Post Credit Games

So you've saved the world and rescued the princess and everything is all done and dusted, credits roll and the title screen reappears. To some people that's the last they ever see of the game, beat it once it's beaten for good.

For people like me however, that's far from then end of it. Quite a lot of games now days offer some kind of new game +, a game mode where you play the game again with bonus features or extra restrictions (like keeping your level/stats/weapons/abilities and having a bunch of challenges added or scaled up to your assumed mastery of the game. Early examples of this were the second quest in the original Legend of Zelda (NES) and playing as Luigi in Super Mario. But sometimes that's not enough, and that's where player enforces rulesets and challenges come in.

Some common challenges include speed clears (beating the game as fast as possible), low percent runs (beating the game while completing as little as possible or being at the lowest possible level) and glitched (beating the game by breaking in game rules or abusing the game's engine to skip large portions of the game or cause any number of strange happenings). We'll use The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time as an example because it has been extensively abused and lots of skips and glitches have been found that can shorten the game down to as low as 28 minutes. If you were to do a speed run of OoT it normally includes completing all dungeons as fast as you can, to do so, you have to avoid all the side quests...or: you can utilize a glitch known as Bottle Quest where you abuse the in game memory and change bottled bugs/fish into extra bottles and plot related items which let you skip right to the end game dungeon (normally with only 3 hearts of life) which is a challenge in of itself when the final boss fight starts. A low percent run come in two types, low health and low items. Low health requires you to pick up no extra health and low items requires you to try and solve as many of the puzzles in the game without the recommended items (which is surprisingly possible).

All in all I've beaten Ocarina of Time around seven times myself, and only spending $20 on the game as a pre-owned title a decade ago and have got quite a lot of value out of it.

This was relevant because while trying to pass away time I started a no-NPC-Ally playthrough of Guild Wars Factions (never add NPC henchmen to our party) with a friend, we've both played the game for a while and thought a bit of a challenge was in order, so we'll see how that goes.