6 Delightfully Wholesome Ways To Play Famous Video Games
Everyone has thrown their Sims into the pool and removed the ladders. It might as well be in the tutorial. But, just as The Sims can be turned into Saw, so can naturally violent games be transformed into wholesome experiences. Here are a bunch of just plain nice ways players have found to turn hardcore games into heartwarming adventures for all ages:
People Have Been Hacking Grand Theft Auto ... To Play As Cops
When you think of someone playing Grand Theft Auto, you don't picture a mild-mannered cop writing tickets and attempting to defuse domestic violence situations -- you think of XxLongBongSilver420xX beating virtual prostitutes with a flaming dildo. And yet, there's a whole community of gamers playing GTA on the other side of the law (the good one):
We had no idea there was a Super Troopers video game.
It all started with LSPDFR (Los Santos Police Department First Responders), a mod that allows GTA players to play as the good guys. The mod introduces everything one needs to live that sweet cop life, from fully functional precincts with locker rooms ...
... to a fully functional in-game police radio complemented by role-playing social network accounts. Here's the LSPD Community Relations account giving out public service information to Los Santos' fictional citizens, which we guess is a less embarrassing way to spend your time online than cybering as Sonic the Hedgehog.
Modders are constantly uploading new missions, which range from action movie material (high-speed chases, terrorist plots) to Cops episodes (catching escaped animals, breaking up fights between delivery drivers). And for those who think that being a cop in Los Santos is still too hardcore: how about becoming an ultra-polite British version, pulling people over for going two miles over the speed limit? There's a mod for that too. The community has gone so far as to replicate real UK vehicles and landmarks to reverse the Revolutionary War and turn Los Santos into London.
The one thing they haven't figured out is how to make the cars drive on the left, England-style. Launching motorbikes into the sky so they can perfectly land on a fighter jet? Piece of cake. Driving on the wrong side of the road? Sorry, that's just too wacky and unrealistic.
No Man's Sky Players Have Formed Their Own System, Government, And Defense Force
In the run up to the No Man's Sky's release, one question everybody asked was, "what uh... what do you do in this game?" The answer was "not much." The aim is to get to the center of the universe while exploring some of the 18 quintillion planets out there (and learning a valuable lesson about hype). You can name the procedurally-generated alien creatures you come across, but the chances of another player randomly stumbling upon those same Sporcle motherfuckers is infinitesimal. So one group of players decided to go in the opposite direction, literally, and started squatting in a dank corner of the universe. Calling themselves the Galactic Hub, they began mapping out planets and cataloging the weird shit they came across in their little pocket of existence. Like for instance, the thickest creature in the recorded universe, the Caesarus:
Or the Cranberry Coast, a stunning visual representation of being off your face on acid:
Normally, these randomly generated sights would have been witnessed by one person and instantly forgotten, but the Hub's efforts turned them into in-game tourist attractions. Such was the Hub's success that other groups started settling in their own corners, leading to diplomatic ties and embassies. By now they have an economy and a pretend space government with officers in charge of security (read: dealing with trolls), media, and even recruitment. Here's a poster:
So far, the biggest threat to the Hub's continued existence has been every Windows user's least favorite word: updates. The Hub has twice had to relocate because major updates changed the whole landscape of their planets (the Bootysaurus sadly went extinct last year), and many were understandably worried by the fact that you can actually see, fight, and kill other players now. Luckily, they formed their own space army to defend the Galactic Hub from miscreants who think sci-fi video games are for cool laser battles, and not careful bureaucratic documentation.
Minecraft Players Are Helping Keep A Dying Language Alive
"Elfdalian" is an obscure Scandanavian language only spoken by about 3000 people. It isn't officially recognized by Sweden's government -- that's how weird it is. Even people who speak Swedish don't think it's a real language. Elfdalian was destined for the graveyard of history, until it caught the attention of the most obsessive and determined people on the planet: Minecraft fans.
It started with your typical 21st-century love story. Boy meets girl in a Minecraft server, boy moves to Sweden to marry girl, boy and girl take a summer course in Elfdalian, and then they decide to devote their lives to saving it from extinction. You know, that classic tale. The couple's efforts have taken the form of an in-game recreation of the village where they took the language course, Alvdalen. If Minecraft fans can make shit like a giant working Game Boy with a playable Pokemon game out of little blocks, of course, they can recreate one village.
With the help of three Americans and a local Swedish boy, the pair are also filling that village with in-game quests designed to immerse players into the Elfdalian language, culture, and history. Once the project is finished in 2019, the couple plans to add surrounding villages, and eventually other endangered languages from around the world. Meanwhile, local Alvdalen officials have called the project "extremely important" due to its appeal to young people. Hear that, mom? Who's "wasting their childhood" for playing Minecraft all day now?
