The 6 Most Mind-Blowing (and Pointless) Gaming Achievements

But you had to know that a game built specifically for obsessive people with lots of spare time would quickly top even that -- in complexity, if not size. For instance, there are those who take things into Inception-esque territory and create entire games within the game. We're not talking about building the settings for famous video games using Minecraft blocks (although those also exist, and they are awesome); we're talking about recreating the games themselves. For example, a team of players made a giant old school Game Boy with 18 million blocks and used it to make stop-motion videos of classic games, including The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening and Super Mario Land, brick by goddamned brick, pixel by pixel:

Since they're stop-motion films, that means each individual frame of gameplay was painstakingly recreated. It's so nuts that even Minecraft's creator, Markus "Notch" Persson, thought it was bullshit until the team released a "making of" video, which shows that they didn't just recreate every pixel of Mario Land; since it's a side-scrolling game, they then had to shift every single block to the right, one by one, to make the screen move.

What's even trippier is that other people have created little versions of Minecraft that you can play inside Minecraft. They look like crude versions of the real thing, of course, just like Minecraft itself looks crude to us, and how we probably look crude to the aliens controlling us.

It's not just Minecraft, of course -- any game with a building mechanic attracts this kind of craziness. For instance, the kid-friendly side-scrolling game LittleBigPlanet lets you build your own levels, but players quickly took the idea to crazytown, doing things like building other games and creating extremely complex mechanisms like this giant working calculator. That's right; they took the cartoon blocks and pulleys and levers provided by the game with the intention of letting you build a wacky obstacle course for your character, and instead (with a mere 1,600 parts) built a crude, working computer. You put in a number on each side, add your operation, hit the big red button ... and boom! You get your result.

Looks pretty simple, until you see this video of it in action and notice that behind it there are hundreds and hundreds of small parts forming an intricate series of cogs, pulleys and belts, and that if a single one of them were out of place, none of it would work.

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In a multiplayer game where the arsenal ranges from assault weapons to aerial drones that obliterate a city block, there is one Call of Duty player appropriately named "only use knife" who has, according to the game's creators themselves, 30,000 knife kills in the fourth game alone. He got them by sneaking up to opponents and stabbing them from behind ...

... throwing knives into the sky to hit enemies all the way across the map ...

... or a combination of both approaches.

But then there is the Skyrim player who decided that he would play through the entire game without touching a weapon at all. Not because he's a pacifist, but simply because he enjoys murdering things with his bare hands. This self-proclaimed "fucking psychopath" Viking not only managed to (literally) beat the game just by punching everything, but he teaches you how to do the same thing in this educative (and extremely NSFW) video.

If you can't watch the video, we'll just sum it up for you: It's basically eight minutes of him punching armed soldiers in the face to get their armor ...

... punching animals to increase his heavy armor and smithing skills ...

... knocking down giants with his bare fists, then punching them some more on the ground ...

... and so on, until there are no more things left to punch. Apparently there are certain perks that increase by playing Skyrim unarmed, for some reason, so it's just a matter of getting the right type of armor and punching the shit out of anything that crosses your path until your fists turn into invincible killing machines.

We can actually only think of one thing harder than that ...

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We've talked before about the biggest dick moves in online multiplayer games, but we have to admit that being a dick was always a part of those games. It's impossible to make any progress in World of Warcraft, for example, unless you're willing to go around murdering things ... or so we thought. It turns out there's a special breed of "pacifist" players who spit in the face of the gaming gods by playing these games in a way they were never intended to be played: as decent, nonsociopathic people.

Take Noor the Pacifist, a WoW player who refused to take any quests that involved killing other players or characters and still managed to reach level 80, the highest possible level at the time. Granted, it took him two years, but getting that far in WoW without using murder is like winning at Monopoly without using money.

And Noor isn't the only one: Another WoW player named Everbloom managed to reach level 85 just by walking and collecting crafting materials. She just strolled through the game's map for days upon days, gathering the pitiful experience points you get for exploring and picking flowers until she spontaneously became all-powerful. If you did that in real life, all you'd get is fantastic calves.

