f-zero to F-HERO friday: Time Wasters

With pretty much every-game thats being created right now you are seeing a sandbox type of gameplay. The freedom to explore your environment and interact with it is ever so popular right now because everyone knows its fun to screw around. Now that systems have enough processing power to support entire worlds game companies are giving us what we want. Everything from First Person Shooters to Racing games are taking advantage of this to offer the gamer more of an indirect way to accomplish goals. Going to an online video site like ifilm, collge humor or break (you tube is getting lamer and lamer) you can find limitless videos of people doing stunts and pretty much turning fucking around into an art form. Even though we are doing it now more than ever be for wasting time in video games always has always been a distraction and in these examples a special treat. I give you our top 5 favorite Time Wasters


#5
Dale - Sound Test (Jungle Book, Sega Genesis)



For pretty much every-game that had one back in this era I would tinker around endlessly with the sound test screen. This used to be a lot funner before computers were in every house hold and you could just download your favorite MP3 and listen to it at nauseam. Jungle Book however had me spending a ridiculously large amount of time pissing around with this mostly for two reasons there was a whip noise and a thunder clap noise. Ok I'm a dirty liar I would also play the sher kahn growl over and over and pretend I was growling and make a little claw shape with my hand.


Mike - Murdering Hundreds of Russian Soldiers (Goldeneye, Nintendo 64)



In one of the first levels in Goldeneye you are infiltrating a Russian facility to rendezvous with another agent. Well when you reach one of the last hallways in the level guards are alerted and an endless stream of them come to kill you. One of the funniest things to do in the entire game is to just stand there in the hallway and slaughtering them as they spawn right around the corner and rush blindly towards you. Pretty soon the bodies are piled knee deep on the floor and every step you take lands upon an AK-47 dropped from lifeless Russian hands. After about half an hour of watching green uniformed bodies twitch and spasm on the ground you might get a little bored. But then you turn on DK mode and suddenly your murder spree is entertaining again because now your targets have giant, emotionless block heads.


#4
Dale - Tazer (Siphon Filter, PS1)


Aparently they gave a monkey a camera but this is a guy being lit on fire by the tazer

There was no shortage of weapons in this game so you barely ever had to resort to you base attack which was a tazer. It was the type with a cord so you could shoot like 20 feet or something awesomely exagerated. The reason this became such a little joy for me is because you could hold down the button and the guy would just sit there and vibrate and eventually light on fire. My Favorite was to sneak up directly below a sniper that was on some ledge above you and tazer him until he lit on fire. He would then plummet the 20-30 feet as a giant bad guy fireball. It was the perfect release for vindictive pyromaniacs like myself. I think some officers from the City of Vancouver Police Department must have played this game too. Except instead of zapping some snipers till they lit on fire it was an immigrant who didn't speak english and he just died.


Mike - Mass Murder (GTA III, PS2)



We've all done it. You're running around Liberty City, maybe you're delivering some kind of illegal package, maybe you're going to beat up a pimp, whatever. Then you see a sniper rifle lying on the ground. You grab it and from that point on it's only a matter of time before you're on a rooftop taking aim at innocent civilians walking around below. You shoot them and then a cop shows up and starts taking shots at you, and he goes down too. Then more cops. Then a helicopter. Then the SWAT teams. You probably get killed at this point. But when you come back to life you're hit with an uncontrollable desire to reach maximum wanted level, and so you enter some cheat codes and stock up, find a defensible position, and go to town. Soon there's bodies all over the street, burning wreckage of helicopters falling from the sky, and SWAT vans lying overturned in the street. That's when you see it. Looming, clanking, slowly approaching. The Tank. Mission accomplished.


#3
Dale - Shooting Lights (Golden Eye, N64)



This was the first FPS I ever played. I was so enthralled with the fact that I could just aim and shoot anything that it pretty much took over my time. I would draw pictures on the wall, see how many bullet holes i could put in the toilettes and snipe bad guys in the hands or butts instead of going for an easy kill. There was one thing however that I treated as more than just pissing around it became an OCD ritual that gives the kind of pleasure that looking back on kinda makes me look "a little off" lets say and that was shooting lights. It started out because I was amazed that the lighting in the level changed when you shot the light and back then that was a big fucking deal. It got to that I couldn't run past a light without stopping to shoot it. Every once in a while when I am playing modern FPS's I take a little me time and shoot the lights.


