Giving hardcore games to casuals

[MajorTomServo]

I dislike both those terms for the record, but brevity is important when it comes to thread titles... And by "hardcore," I mean hardcore for them. Meaning, it's not pac-man.

Anyway, I have a pretty diverse group of friends. Some are gamers, some are not. At parties, sometimes we all sit around and watch the non-gaming type hit the hard stuff.

For example, one time we had this shy, quiet, super religious girl play Grand Theft Auto IV. It went something like:
"Take it, TAKE THAT CAR!"
"How do I..."
"Triangle!"
*hops in the air*
"No, that's square! Triangle!"
*steals car, runs over a guy*
"Oh dear... I'm sorry!"

Another time, we watched a different friend play her third video game ever, Dark Souls. She made a red-headed fat black girl named "peniSenvy." She actually made it through the undead asylum eventually (though I had to kill the demon for her), but when she got to the main hubworld, she attacked that one quest giver guy right in front of the fire. He just kept slaughtering her, she would respawn right in front of him, and repeat. We gave up.


So, any of you ever do something along those lines? Any mildly amusing stories?

 

[The Wykydtron]

Ok that Dark Souls example reminded me of one of the funniest videos I have seen lately.

Spoiler

[sub][sub][sub]That oneshot on the Moonlight Butterfly gets me every time...[/sub][/sub][/sub]

OT: Give my mother any game, ANYTHING and she will both fail at it and at the same time find a way to condemn it as both mind rotting and soul destroying. No really, direct words.

Then she's ALWAYS playing this little gem game thing on her phone AND has it open on her laptop whenever I see her. Can you say "hypocrite?"

Oh and my one friend tried Dark Souls. He just gave up before the Asylum Demon because apparently his attention span is worse than a goldfish.

Dark Souls is just gonna be gold for this thread I swear.

 

[Nouw]

Letting my brother play Halo was an exercise in patience and love. On the bright side, he's a decent shoot with a controller now and can manage more than one thing going on in his screen in real time.

GTA4 is a hardcore game? I thought it was one of the bigger casual games. No difficulty, jump in and dick around if you have not much time... So what is the newest definition of 'hardcore' again, I always fail to follow with that.

I think it was relative to the games she played before.

 

[LetalisK]

So, any of you ever do something along those lines? Any mildly amusing stories?

I love my wife dearly, but she's a little ditzy. In MMOs, I have to basically hold her hand and escort her wherever it is we're going. Though once we get there, she's good to go.

So what is the newest definition of 'hardcore' again, I always fail to follow with that.

Hardcore is any game that requires a 10 inch dick to play.

 

[Nouw]

I think it was relative to the games she played before.

Okay, I may put aside my hatred for this word now...

Hey, I hate it too! Just gotta keep the context in mind though.

 

[The_Merchant]

Give any scrub Godhand and watch them cry

 

[AITH]

A few years ago when Halo 3 came out, I brought it over to my f-buddy's apartment since it had co-op. She was one of these folks that think "nerdy is the new cool", you know, kinda like 90% of the audience physically present at the VGAs that says they're interested in gaming but have nothing to do with it. She bought an XBOX 360 which primarily turned into a dvd player...

Anyway! She simply could not comprehend how to maneuver with dual analog sticks. One to move, one to look. I'm off blasting Covenant while I look over and she's spinning in circles. Needless to say she ragequit in about 2 minutes.

Not a hardcore game by any means but she took casual to a whole new level I'd never seen before.

 

[bug_of_war]

Heh, my sister tried playing LA Noire, she got halfway through the game before giving up after obtaining 1 star for every case.

 

[tippy2k2]

My Dad is in a weird place between Casual and Hardcore. He can handle slower paced but complicated games (like Dragon Age/Mass Effect) but has trouble handling a lot of the basic stuff in quick "twitchy" games. I've got him building up with Skyrim now but it'll take time before he gets to start pwning n00bs...

Anyway, I tried playing Halo with him once, which was highly entertaining. I basically dropped the difficulty to Easy and did my best not to just murder everything that got anywhere near us. He had a lot of trouble getting used to aiming and moving at the same time so he would usually just stop in the middle of the war-zone to aim at the bad guys.

The Bigs was another fun one (arcadey baseball game). He could handle everything about it except for when it came to jumping the wall to steal a homerun. To do this, it gives you a glorified QTE and he doesn't know the buttons well enough to do even the most basic of QTE's in time. Kind of humorous since he has 3 buttons to push in 10 seconds while I have 10 to push in 10 seconds. I stole every home run from him that I could and he was lucky if he could get 1/4.

 

[Kopikatsu]

My Dad is in a weird place between Casual and Hardcore. He can handle slower paced but complicated games (like Dragon Age/Mass Effect) but has trouble handling a lot of the basic stuff in quick "twitchy" games. I've got him building up with Skyrim now but it'll take time before he gets to start pwning n00bs...

Anyway, I tried playing Halo with him once, which was highly entertaining. I basically dropped the difficulty to Easy and did my best not to just murder everything that got anywhere near us. He had a lot of trouble getting used to aiming and moving at the same time so he would usually just stop in the middle of the war-zone to aim at the bad guys.

