What are some tricks to make games more fun/payable?

In Fester's Quest for NES, stay in the beginning of the game until you get all the gun upgrades. The game is still difficult with the best gun, but it's impossible without it.

Damn_Underscore posted...

In Fester's Quest for NES, stay in the beginning of the game until you get all the gun upgrades. The game is still difficult with the best gun, but it's impossible without it.

The new speedruns for that game are cool - they skip half the bosses

For Total War: Warhammer 3, do not turn on easy mode even if you are really new. Easy mode seriously screws up the game balance and makes players think that they are worse than they are. Basically easy mode strongly favors auto-resolving battles and you keep more of your troops alive by auto-resolving. But this has a psychological impact of making new players think that they are failing at the combat when they are not.

Sin & Punishment on N64: Play with left grip style (Left hand on the left prong, right hand on the middle prong of the N64 controller). There's an option for it in the menu.

Knights of the Old Republic 1+2: Do a playthrough where you cheat the alignment system with console commands. Especially recommended for KOTOR2 because your alignment needs to reach a certain point in order to reach your prestige class, which is a kick in the teeth for morally grey characters. You may also want to install the "always succeed influence checks" mod for KOTOR2 so that you can explore more dialogue options that you otherwise wouldn't. This also has the added benefit of removing the threat of accidentally softlocking yourself out of the Visas Marr questline by asking questions in the wrong order.

Nuzlocke for pretty much any pokemon game

Ninja Gaiden: It is actually a "go slow and carefully" game, not a "run through frantically" one. Once you realize this and watch for enemy spawn patterns, the game becomes way easier. As long as you go slow, the game rarely has you fight more then 1-2 monsters at a time. Sure, they still put some spawn points at the edge of ledges to really mess you up, but you can usually watch for the pattern and figure out how to get through it pretty easily. Plus, even with this method, the time limit is rarely an issue.

Edit: Another one for NES/SNES games in general: Very few have true "randomness", everything is usually done by a pattern. Think of them like puzzle games rather then action games, you just need to put the right button combinations in at the right time.

Normally if I dont like a game, I just abandon it and move on in my backlog.

But if I were to try forcing myself to enjoy a mediocre game, I suppose Id look for mods to make it more fun, or at least entertaining.

Oh, I even made a video on this:

Alekhine's Gun is a kinda shitty spy game... but if you use ONLY the knife, it becomes a rather interesting puzzle game since you have to recover your knife every time.

Adding mods to eliminate damage and traffic fines makes American Truck Simulator (and Euro Truck Simulator) so much more fun. Especially since the game was written with the expectation that people will be driving carefully, so when you deliberately slam into someone at 120 MPH the physics engine just says "I'm outta here!"

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/2/24f668eb.jpg

I was achievement hunting on crazy taxi and one of the challenges like bowling or maybe the high fare was giving me trouble. I was trying to finesse it for a while and not getting anywhere close. So I look it up and either on this forum or trueachievements or something, someone else was stuck. Another poster replied that they weren't able to do it was because they weren't letting loose and were playing like a driving game. You're suppose to crash into everything and drive like a maniac and actually have fun. Its called crazy taxi for a reason. Just that and it really did make the game easier and more fun and I realized that games have kinda been sucking for a while to make that counterintuitive to others and myself. You don't always have to make the right choice so you don't lock yourself out of some random sidequest or point of no return or save some strong item until you're too strong to need it anyway. You don't need to play like a laundry list or chore.