5 Mind-Blowing Ways People Mastered Famous Video Games
Video games are one of the most enduring wastes of time out there, but what happens when you master a game so thoroughly that it no longer poses a challenge? There's no DLC coming, you've gotten every achievement, and hardcore mode insults you with its pedestrian concepts of difficulty. Well, most people find a new game or maybe go outside, but a few hardcore gamers said: "Screw this; I'll just make it so insanely hard on myself that the basic structure of the game no longer applies and we stumble screaming into the realm of madness." And lo, they did ...
#5. Invisible Tetris
Tetris Holding
Everyone knows Tetris. You stack falling blocks into vanishing rows until they either reach the top or you get bored and make a wang. There is no end.
But there is a tip.
However, in the confusingly named Tetris The Grand Master 3: Terror-Instinct (we're pretty sure they got the title from a Steven Seagal movie), there's a mode that has an actual, definitive endpoint ... assuming you're good enough to reach it, which, unless your name is Jin8, you probably aren't.
It starts off like any game of Tetris, except the blocks fall much quicker. We count about two blocks per second, and Jin8 is handling it like a champ. He's sticking those suckers together like a blue methed-up mason.
"I am the one who blocks!"
Then at the three-minute mark the game decides that two blocks per second is for babies and men who see the world as anything but an intricate series of right angles. The fall animation disappears completely and the blocks come down instantaneously, giving Jin8 less than a quarter of a second to place a block before the next one's up. Somehow he keeps this up for two minutes, and then it happens: Invisible. Fucking. Tetris.
If this doesn't bump him up to Jin9, nothing will.
That animation doesn't do Jin8 justice. Nothing short of watching the entire video set to a Viking rock opera written to commemorate his deeds does it justice. He's stacking invisible, instantly falling blocks while the credits scroll by at a snail's pace to distract him -- because it wasn't hard enough before.
There's also a guy off screen doing that annoying "I'm not touching you!" thing right next to his face.
If you watch the video, you'll notice that he clears several sets of lines, meaning he has the placement of his unseeable insta-blocks memorized. When it finally ends, he's rewarded with a lame fireworks animation and the most underwhelming message since the days when putting "CONGRATURATION!!!" on the screen was considered closure.
#4. Falling Off of Games to Win Them
Nintendo
F-Zero X is a racing game where futuristic cars blast through sharp turns, pipes, jumps, and loops at ridiculous speeds. Obviously, there's a constant risk of plummeting to your fiery death, because (even in the idyllic world of the future) people only watch racing for the crashes. Of course, with three-dimensional tracks come three-dimensional shortcuts. BZ4Eoo7 (that's somebody's gamertag, not the result of a cat having a seizure on our keyboard) makes like every other unskilled newbie in a high-stakes racing game -- he flies straight into corners at full speed, like he's still pumped from watching 2 Fast 2 Furious. But whereas your buddy just plows into a wall and explodes in a ball of idiot shrapnel, BZ4Eoo7 maneuvers so precisely that he leaps out of a half-pipe and lands, unscathed, two miles away. Presumably now wearing a pair of sunglasses that materialized from nowhere.
Meanwhile, you still can't parallel park.
Then came F-Zero GX, a sequel with more complex tracks and more elaborate shortcuts. Desperate for the fastest time, CrazyGameNerd (finally, an honest pseudonym on the Internet) came up with the novel solution of driving his car to its literal breaking point, then purposely smashing into the wall to send his smoldering wreck flying ...
"Oooo, I didn't know Dale Earnhardt was a secret character in this."
... allowing him to skip a large chunk of the track. Hey, dead or alive, first place is first place.
But nothing beats Marco A.G.J., who exploits so many tricks that he barely touches the track. He starts the race by instantly falling off the course, and he never returns. What follows is two straight minutes of precision aerial maneuvers and pseudo-teleportation. Remember, this started off as a car racing game:
"Where I'm going, I don't need roads."
We guess at some point Marco decided that he was done with F-Zero and would rather play a glitchy psychedelic rail shooter, then turned out his pockets and discovered he didn't have the money to buy one.
#3. Halo 3 Parkour
Microsoft
Halo 3's multiplayer has been the cause of more deaths than most actual wars. Millions of players have spent hundreds of millions of hours shooting each other in the face. So long, in fact, that some eventually began to question how worthwhile that pursuit was: Surely there's more to life than hovering pretend armored balls over a defeated opponent's corpse? Disillusioned with the casual slaughter, they decided they'd rather turn Halo's sprawling multiplayer maps into the sort of playgrounds they could only dream of when they were children.
The Xbox Live multiplayer judges give him a 9.5, a 10, and a "HaX, [Racial Slur Deleted]!!1."
That bit of gravity-defying acrobatics is known as trick jumping. By finding the itsy-bitsy invisible walls and corners that hold the game world together, exploiting cracks in the physics system, and practicing for hundreds of hours that could have been spent learning another language, players are able to sprint up sheer walls like the sky owes them money. And that's just scratching the surface. You think pulling off a headshot in Halo is hard? Try jumping off of a piece of debris in midair:
Or launching a traffic cone up into the sky with you and jumping off it, then forcing it to follow you with a carefully timed grenade explosion and jumping off it again:
Grenade parkour is a niche, and largely legless, sport.
Or jumping backward off a ledge, shooting an icicle off the bottom of said ledge, jumping off of that icicle, shooting down another while in midair, and then leaping off of that to reach a platform that's normally totally inaccessible. Jesus, we're not even making sentences anymore.
Turns out the final boss in Halo 3 was the English language, and it was defeated by trying to describe what this player just pulled off.
