Greatest Gaming Achievement

Yeah, I know this should be about eventually getting to a BILLION exp points in Diablo II or some time record time racing through Doom or something..but my greatest gaming achievement was on the old Bullet Proof Software SNES cartridge game Pipe Dream.

It was a stoopid puzzle game, connect pipe to reach a goal, don't let the water spill. You scored a multiplier for using the "x" pieces and running water through them. And as you got to higher levels, you got accelerators, "slowdown" pipes, "break through the edge of the field and come out on the other side" pieces, etc, etc...all of which had scoring bonuses that combined and multiplied and so on.

I got pretty good at it, and one day I figured I was nearly at the very top level when I got a magical combination of scoring pieces, all run through multiple multipliers and when the water his the goal, the score started rising as fast as the display could display. So fast that the game crashed, locked up with a bizarre nonsense display on the screen. I scored so high I broke the game!!

So, even if it was a lame game, that was pretty damn cool.

But any games I could brag about would be very old school.

GREATEST OBSESSIVE USE OF THE MANUAL SAVE FUNCTION:
Beat X-Com with my original 6 Marines ALL ALIVE and in the final raiding party.

GREATEST RESCUE BY A 9-YEAR-OLD:
Beat Betrayal at Krondor after arriving at the final battle with 1 health, 3 mana and a stick (or close to it). Thing with that game was, for the two levels prior to the final fight, you HAD NO SAVE POINTS AND NO RESOURCES TO GAIN. Then it saved you at the last battle with whatever you had left. ******. I had been sharing gameplay with my sons and I had screwed it up, so I was determined to get out of it and tried over and over and over and over again, all night, till 6 in the morning. I was toally blurry when Son #1 came in and saw what I was doing. The cat was out of the bag, so I explained the situation and apologized. He studied it out for a while and suggested a strategy that actually (after about 10 more tries) beat the evil wizard (or whatever it was, don't even remember) and won the game. A fine shared victory.

GREATEST FAKE WIN:
Got into a little contest on a message board playing a free Miniature Golf game. We were all trying it and screenshotting the scorecards and posting them. It was 18 holes, about a par 44 or sth and it got competitive, as such things are wont to do. People were scoring in the low 30s for a while, couple of people broke 30, me included. Then I took one of the scorecards and did an almost perfect photoshop job on one that said 22...

Those folks tried for DAYS to get anywhere near that score. "Just in a zone, man." was what I told 'em. One smarty finally figured it out and did some detective work on the image to confirm the fakery. I laughed my ass off. No idea where they got the idea that nobody would be petty enough to pull a stunt like that. lololololol...

Oh, and

WORST USE OF AN OUT-OF-GAME RESOURCE:

There was a Genesis game called Fantasy Star, actually pretty popular in Japan. Kinda like a very early Final Fantasy game.

We'd bought the game used, and it came with the manual, and the previous owner (japanese name) had done a great job of drawing maps and putting tips IN THE MANUAL. And the kid was good. The maps helped, A LOT! We didn't exactly breeze through the game, it wasn't an easy one, but we did get to the end.

Only to realize that, given the final boss' hit points, and our strongest spell...we were several experience levels short of being able to beat him. How short?? Given the absolute maximum grind rate for gaining experience, we were AT LEAST 20 hours short of having the power to cast those spells with enough power to take out the final baddie. All because of how "easy" those maps and tips had made the game for us.

We quit. Too much grinding.

I don't have many braggable achievments in my gaming history. But I do recall after days of playing Madden '94 on the SNES being able to beat the All-Madden team with the Bucs on All-Madden difficulty. I do belive I wore out the Y button on that controller from all the high stepping.

I guess my next best would be getting all of the celestial weapons fully powered up in FFX, that took forever.

I just downloaded the original Fable game for Xbox (never played it, heard it was good) on my 360, I'm about 20 hours in and I've been thinking about going back and trying to finnish the whole game naked, but I'm not sure if I want to start over so I can do it.

I went 65-0 in an online game of Modern Warfare 2. I used a sniper setup.

I mostly just play Madden (stand alone, not online), but also enjoy the Elder Scrolls and Dragon Age games.

I suppose my greatest acheivement in the video game world was back in 2005-06. I was into WWE Smackdown vs Raw. I started making CAW (create a wrestler) attributes for guys that were not in the game. It got way out of hand and I ended up creating over 800 CAW attribute sets for wrestlers of all generations. (I spent hours every day researching wrestlers so I could create the attributes.)

I even started to have other people stealing them and taking credit for them on different sites.

The original CAW site has long been deleted, but if you search for the attributes, you can still find a couple sites that copied my attributes over. (i.e. http://caws.ws/forum/topic/714-wrestler-attributes-515-attributes/page__st__-20 )

As far as I know, it's the largest collection of attributes ever created. So I guess that's something .... maybe ... I guess.

zero24gravity wrote:

I mostly just play Madden (stand alone, not online), but also enjoy the Elder Scrolls and Dragon Age games.

