What have you done in a video game that you shouldn't have been able to?

[aozgolo]

So let's exclude any sort of cheating. This is more in the realm of "clever use of game mechanics". Things like exploring an area never meant to be seen, beating a boss fight you are meant to lose, bypassing a big chunk of game, or other tricks you pull off not thought of by the game designers.

Let's hear your stories of when you "outsmarted the game"

 

[iwinatlife]

Does mountain climbing in old vanilla wow count as cheating? Because my friends and I spent hours walking along world seams to get atop Ironforge where there was a little airport that was never supposed to be accessible. It also allowed you to leap of the main gate of Ironforge which was fun as a mage because you could then ice block half way down to be frozen in midair.

 

[DrownedAmmet]

So let's exclude any sort of cheating. This is more in the realm of "clever use of game mechanics". Things like exploring an area never meant to be seen, beating a boss fight you are meant to lose, bypassing a big chunk of game, or other tricks you pull off not thought of by the game designers.

Let's hear your stories of when you "outsmarted the game"

I'm not sure if these were never thought of by the developers, but I did a lot of stupid stuff in the Deus Ex reboot to get past places I didn't have the augs for. Mostly super jumping over walls, stacking boxes, or tossing mines behind giant boxes, I brute forced my way to a lot of that games secrets. I think they designed it so there are multiple ways to get by, but there is usually one Aug that would solve the problem.
I never got the strength mod that let you move the giant refigerator sized boxes, I would just super jump and wedge myself in there until I squeezed through

 

[aozgolo]

Does mountain climbing in old vanilla wow count as cheating? Because my friends and I spent hours walking along world seams to get atop Ironforge where there was a little airport that was never supposed to be accessible. It also allowed you to leap of the main gate of Ironforge which was fun as a mage because you could then ice block half way down to be frozen in midair.

Wall jumping in WoW was partly what inspired the thread. In Wrath of the Lich King there was a world explorer achievement I got at level 75, 2 levels before you could use flying mounts in Northrend, of which some locations "only accessible by air" were required to get said achievement.

 

[aozgolo]

In MK2 on SNES, if you timed it just right the losing character could perform moves (including some finishing moves) on the winner. It made for some interesting scenarios to say the least.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

Ehhhh.... Not sure if it counts but in RE4 in the fight against Krauser I'd cheese the boss in the early fight with a hilarious trick of jumping over a window only for him to follow me and then I'd jump back and we'd just do that for a while. I think I was able to just pop a shot at him once every time I jumped over the window and just did that over and over til I triggered the next stage of the fight.

 

[Bad Jim]

I've done speedruns of the missions in Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising. The most abusable mechanic is that ingame cutscenes do not pause the action, they just switch the camera to a fixed position and make your units invincible. With a bit of planning you can bum rush heavily defended bases with unarmored units and have a well timed cutscene keep them alive.

 

[go-10]

Deus Ex Human Revolution one hit killing the final boss
Mario Kart 7, jumping in the water to have Lakitu pick me up and put me and the end of the first lap and doing it over and over finishing the race in 15 seconds... it worked online too, I think a lot of people hated me
Borderlands 1, killing Crawmerax with Lilith by spamming shots from the map ledge where he isn't programed to go to
Mega Man, rapidly pausing and unpausing the game to reset animations and have bosses take multiple hits from one single shot

there's probably lots more but from the top of my head that's what I remember

 

[happyninja42]

Original Thief game, final boss "fight"

The most common strategy by players, is to simply toss down some moss arrows on the ritual circle, so the Trickster doesn't notice you are stealing the ritual item.

I however, decided to go cat burglar style, and went around to this one rocky protrusion to the side of the ritual, in the shadows. I climbed on top of it, and realized that the rope arrows would stick in the roof. So, I shot a few rope arrows, heading towards the ritual center, then made like Pitfall, and jumped from rope to rope, until I was hanging over the ritual center. I slid down the rope (in my head I was hanging on by my feet), and snatched the item.

For some reason, I couldn't jump back the way I came, maybe it was just bad aiming or what, but I kept falling and getting spotted, so I just hung there instead. This turned out to be even more amusing, because the final bit is the Trickster looking up at the ceiling, while standing in the center and yelling "I've been betrayed!!" before he dies. Since I was hanging there, it felt like a classic movie climax, where the villain looks over, sees the sneaky hero waving at him with the MacGuffin, and then dying. So I, again, imagined my guy was hanging there, ritual item in hand, and flipping off the Trickster as he looked up and saw him there, realizing he'd been tricked.

It was a most enjoyable moment for me.

 

[Chimpzy_v1legacy]

Deus Ex Human Revolution one hit killing the final boss

Zapping Zhao right through her glass shield with the Laser Gun. Good times.