The Bigs was another fun one (arcadey baseball game). He could handle everything about it except for when it came to jumping the wall to steal a homerun. To do this, it gives you a glorified QTE and he doesn't know the buttons well enough to do even the most basic of QTE's in time. Kind of humorous since he has 3 buttons to push in 10 seconds while I have 10 to push in 10 seconds. I stole every home run from him that I could and he was lucky if he could get 1/4.

People who're older but haven't kept up with vidja games tend not to have twitch skills. For instance, I have a friend that's a surgeon (He's about 53). I tried to get him to play Dead Space 2 and Vanquish, but he just couldn't handle moving the camera with one analog stick and controlling the character with the other. He tried it for a full hour and a half before finally giving up.

 

[Vegosiux]

I predict a Dark Souls circlejerk for some reason.

Hmmm, giving an avid RTS/TBS gamer who rarely strayed out of the genre an action-adventure or RPG game would count as "giving them a hardcore game"?

Heh, I remember one time I set up an Empire Earth game with my ex, she's never played an RTS before, but she kind of destroyed my ass so hard I was just sitting there, speechless. She had a knack for figuring things out.

People who're older but haven't kept up with vidja games tend not to have twitch skills.

Reflexes aren't skills, really...

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

When I was younger and Portal had just come out my mom saw me playing it and remarked "oh wow, that looks interesting, and finally you're playing something where you're not killing things." I started a new game for her and let her try it out. My mom gave up within 5 minutes when she couldn't figure out how to move and look around at the same time because she couldn't understand how to use the mouse and keyboard independently (she's also one of those people who types with two fingers).

Recently my friend and I started getting his girlfriend into video games. She really enjoyed Assassin's Creed 2 because the controls were fairly simple and didn't require her to make any complicated inputs in order to platform. Her favorite thing ended up being running around and killing random farmers for enjoyment. She did eventually beat the the game though. Since then she's also played through Assassin's Creed and Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, and my friend is currently trying to get her into Batman Arkham Asylum, though the more precise controls are a pretty big challenge for her at the moment.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

People who're older but haven't kept up with vidja games tend not to have twitch skills.

Reflexes aren't skills, really...

I disagree. A twitch shooter isn't just about reflexes but actually being able to control those reflexes in a very precise way. It's one thing to just react to another player shooting at you, it's another thing to be able to spin around 180 degrees, instantly acquire your target, and shoot them in the face.

 

[GodzillaGuy92]

This may not count, given that the intended audience technically includes her, but last January I introduced my six-year-old cousin to Minecraft. I started her out with Survival Mode on Easy difficulty, but juggling resource-gathering, crafting, nutrition, and monster-killing proved too much for her to handle, particularly not without so much help from me that I was essentially playing it for her. She was still quite obviously enamored, though, so I switched her over to Creative Mode, where her game experience improved almost immediately - especially since, free of the survival aspects, she could focus on improving her ability to navigate through and manipulate the environment. (From what I hear from my aunt, she now spends a ton of her free time playing the Pocket Edition, and even asked for a Minecraft cake at her next birthday party.)

But even on Creative, there are ways for things to go off the intended rails. She decided to make her permanent home next to the first village she found, but was disheartened when night fell and they were all killed by zombies. After I showed her how to spawn more villagers, she proceeded to flood the place with what must have been several hundred of them, but didn't put the same devotion into providing them with protection. Come the following night, a bare handful of attacking zombies quickly doubled, then quadrupled, etc. in number as they infected the exposed villagers, and in almost no time at all every square inch of that village was infested with big-nosed zombies. It was such an accurate simulation of a zombie apocalypse that I was shocked for not having previously conceived of what a six-year-old had managed to do entirely by accident.

 

[Pink Gregory]

'Casual' is an unpleasant and loaded word by now.

 

[Jimmy T. Malice]

I dislike both those terms for the record, but brevity is important when it comes to thread titles... And by "hardcore," I mean hardcore for them. Meaning, it's not pac-man.

Anyway, I have a pretty diverse group of friends. Some are gamers, some are not. At parties, sometimes we all sit around and watch the non-gaming type hit the hard stuff.

For example, one time we had this shy, quiet, super religious girl play Grand Theft Auto IV. It went something like:
"Take it, TAKE THAT CAR!"
"How do I..."
"Triangle!"
*hops in the air*
"No, that's square! Triangle!"
*steals car, runs over a guy*
"Oh dear... I'm sorry!"

Another time, we watched a different friend play her third video game ever, Dark Souls. She made a red-headed fat black girl named "peniSenvy." She actually made it through the undead asylum eventually (though I had to kill the demon for her), but when she got to the main hubworld, she attacked that one quest giver guy right in front of the fire. He just kept slaughtering her, she would respawn right in front of him, and repeat. We gave up.


So, any of you ever do something along those lines? Any mildly amusing stories?

Lets see: I got my little brother (currently six years old) to play battletoads...

He beat it after a day. I was so freakin' pissed.

So then I gave him Dark Souls.

He died instantly on the first enemy 20 times. It was funny.

The first enemy? You mean that cross-eyed Hollow that doesn't even attack you?