I suppose my greatest acheivement in the video game world was back in 2005-06. I was into WWE Smackdown vs Raw. I started making CAW (create a wrestler) attributes for guys that were not in the game. It got way out of hand and I ended up creating over 800 CAW attribute sets for wrestlers of all generations. (I spent hours every day researching wrestlers so I could create the attributes.)

I even started to have other people stealing them and taking credit for them on different sites.

The original CAW site has long been deleted, but if you search for the attributes, you can still find a couple sites that copied my attributes over. (i.e. http://caws.ws/forum/topic/714-wrestler-attributes-515-attributes/page__st__-20 )

As far as I know, it's the largest collection of attributes ever created. So I guess that's something .... maybe ... I guess.

you should play Madden online it's a lot of fun. You can join leagues and stuff!

There used to be (before EA basically destroyed any competition and creativity in sports sims) a football game called Front Page Sports Pro Football. It was early 90s, and so it was graphically limited, but it was crazy editable...you could create and name your own players, set their attributes, and best of all design plays!! And not just "handoff to HB sweep" or "off tackle run" but down to the nitty-gritty of blocking assignments, including delayed blocks, fake blocks, pulls, etc., etc...that was the most fun of all.

Of course, the attribute editing was the great temptation...

So I walk in from work one day and my eldest son and his chinese buddy Shung Tsen were playing the game and laughing their asses off. I start watching and they were having a pretty good run of luck...fumbled kickoff recovered for touchdown, interception for touchdown, fumbled kickoff recovered at the 2 and one-play drive for a touchdown...weird.

Found out they had created a team of gay anorexics to play against a team they created combining all the best players from the 72 Dolphins, 85 Bears, 94 Niners, etc (and all tweaked up to 100 from that starting point) in an effort to win a game 1,000-to-0. They succeeded, the little freaks.

Of course, that isn't much worse than when I was playing Panzer General (great strategy game, like having WWII in a box!) and got in a tight spot that replay wasn't saving me from...so I obtained a hex editor to edit the attributes of my units (1st My Little Ponies, 22nd Rainbow Brite Armored, 5th Strawberry Shortcake Artillery, etc...). I not only got out of that tight spot but ruined the game forever, even before I rolled through Germany. Man, that was stupid.

Trollificus wrote:

GREATEST FAKE WIN:
Got into a little contest on a message board playing a free Miniature Golf game. We were all trying it and screenshotting the scorecards and posting them. It was 18 holes, about a par 44 or sth and it got competitive, as such things are wont to do. People were scoring in the low 30s for a while, couple of people broke 30, me included. Then I took one of the scorecards and did an almost perfect photoshop job on one that said 22...

Those folks tried for DAYS to get anywhere near that score. "Just in a zone, man." was what I told 'em. One smarty finally figured it out and did some detective work on the image to confirm the fakery. I laughed my ass off. No idea where they got the idea that nobody would be petty enough to pull a stunt like that. lololololol...

No way bro thats cool man! You still got this game?

My first job out of high school in '99 was at a Convergy's call center. I was billing/tech support for Sony Online Entertainment, but 99% of our calls were about the MMORPG EverQuest. We actually got paid to play the game, because we had to be able to answer questions and know what people were talking about. I thought the game sucked ass and never bothered playing until we discovered that we could log into peoples accounts and steal their gear. Ya, we were dicks. We also discovered that there was a crazy market on ebay for this crap. We were selling armor and gear for $300.00 to $400.00 per item. We had literally thousands of accounts we could hack into and steal from, and boy, did we ever. Sony caught on to what was going on (not us specifically) and made it impossible to continue doing, but not before we wracked up several thousand bucks. I did eventually get hooked on the game and ended up keeping the same character for almost 12 years. At that point Sony was keeping stats on all servers and was in the top 10 in the world for my class. Once I realized what that meant, I cancelled my subscription, sold my account, and tried not to be such a loser. (failed)

TroutBum wrote:

My first job out of high school in '99 was at a Convergy's call center. I was billing/tech support for Sony Online Entertainment, but 99% of our calls were about the MMORPG EverQuest. We actually got paid to play the game, because we had to be able to answer questions and know what people were talking about. I thought the game sucked ass and never bothered playing until we discovered that we could log into peoples accounts and steal their gear. Ya, we were dicks. We also discovered that there was a crazy market on ebay for this crap. We were selling armor and gear for $300.00 to $400.00 per item. We had literally thousands of accounts we could hack into and steal from, and boy, did we ever. Sony caught on to what was going on (not us specifically) and made it impossible to continue doing, but not before we wracked up several thousand bucks. I did eventually get hooked on the game and ended up keeping the same character for almost 12 years. At that point Sony was keeping stats on all servers and was in the top 10 in the world for my class. Once I realized what that meant, I cancelled my subscription, sold my account, and tried not to be such a loser. (failed)

How did I not see this? That's funny.

Every "great" video game achievement should generate a mix of pride and shame.