Also in the same game, Jaron Namir is vulnerable to takedowns while he's vaulting over walls. You can provoke him into doing it, run up close and if he's still in mid-air, a quick tap on the takedown button will net you a 1HKO.

Bit of a 'guide dang it', since the other bosses taught you not to straight run towards them and try a takedown, including Namir himself in any other situation.

 

[Xprimentyl]

I bought Final Fantasy VIII on PC when it first came out in ?99. It was the first FF game I?d ever played, so I didn?t know how anything worked, including the money (Gil) system, but I noted that I had something like, I dunno, a BILLION Gil right from the start. I didn?t know how much things cost in a FF world, maybe it was like the Japanese Yen where a stick of gum costs 10,000 Yen or something. So, I just progressed as if it was normal. I noticed in the early shops, the most expensive items were maybe 1,000 Gil, and I remember thinking ?man, I?ve got a lot of Gil for basic items to only cost 100 Gil; maybe weapons or other items will cost MILLIONS?? Fast-forward to the first dream sequence where you play as Laguna, and my PC crashed to the desktop at the exact same moment every single time. After trying about 10 times with the same result, I emailed tech support (yes, this was 1999 before you could Google everything,) and it turns out I?d had some rare glitch that occurred during install, and the solution was to reinstall. I had to start the game over, starting with the paltry few hundred Gil I was supposed to start out with the first time; wish I?d known I was living like a FF king; I?d have appreciated it more?

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

In FFXII you can 1shot bosses by chaining multiple quickenings back to back from about 20 hours into the game or so. Quickenings in general were too broken, the one playthrough I managed to beat the game in I forbid myself from using them at all, as well as those auto battle systems which could be set up to play the game for you such that it was nothing more than a walking simulator.

 

[PacDwell]

Quake - Rocket Jumping wasn't something which was intended by the developers, but became a vital skill.

Deus Ex - Using limpet mines to climb buildings. If I remember correctly, in Tokyo you could climb a building and an NPC was up there.

 

[Sniper Team 4]

The first Dragon Rider boss in Dark Souls II can be one-shot in a way. Found out that you can see him for a bridge in the level, and if you have an insane amount of arrows, you can snipe him from there until he has literally 1 hp. Then you just walk into the room and sneeze on him.

Not sure if that really counts though, because once you get him down to that, he raises his shield so you can't shoot him anymore, so it's possible the developers knew about it.

 

[Mcgeezaks]

I'm pretty sure everyone who played WoW back then did this:


Ignore the 12yo edit, I was 13.

 

[CaitSeith]

Once I was helping in battling the Iron Giant boss in Dark Souls, when we made it stagger near the edge of the platform. I gave it a couple of good hits on its knee, it fell backwards, past the edge of the platform, down into the abyss, and died instantly (saving us of doing half of the battle). Never felt like we had outsmarted the game more than then.

 

[Bad Jim]

I also found a rather weird way to beat the T-Rex in the first Tomb Raider game. If you stand on this 2 ft high rock the T-Rex just gives up for no reason. I guess the AI thinks you're firing from an elevated position and therefore it cannot get to you.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

This one time I was playing Dragon Age Inquisition and I was in the Hinterlands. I was on a little rocky ledge and I fell off. And landed on the top of an evergreen tree. And stopped. Took no fall damage and now I'm on solid ground, quiet a bit above the actual ground. And it was like a full other layer! I could walk all around, above enemies, over building.

So, to test it out, I went to fight the Frostback Dragon.

My NPCs got stuck somewhere being useless, so it was just el Frosty and my bow and magic. I could hit him, he couldn't hit me! Every blast and swipe blinked off the invisible floor between us while my arrows, doing not a whole lot of damage, were able to whittle him down. Took like 40mins.

Afterwards I had to find a castle tower at the same level as me and walk onto it. The game finally seemed to realize I was on ground. But there was no exit because it was just a decorative tower, so I had to jump off. Died.
But still, Dragon Kill!

 

[WhiteFangofWhoa]

Sequence breaking in AM2R is probably the most recent feat.

Any beam except for the Ice beam can be skipped, but that's not really much of a break. No, the real challenge comes if you skip the Space Jump and use Shinesparks (aka Speed Booster jumps) for everything you're supposed to use Space Jump for. You also get to skip the most difficult non-Metroid boss in the game as a bonus. And yes, I did get the 'secret message' in Metroid Fusion too, but obviously the developers planned for that sequence break, even if they made it hard as hell to actually achieve.

It might be patched now, but when I was big into The Old Republic, I found a hidden path above the Imperial starting base on Quesh that could get you outside the 'barrier' of mountains designed to keep you in. You could run for miles outside the zone borders, but I never found it useful for much aside from reaching a datalog you normally have to fight an elite boss to reach, or perhaps sneaking past the nearly invincible Republic guards to get into their starting base and say hi to the Republic players there. Too bad it's on the least populated world in the game.