10 Unexpected Ways To Master Challenging Video Game Mechanics
Always watch the feet during Ghost of Tsushima's standoffs.
Transcript
00:00 Now it's enormously satisfying to see your skills improve while playing a video game,
00:04 where you've invested enough time and mental energy to master even the very trickiest gameplay
00:09 mechanics.
00:10 But sometimes, though, there's something other than mere time and effort that's involved,
00:13 as the true key to victory may lie in a most unexpected of tactics or techniques.
00:18 And that's what we're here to talk about today as Armtools, this is WhatCulture.com,
00:22 and these are 10 Unexpected Ways to Master Challenging Video Game Mechanics.
00:27 10. Remap Dash to a Shoulder Button - Mega Man X
00:32 The Mega Man X games have been widely criticised by players for their tricky, fiddly dash mechanic,
00:37 largely because the default control scheme requires players to press a face button to
00:41 dash. This awkward placement makes it difficult for players to dash, shoot and jump at the
00:45 same time, basically requiring them to contort their hands into an uncomfortable claw shape
00:50 to play effectively.
00:51 But this can be solved incredibly easily - so easily, in fact, that it may not have even
00:56 crossed your mind. With most modern games allowing players to remap control schemes
01:00 to their liking, you're free to just remap the dash to one of the shoulder buttons. Regardless
01:04 of what type of controller you're using on whatever platform, this makes dashing so much
01:09 more intuitive, and above all else, should ensure that you're not left with a horrible
01:13 hand cramp after a lengthy play session.
01:16 9. Exploiting Invincibility Frames While Rolling - Dark Souls
01:21 Rolling may seem like a totally simple and straightforward movement mechanic in most games,
01:25 but it's actually deceptively complex in Dark Souls. Whenever the player rolls, they
01:29 are granted a certain number of invincibility frames, meaning that for a few frames they
01:33 are effectively invincible to the enemy. This can often be preferable to using a shield
01:38 to block an incoming attack, as there are many instances where it makes more sense to
01:42 actually roll into an attack in order to take advantage of the iframes, rather than frantically
01:46 attempt to roll away.
01:47 It's also worth noting that the number of iframes is dependent on your loadout - if
01:52 you're carrying a lot of weight, you'll perform a fat roll with just a few iframes,
01:56 while a light on their feet player will receive a more generous allowance of iframes. But
02:00 yeah, seriously, try rolling into the enemy when they're attacking rather than away,
02:03 and you'll get so much more out of these games, especially in the recently released
02:07 Elden Ring.
02:08 8. Change Your Field Of View To 110 - Rocket League
02:13 Though Rocket League is an extremely easy game to pick up and play, its manoeuvring
02:17 mechanics are shockingly difficult to master. To perform mind-bogglingly precise acrobatic
02:21 mid-air feats with your RC car can take hundreds of hours of practice, but you can do yourself
02:27 a massive favour from the outset by adjusting the game's default camera settings. Though
02:31 there's a lot of debate in the Rocket League community about which camera settings are
02:34 the best, by far the most common change made by pro players is to adjust their field of
02:38 view from a default of 90 to 110. This is a simple but vital adjustment as it will let
02:44 you see far more of the surrounding area, allowing you to keep track of everything that's
02:48 going on much easier and without needing to manually move the camera around quite so much.
02:53 7. Retrace Your Footsteps To Avoid BTs - Death Stranding
02:58 For many, Death Stranding's central traversal mechanics are so damn relaxing and enjoyable
03:03 that it's a shame that the game has to have any combat or stealth at all. And the enemies
03:06 that you'll encounter most throughout the game are BTs, the creepy supernatural entities
03:11 that will attack you if you're not careful to stealth your way past them. They can be
03:15 a major pain in the ass to evade once they find you, and even the rigmarole of stealthing
03:19 through a horde of them in a BT zone can feel a lot like busywork. But you can save yourself
03:24 a ton of hassle in areas you've already successfully passed through once by scanning
03:28 the area to reveal the footprints of your previous path. In some situations, you can
03:32 also see footprints left behind by other players, which may offer the most aggro-like path through
03:37 a BT zone. As simple as it might seem, given the sheer amount of information the game throws
03:42 at players in the early going, it is easily the most missed, or just generally forgotten.
03:48 Build Reserves To Maintain The Blue Fire - Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled
03:53 Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled's cute, colourful design belies the fact that it's actually
03:57 one of the most challenging racing games released in recent years. Yeah, seriously. One of the
04:02 game's most surprisingly tricky mechanics is that of turbo-boosting, whereby players
04:06 can chain skills together to achieve different coloured boosts. With a blue fire boost, also
04:11 known as Ultra Sacred Fire, being the fastest. And you can only achieve blue fire by driving
04:16 over a super turbo pad. And while maintaining it is incredibly difficult, you can make life
04:21 easier for yourself by learning about the game's hidden reserves mechanic. Reserves
04:25 are built up by chaining together powerslide turbos, hangtime turbos, turbo pads, and turbo
04:30 power-ups, allowing you to theoretically maintain blue fire for many laps if you're skilled
04:34 enough. Reserves as a mechanic are never actually mentioned or explained by the game itself,
04:39 and yet they're a vital skill to learn for anyone looking to get seriously, even professionally
04:43 good at CTR Nitro-Fueled.
