Turning Anything Into a Competitive Game [Grab Bag]

As you might recall from my Retro Game Master crossover, two people can compete by playing the same game at the same time. This versatile method lets you turn any kind of game into a competitive one.

[Special Crossover!]

[SaviorGabriel]

Game night at Sakurai's place sounds like a blast.

[thecunninlynguist]

my friend and I made Ace Attorney competitive for fun. We tried to see who could finish a case faster, who could do a flawless cross-examination, or who could get to certain scenarios in a limited time frame

[browncow]

Reminds me of a couple of years back when a friend and I hooked up a couple of N64's and raced through the child section of Ocarina of Time. I started horribly, missing the jump onto the webs, fumbling Gohma, and even smacking my face on the drawbridge right as it started raising. Then things turned around in Death Mountain when for whatever reason he didn't take the shortcut to the Lost Woods when I did. I overtook him there, played Dodongo's Cavern and Zora's Domain pretty much perfectly, and won.

[caliburnleaf]

The very first thing I thought of was speedrunning, but it's neat to see other win conditions too.

[zobblewobble]

In ATV 3: Off road fury, if you drive to the edge of the world map, you will hear a rumbling and if you keep going forward you get launched a mile through the air back into the map. My brother and I would always compete to see who got the closest without getting yeeted. It’s funny because that game was designed as a racing game but we did more stupid stuff like that in freeroam than actually race against each other.

[Zen.Connection]

On the launch day of the Wii U, my friends and I all got together and did a race like this through New Super Mario Bros. U. Started at the same time, agreed to take different splits at the point where you choose between the ice and water worlds, and both teams reached credits within a couple minutes of each other! It was a truly memorable experience and I'd love to get the chance to do something similar again.

[BigKlingy]

This format reminds me of "races" done at speedrun events or just online with friends. If you've got a game you can stream to PC and a screen sharing program like Discord, you can easily pull this off.

[connordarvall]

So Sakurai's main form of an evening with friends was hosting a miniature speedrun competition. Reminds me of LAN parties a little.

[eduardopazhurtado]

I did this with my kids two months ago. The game was Super Mario 64. The goal was to get to the first Bowser as fast as possible. My son played on my 2019 Switch, my daughter played on my Wii U, and I played on my Zelda OLED Switch. It was such a blast, I want to do this with more games!

[tehshingen]

In the 90s, we had on Canadian television a show called “Video and Arcade Top 10” that had the “race” concept, whoever gets the farthest in the time allotted. They played a variety of games, even an RPG like Shadowrun on SNES was played on that show.

[SynaMax]

0:55 I never thought I would see Atari's Major Havoc here!

[ppowersteef]

I started to think about NES championship the moment you mentioned simultanious gaming, what a cool concept.

If I only got two TV's. :D

[SobmicSSBB]

Imagine Sakurai inviting _you_ to his apartment for a games marathon contest!

On one hand, video games are my favourite pastime because the rules are clearly defined, but on the other, going outside that framework makes them even more exciting.

That's why even in actual game competitions it's good to have obscure games or challenges as side tourneys, as a breath of fresh air.

[U-Flame]

This reminds me of something my friends and I like to do, make single player games cooperative. Take a game on the Switch that requires two joycons to play, like Breath of the Wild, hand the left joycon and the right joycon to two separate people, and see how successfully they can coordinate.

[brannycedeno]

Hey, I used to play this "simultaneous competitive gameplay" style with my neighbor a lot ago. We just loved to pick the same game and try and see who could finish it first. One of my most memorable experiences was with Yoshi's Island, which he and I both loved. He'd play in his handheld, and I'd play on my own system, and we'd sit down every afternoon or so to play together, and keep asking each other in which point of the game we were. Good times.

[KeyboardKrieger]

Once a year I host game Olympics for my mates and me.
The idea is everybody brings one game with a specific goal. You have to be able to play it Vs or get a high score.
It's always a wild mix, starting from NES and going up to VR

[JoTre-ui]

You made my entire childhood through your games Mr.sakurai, and now your teaching us how to create our own worlds. Thank you 😊

[yuki_dawn]

Back in my livestreaming days: I used to do a weekly stream called "Yuki-Versus" which was this exact concept; we'd take a non-multiplayer game and compete to see who could get furthest or beat the entire game the quickest, or just end the game with the most points. It was a lot of fun, and I miss those streams (and just playing video games with people in general) greatly...

[the_very_cozy_burrito]

Late night sakura videos are quite an experience ngl

[mystman]

Reminds me of some of the alternative ways that people have come up with to make pinball competitive. Obviously there's the standard method of taking turns between balls and seeing who can get the highest score when the game is done, but there are a few other formats that have become relatively popular recently, pinbowling and pingolf.

In pinbowling each machine has a predetermined score goal and reaching that score in one ball earns a strike, two balls earns a spare and if you fail that you are scored based on how close you were to the goal. Each game represents one frame of bowling and after 10 your score will be calculated in the same way!

Then there's pingolf, which is similar except it uses golf rules, and the goal can be an objective, not just a score. So a game might have a goal like to start multiball and you try to reach that goal in as few balls as possible. Once all the games have been played, the player who used the least amount of balls wins.