PvP. I especially like Dark Souls 3 and it's still pretty active, at least on PC! Hosts can choose to be invaded by intentionally using an ember and the dried finger and even try to "gank" the invader by teaming up with other players to fight them with a massive advantage. It's fun to invade these worlds and have a duel, or try to overcome a gank. I got pretty decent at fighting, spacing, parrying, weapon-swapping during animations for massive critical damage, etc.

But the game will also ember you after beating bosses, opening you up to invasions even if you didn't want that. And invading is such an aggressive act that I don't find it fun to hunt down and kill someone who doesn't even want to PvP. So when I encounter someone who very obviously doesn't want to fight me (and I can't entice them to attack), I'll just follow them around in underwear or a crazy outfit, staying out of the way and gesturing and yelling by using the carvings at all the PvE enemies they kill. You can also drop items for other players. It's a silly, time-wasting thing to run around until the host dies or goes to fight a boss and you get kicked out of their world...

Helping as an invader is all I do. I can't bring myself to attack someone else who just wanted to play with their friends. Seamless coop was the fucking best thing to ever happen to elden ring.
- Its funny how much of the random PVP crowd still cries about Seamless Coop. I have been playing open PVP games since Ultima Online and frankly open PVP has never been fun. See the fans of this mechanic will say "well you're just afraid to take risks carebear" but in reality they're the ones closer to carebear mentality than the people running valuables through risky places. The victim is ironically the only person taking any real risk, because the attacker can choose their battles and take only equipment they're willing to lose.
  Once I figured this out I built myself to trick people into attacking me and then they'd find out I'm entirely specced for player killing, usually much too late to do anything about it. The tears from the people who call others carebears are the best tears of all.

Fallout 4

I've got a lot of mods installed (200-ish). The commonwealth in my version of the game is absolute hellscape with radioactive storms that kill visibility, pitch black nights, hoards of feral ghouls, and upgunned raiders. What it means is that I actually invest in building proper settlements now. I console command for all the resources because I can't be bothered picking through trashpiles. With all the mods, I have huge concrete walls surrounding my settlements which have comfortable bars and hangout areas. It can be very comfortable just chilling in a settlement while a storm rages outside.

When I do go outside I'm playing additional mod loaded content most of the time and doing my best to ignore that default story.

Oh man this made me dust off an old memory

There was a PS2 game my dad had called Dirt to Daytona. It's a racing game where you're supposed to play the career mode going from driving dirt track beaters to modifieds, trucks and finally becoming a pro nascar racer. You can tweak the cars, paint them, and try to get sponsors to fund you before your money dries up.

It was a cool game, but all I did was play the quick race mode. I would turn off all the caution flags and played it as a crash and pit manuver simulator lol

Back when i played Hearthstone (briefly) my friend and i woulf pass until the 10th turn and then try to one-shot eachother before the other is able to.

Any game that has a fishing mechanic will be used as a fishing game.

This. So much this.
For me, the peak fishing game was Final Fantasy XV :D

on some of the later pokemon games i was mostly farming berries, quite obsessively, and the semi fun end game "avenue. rather than battling online.

In the item-farming regard, it really did feel like Sword and Shield copied Crystal's homework without understanding the assignment.
- i stopped playing after ultra and moon.

Persona 3 FES, rush each block of Tartarus, then hyperfocus on the social sim side of the game for the next in-game month. Rinse and repeat.

Final Fantasy XII, go out of my way to powerlevel, but then mix up multiple powerleveling methods in one. Also spending an excessive amount of time reading the in-game lore and accidentally triggering the eternal delay glitch in the game by trying an unrelated cheese against a superboss.

Wait, you're not supposed to play Persona 3 like that?
- We are? 🙃
  Plot makes such a big deal out of Tartarus, battles are so hard and characters get tired so quickly (FES player here) that I get the impression multiple visits are required. Given that and finding amusing to do so, as well as liking the game's social sim side, I'd usually beat each new block in a single in-game day, at most two if Elizabeth gave any new missions.