04:45 5. Use Num Lock to Auto-Cast Skills - Diablo 3
04:51 One of Diablo 3's most vital skills involves being able to juggle the sheer amount of logistical
04:56 chaos that can flood the screen at any one time, and also use your hands' muscle memory
05:00 to efficiently cast skills without developing a nasty cramp. Well, Diablo 3 shipped with
05:04 a bug/secret feature that allowed you to auto-cast a skill repeatedly by using your keyboard's
05:10 Num Lock key. By setting the secondary key bindings for your action bar skills as number
05:15 keys on the numpad, you can then simply press this key at the same time as the Num Lock
05:19 key and the game will auto-cast whatever skill was bound to said number key. Better still,
05:24 you can even auto-cast multiple skills at once by simply pressing the respective keys
05:28 at the same time along with Num Lock. Pretty magic, right?
05:33 4. Use Switch Stance to Maximise Combos - Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 & 2
05:39 It's absolutely vital that you learn to rack up skill combos while playing the Tony
05:43 Hawk's Pro Skater games, but it's possible for players to gloss over the fact that they
05:47 can do themselves a simple favour to quickly score more points, and that is by using the
05:52 Switch Stance. Even the most casual Tony Hawk's player will have realised that tricks depreciate
05:56 in value the more that they're repeated within a short window of time. But by swapping
06:01 to Switch Stance - that is, the opposite stance - the game treats even repeat tricks as entirely
06:05 different. Switch Stance comes with the caveat, though, that your stats are given a bit of
06:09 a nerf, because it is your non-dominant stance and all. But because point acquisition is
06:13 the name of the game, it is a great way to combat the diminishing returns of sticking
06:17 to a single stance.
06:19 3. Letting Go of the W key while Rocket Jumping - Team Fortress 2
06:25 Since the release of Quake some 25 years ago, rocket jumping has been a popular technique
06:30 in FPS games for players to achieve ridiculous feats of speed and movement. Typically speaking,
06:35 rocket jumping involves looking down at the ground, jumping upwards, and firing your rocket
06:39 launcher which, depending on the game, can cause you to fly absurd distances, albeit
06:43 at the possible cost of a massive health loss. 2007's Team Fortress 2 opted to include
06:48 rocket jumping as its own well-defined and totally intentional mechanic, but it's also
06:53 safe to say that mastering it is no picnic. Players using the Soldier class can rocket
06:58 jump, but controlling your movement during the flight is much tougher than you might
07:01 expect. And that's because there's a hilariously simple knack to it. To control your path through
07:06 the air, you need to rely on the strafe keys A and D, rather than the forward key W, which
07:11 makes movement and control much more challenging. Not pressing a key might seem like the simplest,
07:16 silliest tip ever, but breaking entrenched muscle memory is incredibly difficult, so
07:20 some players have even resorted to rebinding the forward movement to another key entirely,
07:24 or even creating a macro for rocket jumping.
07:27 2. Watch Your Enemy's Feet During Standoffs – Ghost of Tsushima
07:32 Ghost of Tsushima's standoff mechanic can be tremendously satisfying once you have it
07:36 nailed down, as it allows you to dispatch a foe with a single strike, but figuring out
07:40 the particulars is trickier than you might expect. Basically, when you initiate a standoff
07:45 with an enemy, you have to hold the triangle button until they move to strike. If you time
07:49 the release of your triangle correctly, you'll kill them, but if you time it wrong, you'll
07:53 end up badly wounded. Later on, foes begin feigning their strikes to try and throw players
07:58 off guard, which can make it immensely frustrating if you don't know how to spot a fakeout.
08:03 Except every enemy in the game has an extremely easy tell for standoffs, and that's their
08:08 feet. Basically, don't release the triangle button until you see an enemy's feet move,
08:12 as even when they're feigning a hit, they won't move their feet. This is a note-perfect
08:16 way to win standoffs every single time, and yet it's not remotely obvious to even players
08:21 who've put many hours into the title.
08:25 Visual clues tell you when to deliver a knockout punch. Punch Out! Punch Out! is an infamously
08:31 tough boxing game where battling some of its trickier opponents feels as futile as trying
08:35 to punch smoke. While it's been known for many years that there are brief windows of
08:39 time where players can deliver knockout punches to bosses Bold Bull and Piston Honda, only
08:43 more recently have the precise tells been discovered. In 2009, Nintendo themselves revealed
08:49 that when battling Bold Bull for the first time, you should keep an eye out for the camera
08:52 flash in the right-hand side of the crowd, as this will signal when you're able to
08:56 throw a knockout punch. Additionally, in 2016, Redditor MidWesternHousewives discovered that
09:01 during the rematch against Piston Honda, there's another tell in the crowd. Wait for the bearded
09:06 man on the left-hand side of the front row to flash his mug. Then, and only then, is
09:10 it time to land a KO punch. It's simply astounding that both of these tricks went
09:15 unreported for more than 20 years, and in the latter case, almost three full decades.
09:20 Pretty incredible, right?
09:21 And there we go, my friends. Those were 10 Unexpected Ways to Master Challenging Video
09:26 Game Mechanics. I hope that you enjoyed that, and please let me know what you thought about
09:29 it down in the comments section below. As always, I've been Jules, and if you want
09:32 to chat to me further, you can do so over on Twitter @RetroJWithAZero, or you can swing
09:36 by Live & Let's Dice, where I do all of my streaming and Warhammer Battle Reports
09:40 outside of work, and it'd be great to see you over there, my friends.
09:43 But before I go, I just want to say one thing, and that is a few tips on how to master the
09:47 challenge of being kind to yourself, because you deserve the best things in life. Trust
09:51 me, my friend, you do. And do not let anything or anyone else tell you otherwise, alright?
09:55 You're a massive ledge, and I want you to go out there and absolutely smash it today.
09:59 I believe in you.
10:01 As always, I've been Jules, you have been awesome, never forget that, and I'll speak
10:04 to you soon. Bye.
10:06 [BLANK_AUDIO]