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Sometimes, after I've spent a bit of time with a game, I decide to stop playing it and start dicking around. This is not a rare occurrence; in fact, everyone who has ever played a Grand Theft Auto game reaches that point eventually.
However, my off-the-track habits are not confined to open-world games (in which a certain amount of non-story shenanigans are not only common but also a conscious design choice). But sometimes I get bored, don't feel like progressing, or just wonder if a game will let me do something, and this is when shit gets weird.
Below are two examples of how I have made my own fun.
1) Bullet Graffiti in GoldenEye 007
GoldenEye was the first game I ever played that modeled bullet holes in walls, and this feature was responsible for more of my level restarts than accidentally shooting Natalya during that awful escort mission. It's a silly thing to get excited about now, but the fact that I could shoot a wall and the game would draw a little picture of a hole there was about the coolest thing I'd seen.
Bear in mind that I was also impressed by the "realistic" character models.
It was a simpler time, people.
Discovery led to experimentation, which led in turn to design; after I'd figured out exactly how many holes I could shoot in a wall before the game started replacing them (the exact number left my memory around the same time as the lyrics to Bryan Adams' "Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?"), I started taking breaks from firefights to scribble on walls in bullets. I liked to imagine some pissed-off Russian general surveying the carnage after I'd beat the level and bellowing, "Who has done this to us?" and then a timid junior officer goes, "I don't know, but he shot a horrible rendition of a puppy into the wall of your office."
Eventually, I wasn't content to just draw pictures for myself; I had to share them with friends, and that is when I experienced the single greatest multiplayer moment I've ever had*.
My friend and I were playing splitscreen, employing an unsung N64 peripheral we called "The Equalizer," which was a piece of cardboard taped to the TV to keep us from spying on each other. After a while, my friend asked what I was shooting at.
"Oh, that wasn't you?" I asked.
"No," he replied, adding, "dumbass."
He came around a corner and stopped.
"What the fuck?" he said.
I'd shot a message into the wall: TURN AROUND (it was probably more like "TRN RND," but I only had so much to work with).
He turned, just in time to see that I was standing right behind him.
Thoop-thoop-thoop went my gun, and down he went.
"You fucking asshole," he muttered, shaking his head.
I had my retort all ready. "Bah-dah-DA-DAAAAAAAAAH!" I said.
He literally couldn't argue with that.
2) L.A. Noire's Hidden Game of "Where's Waldo?"
"Look, just tell us where the Wizard Whitebeard is so we can all go home."
After I finished the story mode of L.A. Noire, I went into the free-play mode to find the rest of the cars for the "Auto Fanatic" Achievement. Needless to say, wandering around comparing fenders got old after a while, so I turned my attention to the random pedestrians populating the streets of 1947 Los Angeles.
It is to Team Bondi's credit that Cole Phelps is incapable of going on a GTA-style kill-crazy rampage, but that doesn't mean that their open world is free of opportunities for random amusement. In this case, my unscripted fun took the form of a scavenger hunt.
I spent a lot of my time with L.A. Noire playing a game I called "Spot the Character Actor," which usually involved interviewing someone while simultaneously trying to remember which episode of Monk I'd seen that actor in. This was more of a distraction than a fun diversion, and my interrogations suffered.
In free-play, I discovered that, in order to create the random passers-by you might run into (with or without your car) while traveling through the city, Team Bondi had reused actors from other parts of the game and just put them in different clothes. On one occasion I recognized a married couple from one of the cases, except that he was alive and she was pointing me out to him as "that cop from the papers" instead of stabbing him and pushing him in front of a speeding car.
So that was weird.
Here's the game:
1) Pick a character from L.A. Noire.
2) Search the city until you see them walking around.
3) Go, "Oooooo."
4) Bonus points if they tried to hide the reusing of assets by sticking a moustache on them.
Ultimately it's not much more entertaining than comparing fenders, but some of those moustaches are incredible.
*may be an exaggeration.