There's A Gang Of Elite Dangerous Players Who Rescue Stranded Travelers
Elite Dangerous is basically a FedEx simulator... but in space. If a delivery goes bad, then your ship is stranded lightyears from civilization, forcing your character to figure out how to survive with nothing but a crate of dildos or whatever the delivery was (if you're lucky, they're edible dildos). For a long time, the only solution to these predicaments was blowing yourself up and starting over. Enter the Fuel Rats -- not a punk band from the '70s, but a group of volunteers devoted to helping stranded players get out of cosmic pickles.
Players who run out of fuel at inconvenient times can visit the Fuel Rats website and send them a rescue request with their coordinates. Think of it like AAA but with warp engines. Their most famous rescue came when they got a request from a player called Cmdr. Persera, who was attempting to dump cargo further away from explored space than any player had gone before. The cargo: a shipment of personalized souvenir mugs (presumably 500 million "don't talk to me until I've had my covfefe" variations left over from May 2017).
Persera's plan was to go until she was almost out of fuel, drop the mugs, and then make the hyperspace leap back to civilization. But she miscalculated. After 48 real-time hours of flying straight into the void, she found herself without enough fuel to make the jump.
The three Fuel Rats who took the case didn't just need to reach her, but provide her with enough fuel to return home, and keep enough for themselves as well. Otherwise, they'd end up stranded there too, and then more people would have to come their rescue, and this is probably how space colonies get started.
Anyway, the Rats retrofitted their ships for maximum fuel efficiency and headed out into the middle of actual nowhere, livestreaming every second under the accurate title "48 hours of black." They successfully rescued Persera on December 23, 2017, and that's why we changed the date of Christmas last year, if you were wondering.
One EVE Online Player Maintains A Moon-Sized Tribute To The Dead
When you die in EVE, your character's mind is transferred to a new body, but the old one is still left lying around. In 2007, player Azia Burgi decided to start gathering all those bodies, which ... sounds more fun than playing EVE normally, actually. Azia began putting the corpses in cargo containers and leaving them in orbit around a moon, thus turning it into the most badass cemetery in existence.
Eventually, Azia set up a website to keep track of all those floating caskets. As of November 2017, there were about 1,746 graves ... and 25,000 more in storage, awaiting sky "burial." Azia's moon became an in-game tourist attraction, and with that came a surprising new addition: people began leaving virtual memorials to real grandparents, parents, siblings, and friends. A crowdsourced graveyard of real people in a virtual space is a bizarrely sentimental moment in a game about space battles and cosmic Ponzi schemes. But not everyone appreciates Azia's hard work. One infamous incident in 2008 saw a group called the Goonswarm Alliance launching an all-out attack on the cemetery, stealing dozens of bodies and desecrating others. Apparently, only around 100 of the original 700 caskets remain, the rest stolen or destroyed in various attacks. After all, this is still EVE Online and, y'know, the internet.
Pokemon Players Come Together Every Christmas To Flood The Trade System With Good Pokemon
Pokemon XY (the sixteenth entry in the series, if our Roman math is correct) introduced a new way of sharing your adorable little monster slaves, called Wonder Trade. The idea is that you select any Pokemon of yours, and someone else anywhere in the world selects one of theirs, and the two will be traded. Who knows what you'll get? A Starter? A Shiny? A Legendary Pokemon? No, of course you won't. It's the internet. All you'll get is garbage filler Pokemon no one wants, or worse, a Pokemon that isn't part of the original 151.
It's a sure road to disappointment ... except for one day of the year. Every Christmas, little kids will get their first Pokemon game and want to try out the Wonder Trade system, risking losing their cool Starters to end up with whatever the fuck a ZigZagGoon is. And every year since 2013, players from all corners of the internet have been organizing to prevent that. They'll spend the weeks before Christmas breeding rare or interesting Pokemon exclusively to release them on December 25th, thus flooding the trash dispenser that is Wonder Trade with pure gold. Or if they can't be assed to do that, they can at least share the informative posters:
It's hard to tell where the idea started, but it spread from Twitter to Reddit to Facebook to DeviantArt to GameFAQs -- hell, we could probably find some threads about it on 4chan if we dared to go there. Gamers can be garbage sometimes, but it's heartwarming to learn they can come together to help kids have a fun and friendly experience ... until they enter an online battle and get instantly destroyed by someone with six level 100 Garchomps, of course.
When he's not being kind to other players online, Tiagosvn can be found on his Twitter.
Support your favorite Cracked writers with a visit to our Contribution Page. Please and thank you.
For more, check out The 7 Most Horrifying Moments From Children's Video Games and 6 Children's Games Clearly Designed By Psychopaths.
Also, we'd love to know more about you and your interesting lives, dear readers. If you spend your days doing cool stuff, drop us a line at iDoCoolStuff at Cracked dot com, and maybe we can share your story with the entire internet.
Follow us on Facebook. Game on.
