Dumb things you did in video games as a kid.

Don't worry, games are about having fun. Sure you weren't achieving the game's goals. But lives aren't that meaningful in Mario 64 anyway...

Actually not a bad idea for the most part! ^note Statusing the enemy is a waste of time in general. Having healing moves is a waste because you can use items. The only non-damage moves that's worth running is buffing, and even those are useless for single wild encounters.

edited 29th Mar '16 7:22:36 PM by Malco

I used to be terrified of the trap door to Bowser in the Dark World in Super Mario 64.

I used to be really afraid of Grunty's laugh when you hit "quit game". I would always turn off before I heard it.

When i first played RP Gs, i didn't realize after every battle, you were supposed to heal your party. As a result, my party got killed easily by the 1st boss.

I remember whenever playing one of the NES Mario games as a kid, I would always select two-players. Then would immediately and deliberately make Mario lose all of his lives against the first Goomba just so I could play the game with Luigi, because I thought he was cooler than Mario. (And even now I still prefer Luigi over Mario.)

I did that too!

This thread is for DUMB things you did, not SMART things.

Regarding playing with certain characters, I played the majority of times during the Nintendo 64 and GCN eras by choosing a female character even though I'm male. My cousin always asked me why I did that, and I told him it was because I liked choosing them. He then asked me why, and it always made me feel unconfortable, because regardless of the answer I would be damned. Nowadays the only female characters I've played as are Inkling Girl, Princess Daisy, Lucina and Dixie Kong.

My sisters once called me weird because Birdo is one of my go-to characters to play as in Mario Party or Mario Kart. (This is despite the fact that they both are Link and Pit mains respectively in Super Smash Bros. and my older sister's husband will always play as Peach if she's an available character.)

edited 8th Jul '16 10:05:39 AM by kablammin45

Speaking of Mario Kart, my cousins would tease me very often for maining Yoshi in Wii since they beat me all the time, so I decided to swap characters for one round out of spite. I ended up beating them as Baby Peach.

My standard defense method in action games when startled was to either stand still and spam a weapon or try and fail to turn around and run.

But but but but but Birdo is a guy! (Depending on who you ask.)

Anyway it may not be related to gender/sex of the character. It could be other things, like "Why would you ever play a villain?"

edited 16th Nov '16 2:03:39 AM by Malco

When I was a kid my cousin was playing The Legend of Zelda for NES and he told me if i used controller 2 i could play as the enemies. When Link died he said i beat him.

Whenever I played Super Mario Bros. 2 as a kid, I never played as Peach. Not because the little four-year-old boy that I was balked at the idea of playing as a girl in a video game, but because Peach's lose-a-life sprite scared the ever-living daylights out of me when I first saw it.

edited 14th Mar '17 7:42:13 AM by kablammin45

When I was a kid I played Warhammer 40000 Chaos Gate. Being all of 10 at the time, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, so I'd just equip my squad with the biggest, heaviest weapons I could afford. Then I'd promptly get them all killed because I had no idea about range, movement, armor vs damage, ammo, or anything of the sort.

I thought Peach's SMB2 death animation was cute, if you ask me. =<

Test Drive Off-Road 3:

• Instead of driving loops around Mount Fuji, I would try to climb to the top of Mount Fuji.
• I would drive around the wider areas in the Mayan ruins on the Yucatan track to try to take in the details. Or just mess around with the puddles
• Kept trying to climb up the side of a Mayan pyramid in a Chenowth DPV. It could not. Didn't stop me from trying repeatedly.

Wow, someone else played that game besides myself?

Apart from that I unfortinately committed no stupidity in that game.

Bringing back this old thread because someone linked to it in the dumb video game deaths one:

- In M.C. Kids, the McDonald's tie-in game, you can pick from two characters, Mick and Mack, who look different and play identically. I'm not even sure which was which name-wise, but I would always play as the the black kid because of a graphical limitation I found far more funny than it really was: See, he had a flat-top haircut that was rendered as pure black with no outline, so whenever you had him standing in front of something black in the background, his hair would completely disappear. Every chance I got I would stop in front of some black piece of background and make the poor kid look bald.

- When I started playing Godhand, my Player Tic was to kick down every single door I could - I just thought it was fun, but it actually turned out to be semi-useful: I don't always have the greatest sense of direction when it comes to games, and the buildings in each level tend to look pretty similar to each other. I discovered that any door I kicked down stayed that way, so I could tell if I was approaching an area I already cleared by whether there was still a door.

- I had zero experience with the genre when I started Fallout3 the first time and took the Kleptomaniac Hero trope to the extreme, looting absolutely every dead body I saw or found. I remember making it to the Super-Duper Mart before the game informed me that I was carrying too much and couldn't run or fast-travel. I also hadn't mastered the whole selling/trading stuff thing, so I just did the inverse and left all the stuff I didn't need with the first raider I killed there. To this day I use dead people to dump excess inventory that's not worth selling or trading, partially out of tradition.

I think a lot of things on this thread are less dumb and more amusing or even amazing. I propose to rename the thread to encourage more cool posts. :)

That last one is kinda present in most bethesda games. I would even say you were smart to do it.

More things I remembered from my childhood...

• In Jojo's Bizarre Adventure (the Capcom fighting game), I used to be super scared to the point of phobia of Iced's special ball attack (as a boss), I couldn't play arcade mode as certain characters for a while. Later I faced my fears but I still never understood how to dodge it so I just mashed dodge roll, which worked some times.
• In Final Fantasy Legend 2, when I first played it I never knew how the damage formulas worked, so I kept wondering why weapons always did pathetic damage—in the end I never used them. But magic always did decent damage and were AOE, so after a couple of restarts, i had a party of 2 espers, a monster and a robot in my first beating of the game.
• And then for a while in my multiple FFL2 playthroughs before I understood the stats, my strats were always something to the effect of: to make a long story short, grind first world until I got an SMG, then amass more guns, explosives and tanks as the game goes on. Let's just say bosses were unnecessarily tough because i didn't have dedicated boss killers.

I let my uncle use my Pokemon Red file once and came back to a team with names like CHARDNHARD (Charizard) and FARTIKOOKY (Articuno.) Sadly I don't remember what the rest of my team was named.

edited 10th Jul '17 11:59:52 PM by lalalei2001

More annoying than stupid, but back in the days of the NES, when playing 2-player games, I was a pain in the ass. I would attack my teammate in Battletoads and randomly hit the pause button during the other player's turn in the old Mario games (only Player 1 had control over the pause feature.) I figured out how to cheat at Duck Hunt at age 3 or 4 by standing so close to the TV I could touch it. I also triee countless times to shoot that damn dog, but who didn't?

I have yet to beat Brave Fencer Musashi's Steamwood Forest level, not only because of the timed rhythm puzzles on a 15-minute timer, but because lil' me saved in town when the timer was at 8 minutes.

I was playing BOTW and decided to make a balloon raft, but the weight was unbalanced and it started to tilt until the whole thing was vertical. Link managed to climb up and stand on the tiny edge, until the balloons abruptly popped and dropped him off.

During my first run of Pokemon Crystal, my very first game, at 9 years old, I almost exclusively trained my starter Typhlosion and ended up giving it a moveset of 2 HM moves, Rock Smash and... I don't remember the last one (I first remembered giving it a 4-HM moveset but apparently Cut and Strength are the only HMs it can learn and I forgot Rock Smash wasn't a HM back in gen 2)

I also thought holding down B on/after the second waggle of the pokeball after catching a Pokemon would give you a better chance of catching it. (Actually, even after all those years, I still sometimes find myself doing it...)

edited 30th Oct '17 2:58:03 AM by Zanreo