Aug 09 2012
The Five Most Fun Video Game Sandboxes for Dicking Around
I appreciate challenging levels and a good story as much as the next modern gamer, but sometimes, you just want to play games to have fun.
What I mean is, you want to be free of mission objectives and cutscenes. You just want to dick around, whether that means killing every NPC in sight, or exploring uncharted areas the linear storyline won’t take you.
I selected five of my favorite video game sandboxes to play around in. Feel free to add your own in the comments.
San Andreas (Grand Theft Auto)
Since Grand Theft Auto went three dimensional, there are a lot of locales to chose from for this slot on the list. Liberty City, Vice City, Bigger Liberty City, but I ultimately had to go with San Andreas. Why?
San Andreas was the last time Grand Theft Auto wasn’t afraid to truly go goofy. GTA IV struck a more serious tone, but in GTA:SA you could fly around in a jetpack as a morbidly obese black guy. The map was enormous, and still feels like one of the bigger video game sandboxes to date (though it isn’t, really). There were so many areas to explore, and I remember trying to hunt down urban legends like Leatherface at the lumber mill or find UFOs using that mysterious map that I never did understand.
But ultimate, GTA was a great series for dicking around because it was one of the few games that still allowed cheats, so in between missions you were free to drop a tank in your driveway and go on a cross country murder spree until the entire US army was finally able to take you down.
Skyrim (The Elder Scrolls)
Skyrim is less about crazy police chases, unless your idea of fun is seeing how many Whiterun guards you can kill before they give up and leave you alone. Actually that is pretty fun.
But with such a rich and detailed map, it’s one of the first game where you simply felt like exploring rather than playing. Yes, if you played it from a linear perspective you’d just be doing a lot of fetch quests and following an arrow on your compass, but it really didn’t have to be like that.
Rather, the most fun I ever had was on my second playthrough as a stealth archer where if there was a point ahead on my radar, I simply went to it and explored it. With hundreds of places to find, you could sink a few hundred hours into the game and still not find everything. The downside was that combat got quite repetitive, and at higher levels you simply have to glance in most enemies’ direction and they’ll fall down dead.
The sights and sounds of the beautiful land of Skyrim were well worth it though, and it dicking around actually made the game better than if you were just actually playing it for the story.
Stilwater (Saints Row 2)
It may seem redundant to have GTA and Saints Row on here, as the two share many similarities, but trust me, it isn’t. While GTA up until recently has always been a bit goofy, it’s nothing compared to Saints Row which abandons any pretense of sanity in the pursuit of fun. And it’s amazing.
Much of this stems from your ability to alter absolutely everything about your character. You can do drivebys as a tiny Asian woman wearing nipple pasties. You can murder cops as an obese British man in a hot dog costume. The recipes for absurdity are endless.
The missions provide a fair amount of dicking around in and of themselves, but it’s in the overworld between tasks where you’ll truly have your fun. In Saints Row you have a wanted star level for the police AND a wanted star level for rival gangs, resulting in not one but two insane groups that are out to kill you. But fortunately they can’t f*** with me when I’m spraying them with shit from a septic truck.
More Unreal Posts
My favorite would have to be Roller Coaster tycoon. I loved just spending hours building the most insanely fast and dangerous roller coaster and just trying to get people on it. Or if I was feeling extra sadistic that day I’d just build a coaster made to crash and burn. I must have spent hundreds of hours on that game.
minecraft…
is…
addicting…
I got Saints Row The Third during the last Steam Sale, it’s completely insane.
Terraria. Like Minecraft but a side scroller.
Fallout 3 captured the atmosphere and openness for me better than New Vegas, but NV really held me with its story over FO3 (probably because of its continuity related to FO1 and 2).
It may have been because I played FO3 on my PS3 instead of PC (meaning I turned off the lights, had a bigger screen with my TV, and it received my undivided attention, ala no Steam interrupts or alt tabbing).
I got so hype for SimCity 5 with the possibility of communal play. Then I realized it required Origin and an always on connection. Yep. Not playing that, but at least SC3000 and 4 were decent, and Civ 5 is also decent enough to last me a while.
I suppose it is not great for “dicking,” but NYC in Spiderman 2 was tons of fun. Swinging through the city and stopping random crimes made for hours of fun.
Nazi Zombies…..nuff said
My favorite was Simcopter when flying around cities that I built.
I also like to play around in the X3:Terran Conflict sandbox.
Saints Row 2&3 are outstanding time-wasters, and I love them. But now that my goddam X-Box is red-ringed again, its Red Dead Redemption I pine for.
The Simpsons: Hit and Run
I’m sorry, but no Crackdown? Not even in the honourable mentions? Either of the Crackdown games should have EASILY made this list…
Oh, and by the way, Amped3 should have been in place of Tony Hawk, it’s a much truer ‘sandbox’ style extreme sports game in the sense that you can go wherever you want, and can customize the living shit out of your character. Also, sledding.
TBOGT with mods > All GTA sandboxes.
Terraria > Minecraft.
@GnomeSlice: Too bad it’s exclusive to a garbage console.
@gnomeslice,
Yea, agreed, crackdown was a ton of fun to screw around with.
I still love popping in Saints Row 3 for an occasional rampage.
No Prototype? Dicking around pissing off marines was tons of fun