5 People Who MacGyvered The Most Difficult Video Game Levels
Completing a video game can be hard. It requires focus, hand-eye coordination, and a life you can ignore for long periods of time. As we've shown before, this is not enough challenge for some gamers. Why merely enjoy the sprawling wasteland of Fallout when you can sprint through it in 15 minutes or conquer it as a baby? If you tell gamers to climb a virtual mountain, one of them will figure out a way to do it on a seatless unicycle using only the asthmatic character. Seriously, look at the things these people have done.
Beating Dark Souls With A Guitar Hero Controller
Most consoles come with a collection of specialized peripherals. Because if a video game is about playing the bongos, it's more fun to play it on real-ish electronic bongos. And if you're playing a game about jamming a finger up someone's butthole, it's almost not worth it without a giant finger controller. That's real, by the way. That butthole game is real.
Sadly, the "Giant Finger" and "Unsuspecting Butthole" peripherals were never made for home consoles.
Well, a gamer who goes by the handle Bearzly decided to use one of these specialized peripherals to play Dark Souls, one of the most difficult games of all time. It's a brutal experience in which any minutely wrong movement can send you hurtling off a cliff or impale you on an enemy spear, causing you to lose hours of progress. So Bearzly decided that he should play it with a fucking Guitar Hero guitar.
If you're not familiar, guitars are not designed to maneuver a swordsman through terrifying nightmares. One of the buttons on a Guitar Hero controller is a whammy bar, and another is a nubby little flagellum made for strumming. So even after cleverly remapping all the buttons, he couldn't move his character to the left. He also couldn't block heavy attacks, move the camera to the right, or understand the difference between a challenge and simple masochism.
The lack of Star Power wasn't doing him any favors, either.
Most people who play Dark Souls with a regular controller give up after several hundred deaths, and this guy beat it with a character who was barely listening to him. Playing Dark Souls with a Guitar Hero guitar is like teaching an actual person to fight skeletons using only an electric guitar for communication and holy shit we just came up with the sweetest idea for a kung fu movie ever.
Oh, and this guitar killer isn't the only gamer to think of doing something impossible with something stupid. A Destiny player recently went into a six-man raid by himself and defeated Crota. And before you shriek "Crota's only like level 32! Anyone could do that!" keep in mind that this Crota-slayer was using a Rock Band drum kit.
Still easier than playing "YYZ."
Another player with more determination than hobbies managed to beat Soul Calibur on the hardest difficulty with only a Dreamcast fishing pole. And that thing didn't even really have buttons. He had to execute precision martial arts by waggling a plastic fishing pole at his TV and cranking on the reel, which is probably only slightly easier than catching a real fish with karate.
Which is in fact what inspired the Wii Remote.
Beating Games With Comically Underpowered Weapons
Most games follow the pattern of killing enemies to get deadlier things to kill deadlier enemies to get even deadlier things until you can kill the deadliest thing of all. You've probably already guessed this from the heading above, which explained it clearly, but some players choose to skip all those steps and go after the deadliest enemies using whatever shitty knife they start with. And sometimes less.
One YouTuber called Oddler managed to beat The Legend Of Zelda on NES without even picking up a sword. He dodged all the way to the final boss with nothing but his starting three hearts and a can-do attitude. If you've never played Zelda, doing this is like trying to defeat Brock Lesnar as a nine-year-old. It's truly ridiculous.
"It's dangerous to go alone! ... Welp, off you go."
Fighting through the laser-spitting world of Hyrule without a weapon is nuts, but another player took self-imposed handicaps even further. Dying Light is the 200 millionth video game about zombies to be released, and its zombies are easily among the toughest to kill. They're fast, they come in packs, and don't seem to care much if you're shooting them. One player decided that wasn't hard enough, and went through the entire zombie apocalypse with only his fists. It's a world in which your only goal is to go one more second without being bitten, and he thought, "I'm going to try smashing my fist into their teeth."
It's like a pig in a bacon factory deciding to escape by belly flopping workers to death.
And remember the grueling, torturous Dark Souls, which someone beat with a guitar? The one we told you about like two minutes ago? One player went through it armed with less than that. Dark Souls player Lobos Jr beat the game using only somersaults. For hours, he tumbled around enemies and executed them slowly with whimsical bumping. It's crazy -- this guy killed an entire realm of monsters using the exact same methods clowns probably use to kill their victims.
That's ridiculous. Everyone knows that clowns use weaponized balloon animals.
