It's a tough one for me - I'm playing bloodstained, and I sure am doing the same actions over and over, but do I tire of them? Definitely. I think "discovering secrets" is a big one for me. And maybe I could expand that to "exploring spaces that are or were once occupied by someone interesting."
It's vague, but that includes ancient tombs, a house someone left in a hurry, a city with unusual residents (like that shadows of the darned city), etc.
I like to root out every corner of the world and hopefully get a tiny reward for it, whether that's a nice vista, a cool thing to look at, or a trinket to pick up.
I also never tire of being allowed to do something goofy within the mechanical and narrative framework of the game. Kicking a ball around in pikuniku, throwing dudes off a pier in yakuza, etc.
Oh, one more! Shortcuts. I never get tired of finding shortcuts in racing games or other types of games, so long as those shortcuts have some fun element to them... crash through a mall, go through a giant balloon cat's mouth and out the other end, that kind of thing. Yeah.
I love drifting in racing games, can‘t get enough of it. Love figuring out how to drift and pulling off more and more drifts, linking them together. there’s one track in Ridge Racer on the PSP where the track loops over itself and I was able to get the car to drift the entire way down. Sublime.
Playing through all of Gravity Rush and continuing my Gravity Rush 2 playthrough, I‘ve never grown tired of hurling myself in any direction, walking on walls and ceilings. It’s really satisfying just jumping off any ledge, free falling, and catching myself.
Balancing, especially once you have better motorized equipment, is pretty fun in Death Stranding and I've yet to get tired of it, but I'm also not stacking towers on myself most of the time.
Ah, I should try those gravity rush games… I've had them for ages and just kinda did nothing about it.
@silby I totally agree. I told this story on the insert credit show once but in Far Cry... 2? 3? I forget which one, but it was the first one where you could propagate fire across the whole world and stuff. Anyway I was playing a demo, and you were supposed to rescue this guy who was in a hut thing. and since the devs had talked up being able to do anything your way, I decided to avoid all the enemies guarding him, and just go in there and rescue him without firing a shot.
It took a bit of work but I did it, and then the guy says "phew, thanks for taking care of all those guys!" (something I didn't do), then stands there.... checks his watch for a couple seconds.... then just books it straight into the corner of the hut, just running full blast into the wall at a sprint. I loved it and decided nothing in far cry would ever beat that so I never played it again.
EASY ONE: tapping the button an unnecessary amount of times on a Sonic spindash
Getting inside or outside of something you're not supposed to get inside or outside of; so either clipping, or making the Silver fight in Sonic 06 entertaining by manipulating him to throw you outside the boss area and running around a half rendered Soleanna.
This is driving me nuts because I do this all the time but I'm struggling to think of specific examples, but "getting guys or objects who aren't supposed to fall off cliffs to fall off cliffs", I suppose Dark Souls but I know there's better ones out there.
@exodus#1576 I like to root out every corner of the world and hopefully get a tiny reward for it, whether that’s a nice vista, a cool thing to look at, or a trinket to pick up.
This led to me spending so much time wandering around the world of Shadow of the Colossus. It was just such a satisfying place to explore.
My game time lately has become incredibly limited, but I've been trying to sneak in some Aquanauts Holiday to de-stress here and there, and it's hard to complain about a game where you just peacefully swim around and explore the world, just to see what's there.
The two other big ones for me:
1- Stun locking an enemy with a combo. There's something I can't ever get too much of when it comes to just locking down an enemy in a brawler with a combo that they can't do anything about until I'm done.
2- Jumping. If the jump feels good, I will do it all the time. Ax Battler is probably the biggest one for me - after every random encounter I jump while the game loads back to the map, as a little sort of victory hop.
Tearing through hordes of Revenants with Doom II's Super Shotgun. It never gets old and always gets better. I definitely love plotting out how to kill as many mooks as possible with a single BFG blast and tracer spray, and pumping rockets into zombie/imp hordes is a classic. But it all comes back to that satisfying kinaesthetic transaction of losing 4 or 6 shells in a few seconds of devestation.
I've been playing that Doom 64, and that one feels pretty good as well.
I also like breaking out of games and getting out into the wasteland. I always want there to be more stuff when I get there. I long ago had a fantasy of making a game about breaking it, where you'd have to clip through to find weird other stuff and then just keep "breaking" the thing more as you go along in order to advance the narrative. I never had a great idea for what to do other than that, though.
1) setting up a chain in a puzzle fighter game and having it go off OR making a combo to break off an entire section of your board in Puzzle Bobble. love clearing a whole board in one move!
2) animation cancelling in various games. something about feeling like you're getting one over on the game always feels neat.
thought of one while I was driving the other day. I’ll never tire of seeing the place you’ll be playing in later on in the distance. examples that spring to mind are oil ocean zone in the background of mirage saloon zone, lots of moments in demon souls / dark souls, and maybe this one doesn’t count but I feel like it happened a lot in the pokemon tv show.
ah yeah, they do that in uncharted a lot, something Hirokazu Yasuhara made real sure of. I saw his notes and drawings of Uncharted in his giant design notebook and they‘re so dang cute. I wish I could’ve taken more pics of them.
It's less of an action of course, but I also like that stuff! Similarly I was thinking about how much I enjoy that, in Xmen 2 the clone wars for genesis, in stage 2 or so you have to ascend a giant tower that is constructing a sentinel. So you walk up and see all the bits of this sentinel that's under construction and get a sense for the scale of it compared you yourself, well before you have to actually fight one. that's pretty cool.