When i was a kid, every RTS skirmish game was about building an empire and keeping in control the CPU opponent in a small space. At some point it was more like playing a city building game.

Not sure if this counts, because I'm not sure if there is a wrong way to play Fallout. I am going through New Vegas again, but for the first time in years. Completely disregarding the main storyline. Just wandering the Mojave, helping people as I go. Like David Carradine in Kung Fu. Mostly trying to do things peacefully, and gain as much karma as I can. Completely opposite of how I normally play Falmouth game. I need all that karma to offset how many people I've eaten, which is tremendous. Don't die around my character if you want an open casket. I gave myself lockpick and science skills via the command line, because this playthrough is about my interest in where the storyline take me, not about grinding to be able to open a lock.

I spend a solid amount of time in RDR2 camping. I’ll go to town, gather some supplies, and head out in a random direction with no map.

Gather food as I go, hunt for game as I find it, craft supplies, and live off the land.

You can take multiple in-game days to get places and even better is choosing a mountain or similar in the distance and making that your destination.

You still come across plenty of side missions with this approach because of how much is going on in that game, but it feels quite genuine when you do.

I play most MMOs as Auction House PvP.

In Super Sprint arcade, on the track below, once I get enough lead up on the 3rd or 4th lap, I would enter the red arrow 360 loop and then just keep spinning the steering-wheel left. This makes the car do 2-3 donuts around the loop, until going out of control backwards to explode into the barrier.

Always worth it.

That game is near impossible to control. The fact that you were able to get enough of a lead to do donuts* is just mind-blowing to me.
- Or as I recently learned, in the Midwest they call this "whipping a shitty" which seems appropriate here.

Not me, but there’s a great example of this in chess.

There’s an opening called the Bongcloud. You move the pawn in front of your king out for your first move, and then for your second move you move your king up a square. It’s memed as being the strongest opening possible, but it’s actually almost the worst 2 opening moves you can possibly make. Because modern chess does have a large online component and the current best players are young and like memes, it has been played in tournaments, which means that if you play it in an up to date chess programme the programme will name it as the Bongcloud.

A lot of people seem to think that it’s called the Bongcloud because you’d have to be stoned to play it. But almost all chess openings are named after one of three things: a person, a place, or an animal. In this case, the Bongcloud is named after a person - Lenny Bongcloud.

Lenny Bongcloud is a now-inactive user of chess.com. He would always open with the moves described above. That’s because, unbeknownst to them, Lenny wasn’t playing the same game as his opponents. They were trying to checkmate him. He was trying to walk his king to the opposite side of the board as quickly as possible. If he gets checkmated, he loses. If he gets his king to the other side of the board he counts it as a victory and resigns.

So, yeah. One of the oldest known games in the world has an opening the “official” name of which comes from a jokey alias adopted by someone who was deliberately playing the game wrong.

I don't play it any more, but the only thing I did for most of my time playing The Sims was cheat in money and design baller houses. Couldn't have given less of a shit about the Sims themselves.

I'd argue that is a totally valid way of playing - half the game is designing homes after all. A quarter is doing the life sim thing and the other quarter is removing ladders from pools.

Money generated from Community Chest/Chance goes to Free Parking and players can buy Jail.

All money not spent on rent to other players. Buy a property? Free parking. Buy houses? Free parking. Pay to get out of Jail? Free parking. Unmortgage a property? Free Parking.
For games where the game is background noise that you don't care about because you're there to have good conversation with friends. Because it makes the game last forever. And there are ridiculous reversals of fortune.

I love factory games. I have over a thousand hours in Factorio.

I've almost entirely avoided trains. I just build conveyer belts everywhere. Huge long world-spanning conveyer belts. I just dont like having to think about trains, when conveyer belts are so simple to use.

time to shill !automationgames@lemmy.zip which I mod
I would usually not be so promotional except Lemmy needs to grow and blah blah
Do you use as many conveyor belts as Josh does in Satisfactory?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-qqgRjfo3s