Mike - Skating and Grinding (Jet Set Radio, Dreamcast)



As fun as it is being a graffiti-spraying rollerblader fighting cops and helicopters and electric mutants, sometimes it's relaxing and just plain fun to just skate around the city and just grind the shit out of everything. While in no way a true sandbox game, the levels in Jet Set/Grind Radio were big enough that you could just mess around for hours skating and doing tricks and enjoying the great music and stringing together grind combos. It was also fun to see if you could sprint around randomly and leap off into space and try to land on something that you could grind on, be it a rail, a fence, a billboard, a bike rack, whatever. It was so fun and so addictive that in real life when I am walking around I find myself looking at some city architecture and thinking "you know that would be a killer Jet Set grind."


#2
Dale - Rolling Around (Zelda-Majoras Mask, N64)



One of the advertised draws to this title for potential gamers was the fact that you could change into a cast of characters by wearing their corresponding mask to accomplish specific puzzles. One giant draw to this game for Dale is turning into the goron character and rolling around the levels makeing tire squeely noises and accomplishing nothing.

Mike - Breaking the Laws of Physics (Portal, Xbox 360)



If you have played this game, you've done this. The floor-ceiling-floor endless falling, the wall-wall-wall endless running, or maybe even the twisting/rotating floor-wall-floor endless flipping. It's inevitable that at one point during your run through the game that you'll stop, put companion cube down, and spend about ten minutes just fucking around. You'll probably also spend about five minutes placing portals in a corner trying to get a good look at your character. You might even try to get a cube to be trapped suspended in two adjacent floor portals (but not Companion Cube, because it's your friend and you wouldn't do that to a friend.)


#1
Dale - Crashing (Burnout Paradise, X360)



Burnout Paradise has more awesome features that I wish i could talk about here that i would waste my time away with. To do the game justice I would have to do a reality type of show where you just watch me fuck around in the game and then you would know what i was talking about. That would probably actually get picked up by the networks considering what people watch nowadays. I just want reality tv to die. Why WON'T IT DIE. ITS MY GREAT GRANDMA THAT'S LEAVING ME MONEY. YOU KNOW THE ONE WHO CONSIDERED A HARD SLAP ACROSS THE FACE AS A DISCIPLINARY SPANKING. THE ONE WHO DOESN'T SPEAK ENGLISH. THE ONE THAT STINKS. THE ONE THAT DOESN'T HAVE A TV SO YOU NEVER WANT TO VISIT AS A KID. JUST DIE WHY ARE YOU STILL ALIVE YOUR 200 YEARS OLD. But I digress..
You know how insane people (not me at all) talk about how when they are driving down long stretches of highway they get urges to crank the wheel off the road "just to see what happens". Scientists have a scientific term for just this sort of thing its "nuts". Well if you know what I am talking about you can understand how a dick hardening sweet ass camera cinematic would add to the desire to "just to see what happens". It does and it did to me... for hours.

Mike - Taking Insane Jumps (GTA Series, various systems)



The Grand Theft Auto games are pretty similar to one another, including the best time waster of any game ever because of its endless variety and possibilities. I speak of course of the potential for utterly mind-blowing jumps and stunts, in cars, motorbikes, tanks, busses, golf carts - pretty much anything with wheels. Whether it's flying full speed off rooftops in a dinky little towncar or caroming off airport distance markers, the jumps in GTA are always amazing. Even after you find an epic jump and launch yourself through the stratosphere, smashing your car into a building or tree or like five other cars upon landing, you immediately head right back to do it again. Or maybe you go get a different vehicle to see how that one takes the jump. When we were playing four-player free mode in GTA IV recently we found a jump that overlooked the river, and all four of us literally spent 2 or 3 hours trying to jump that damn river in everything possible in the city. You haven't played GTA until you've stacked four people into a tour bus and tried to launch it across the river.