Before achievements and K/D ratios existed, ancient gamers had to measure their success with a baroque currency called "points." In a bizarre twist, one player, NotEntirelySure, decided to beat Super Mario Bros. while getting the absolute minimum amount of points possible. It sounds easy, but as you watch him do it, you'll see that completely avoiding all success is much, much harder than you can imagine. It's enough to make you respect how Corey Feldman has done it for three decades. It's truly exhausting to watch what this master of Mario failure had to do to avoid getting points. He's unbelievable at being bad at this game.
Subpar Mario Bros.
He had to avoid killing a single enemy. He had to make precision jumps without touching any coins. He had to patiently wait minutes at the end of each level so the timer counted down to 000. Because if you remember, Mario gets points for every second left on the clock. One thing this playthrough taught us is that goddamn everything in Super Mario Bros. tried to give you points. You can't even avoid them sometimes. Watch here, as he magically glitch-jumps off of certain death just to avoid picking up two 100-point coins.
"Got! To! FAIL AT ANY COST!!!"
In the end, he managed to rescue the princess with only 500 points, which theoretically is the lowest possible score under any circumstance (since you get 100 for clearing a level, and there's no way around beating five levels). Maybe future generations will find a way to fail harder, but experts agree that it's as terrible as anyone can be using current Mario technology. You can watch this perfectly bad run here:
And count how many times your thumb reflexively twitches to jump for coins.
Fuck It, Let's Play Blindfolded
The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time is a brilliant, groundbreaking, perfect game which no one ever wants to replay because there's this bullshit water temple level that's seriously nine hours of tinkering with an irrigation system. So it's beyond comprehension that someone managed to learn the game well enough to beat it completely blindfolded.
And apparently with the help of a dozen seeing eye nerds.
The player's name is Runnerguy, and he performed the feat in front of a crowd at Awesome Games Done Quick, an event where gamers gather to beat games at world-record paces and perform Nintendo miracles. Runnerguy said he was inspired to learn the art of sightless Zelda when teaching the game to a blind friend. This act of kindness became an obsession, and he eventually became Hyrule's own Daredevil.
You're probably wondering "What? How!?" Well, he can tell his position in the game by how Link sounds when he's running on different terrain. He uses a combination of backflips and side steps to measure his distance, and then it's simply a matter of memorizing hundreds of miles of caverns and tektite lairs to keep from getting lost. It also doesn't hurt that your character is haunted by a fairy sidekick who seems incapable of shutting the hell up.
Still, to navigate a murderous 3D world using footstep sounds and fairy outbursts is incredible. Here he is defeating the first boss of the game more easily than most players could with zero or fewer blindfolds:
"HOLY SHIT, DID YOU SEE THAT!?"
"... No."
There's an embed of the entire video below, so close your eyes and listen to the sliding of your mouse getting closer and closer to it ... you're close ... almost there ... NOW.
"Nope, you clicked on porn again."
Another player who managed to beat video games without any relevant senses was a French woman named Kayane. In front of a crowd of fans, she beat a guy in Soul Calibur without even looking at the screen. Instead, she watched the crowd and played based on their collective screaming. It seems a person can play Soul Calibur the same way a confused husband plays The Price Is Right.
"One dollar! ONE DOLLAR!"
Beating Two Games At The Same Time ... With One Controller
Imagine trying to drive two different cars to one spot from two different locations using the same steering wheel. Turning the wheel to the left will cause each car to tu-- too late, you just crashed. But one gamer, Aura Puffs, took this concept and did something that almost certainly shouldn't have been possible. He simultaneously beat two decently tough games, Megaman X and Megaman X2, using a single controller. One set of inputs going to two screens. You hit the jump button, both Megamen jump:
You die, and both Megamen look at you with pure, unadulterated disappointment.
It's the video game version of syncing up Dark Side Of The Moon with The Wizard Of Oz, and the coordination required to do this is mind-blowing. Jumping over a bottomless pit in one game might mean slamming into the evil boss, Wheel Gator, in the other. One Megaman X will be leaping over and shooting the obstacles of Overdrive Ostrich's level, while the other Megaman X uses the exact same jumps and shots to defeat Launch Octopus. Jesus Christ, someone did that. And even crazier? Those boss names are real. Launch Octopus.
LAUNCH OCTOPUS.
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Turns out gamers love putting crazy amounts of effort into totally pointless endeavors. Like building a scale model of Earth in MineCraft or having the five top WarCraft characters all to yourself. See what we mean in The 6 Most Mind-Blowing (And Pointless) Gaming Achievements and The 5 Most Insane Things Ever Accomplished In A Video Game.
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