What Do You Do Different The Second Time Through A Game?

My recent dive back into Fallout 3, and an e-mail I recently got from Gabriel Stinson, have me thinking about the idea of finding enjoyment in games you've already played before.

Fallout 3 is a great experience for me again, in part for the passage of time and forgetting a lot of the content, but also because of the "Terminator Run" I've been doing as I role-play.

So I'm curious what any of you have done differently the second time through a game to breath new life into the experience. Hunt for trophies/achievements? Make different Role-play choices? Apply an arbitrary limitation to your play style?

I'm also thinking of refreshing the Summer Of Free this year with some new ideas about getting the most out of old games, so your response might even be featured!

Some games I used to play had power-ups that you could build to and use on another play-through. For example, a few of the Sonic the Hedgehog games had bonus mini-games that you had to beat to unlock the ability to become Super Sonic. In that kind of game, I would go through and painstakingly get all the things to become the ultimate leveled-up character, and then I would go through from the beginning and wreck house with my new powers.

In a game like The Punisher, I would go through and try to achieve the extra tasks that were offered but weren't necessary to beat the game. Like, in the levels where SHIELD soldiers or zookeepers follow you around after you save them, I would try to get through the level without letting them get killed. Not sure if I ever accomplished that, actually. I know there were levels with named characters like Black Widow and Nick Fury following you, but they couldn't get killed.

I'll do New Game + if it's an option. Depending on the game, that allows you to upgrade your character a lot more and can give you a new, more powerful experience. With The Evil Within 2 when I played NG+, I was able to get the biggest upgrade which is a slow down time mechanic that kinda' breaks the game, because it makes it way too easy to headshot zombies, but it was fun to have a more action, run and gun experience with that game.

Upping the difficulty is another option. I rarely play games on hard, but I've played The Last of Us on hard because I've been through it several times and I pretty much know everything to do. Playing on hard made me reconsider my approach to some of the action.

I'm not much for platinuming games (not sure what the equivalent is called on Xbox), but that is a way for squeezing every last ounce out of a game. The only platinum I have is for Marvel's Spider-Man, but if more games had easily attainable platinums like Spider-Man I would go for it more often. That might defeat the point though.

DNArington wrote:
I'm not much for platinuming games (not sure what the equivalent is called on Xbox), but that is a way for squeezing every last ounce out of a game. The only platinum I have is for Marvel's Spider-Man, but if more games had easily attainable platinums like Spider-Man I would go for it more often. That might defeat the point though.

The lingo for Xbox might be "achievement hunting", but I'm not sure.

Despite not being interested in competition or playing games for challenge, trophies/achievements do become relevant to me in rare cases! When I have played a game out, especially open world type games, I will sometimes look through the trophies just to see if there is something the game allows me to do/pursue that I hadn't considered yet. Now and then there are some fun ideas on those lists that I find are worth getting back into the game for!

Thanks for reminding me of that!

I've been thinking about this.
I generally don't need anything special for me to enjoy replaying a game.
Just getting to experience the story once again tends to be enough for me, like re-watching an old favourite movie.

However, live-streaming the old classic Sierra adventures I've played many many times during extra life kinda breathed new life into the experience for me last November.

and I'm currently re-playing the Uncharted series, but with my son. (usually means I watch him play until he gets stuck and then I take over. But we sometimes play "pass the controller every time you die"). But it's been so long there's a lot about the story I've forgotten, so it still feels pretty fresh.

I think the fact that I just don't play games that often means that by the time I get back to a game, it's plenty fresh enough without doing anything different.