Others take the obsession with nonviolence even further, like Nondrick, a player in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion who decided to turn himself into a non-player character -- you know, those completely unremarkable villagers who stand in the exact same spot every day and only know how to say one phrase. This guy saw them at some point and said "That's what I wanna be when I grow up."

Following his self-enforced rules, Nondrick had to eat and sleep regularly and do everything possible to stay away from anything resembling an adventure, settling for a quiet, mundane video game life. He's essentially playing The Sims: Dragon Edition. The experience was so rewarding that the same guy later repeated it for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim with Nondrick's descendant, Nordrick. The craziest part here, of course, is the implication that Nondrick actually reproduced.

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By the year 3998, huge chunks of the world were covered by irradiated swampland, the ice caps had melted 20 times over, 90 percent of the world population had died from famine or nuclear attacks and the entire planet was locked in a perpetual war between three super-nations that lasted 1,700 years. It's like a completely different game, with a story that's somewhere between 1984 and Idiocracy.

Also, bear in mind that Lycerius wasn't intentionally trying to create the most nightmarish scenario possible -- it just turned out that way, because apparently a civilization was never meant to last this long.

When Sid Meier (of Sid Meier's ... fame) learned about this, his response was basically "We didn't know. We didn't know." The original Reddit post went viral and inspired an entire community where others can share possible solutions to the apocalyptic scenario, as well as stories and fan art based on it. Lycerius even posted his save file, and within hours, another Reddit user was able to clear the pollution ... in "only" 102 years.

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... like this tower made out of 8,000 red barrels:

Apparently, creating one of these is just a simple matter of taking one barrel from the game and duplicating it again and again until you're left with thousands of it forming your preferred geometrical shape. So, what do you do once you have a virtual tower that would make any PC not belonging to NASA melt just for trying to render it? Why, you knock it the fuck down, of course.

But remember that these objects explode, too. So in the game, if one car is next to another and explodes, it takes the other car with it. So how about a game of exploding car dominoes:

Or this HD video of thousands of cars falling from the sky:

If you're thinking "There's no way my computer could produce something like that," well, neither could theirs. The sheer awesomeness of these scenes are so impossible for a present-day computer to render that the players have to capture those images frame by frame, then put them back together like a slideshow, over the course of hours and hours. Just for the hell of it.

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It's an incredibly fun game, but most of us probably just laughed our asses off playing it with friends a few times and then put it in the back of the closet with our hula hoops and Family Matters-themed Pogs ... unlike Wisconsinite John Bates, who kept going and going until he achieved the distinction of having bowled almost 9,000 perfect games of Wii Sports bowling. Oh, and he's 85 years old. Who's the grandpa now?

In October 2010, Bates received the Guinness World Record for scoring 300 points on Wii Sports bowling 2,850 times since 2008 (although we're guessing he could have gotten one just for playing Wii bowling that many times). Less than a year later, by August 2011, he was up to 8,850 perfect games. At this rate, he'll reach figures beyond what mortal numbers can keep track of pretty soon.

So what kind of dedication does this take? Bates says he plays between 10 and 21 games a day, which translates to about an hour and a half of gaming -- not exactly Skyrim, but pretty impressive for a guy who predates television.

As for how he got so good: It helps that he's an actual bowler, but even then, his best score at the real thing is only 281. The secret is in how you grab the controller: Bates says he "got up from 22 percent strikes to nearly 90 percent" when he started holding the Wii remote with both hands. Like this:

We're not here to hate on his style, though. He's a Guinness World Record holder, after all: He can roll it any way he damn well pleases.

For more from Ashe, check out Weird Shit Blog and The Ashe Can. Karl has a Twitter, Facebook and a blog. Maxwell Yezpitelok lives in Chile, and you can bother him on Twitter.

For more more video game insanity, check out 6 Baffling Old-School Video Game Commercials and The 20 Worst NES Games of All-Time.

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