Odd Gaming Improvisations?

Well, I would say that my biggest improvisation was playing Counter-Strike while having to shoot by pushing the mouse wheel, since my left mouse button was worn out (I have played competitively). It is not that much, but the only thing I can remember.

I remember the d-pads in the original Sega Master System would often break and fall out so we would use all manner of things as replacements as long as it was thin enough to fit. Usually ended up with a flat piece of plastic. They were terrible.

My family had a Slim model PS2. When the disc lid is closed, there is a plastic tab that presses a button down so the system knows. Their one had that tab break off and needed a replacement. I super glued a bit of chicken bone to that thing. Worked for two more years then the laser died.

My attempt to replace the laser with chicken eyes didn't work so well.

Also, I have 3 spare styluses sitting around for when I need them. :P

Using a marker to draw in the crosshair (I think it was for CS 1.5 but I'm not sure)

Maki maki. (Not my first choice, but the first relevant google result.)

Playing Mechwarrior 3 on pentium 166mhz in 5fps and still having fun. It was... strange O_o

Instantly thought of this and this

Need to buy a stylus? Try here.

Right now I'm using my PC monitor to play the PS3 since I don't have a real TV, with an adapter on the audio cables so I can get it to output to my headphones.

I have also done the drawing-crosshair-thing in CS.

Oh and back in school my laptop's HDD failed completely so for months I went by with an 8GB USB stick with Ubuntu installed on it because I was too poor to buy another HDD. Managed to do some light gaming on that too.

I have 2 sets of makey makey and fighting games will never be the same for me (my first attempt was to use spoons to play street fighter 4...it was radical but I was too dumb to not use plastic spoons at first)

I have 2 sets of makey makey and fighting games will never be the same for me (my first attempt was to use spoons to play street fighter 4...it was radical but I was too dumb to not use plastic spoons at first)

Back when I had no job I had to use a shitty laptop mouse with the old PC I was on. Its wheel was broken one day, but since I had no replacement, I had to play every game without that. All that keyboard number searching in HL's multiplayer...

Also had my thumb almost cut off about 6 years ago, so I had to finish Tomb Raider Anniversary with the jump button bound to the middle mouse button. It was... interesting, but I could 100% it, so I guess it was alright.

Not quite the same idea, but I started abusing the fact that multiplayer games on systems earlier than the last generation typically did not care if a controller was plugged in or not, so if I only had 2 controllers for that console and wanted to try out an exploit, I could start 4-player mode and just constantly switch controllers around.

In addition, if you take out a controller, it usually would still behave like the last button press combination you had, which allowed for even more shenanigans in games like Mario Kart 64 and Super Smash Bros. Melee when trying to find glitches.

Using my ancient computer. :P

Binding Caps-Lock to the letter "a" in the registry since the letter "a" on my laptop doesn't work anymore. Well... lower-case "a" doesn't work anyway; upper case "A" still works fine for some reason.

Also, while playing Journeyman Project, there's a sequence where you fly a ship through a canyon and have to shoot things down, but there's no reticule. I cut out a little paper target and taped it to the screen. (This was like 15-20 years ago, before I had a good sense of shooter aim.) Edit: it's also possible that a reticule isn't necessary in that sequence and I just had a ship-shaped cut-out taped to the screen to look cool when playing back the canyon sequence video file from Windows... it's been a long time and I can't really remember for certain.

As a kid whenever the Dpads on either my genesis, or early pc gamepadas broke and fell off, I used to attach erasers (the ones you use at school) to whatever was sticking out of the joystick.

The latest I can think of is cutting off the connector of a dead PSP battery charger and attaching it to a cellphone charger in order to charge my PSP.

When my original NES was having issues reading the cartridge (didn't they all do this eventually?) my sister thought that her "girl breath" would get it working faster than my "boy breath" (she is 9 years younger than me) so she was always the one to blow on the cartridge or in the slot that it slid in to. She didn't know that I had later purchased another NES and had it in my bedroom. I would tell her that I needed help with the NES again, leave her to try to get the messed up NES to work, and then go into my room and play the game that I wanted to play on my new NES. In reality I didn't want her to bug me while I was playing so it kept her busy for a while - unless she got the messed up NES to finally work which did happen a few times.

Maybe "girl breath" was better because she ended up keeping that NES for herself and used it for at least a year until we got a N64 which I was forced to share because it was so expensive back then. Of course, later I found out that it was the system that needed cleaning and all of that blowing across the cart contacts really did nothing to help other than to keep my sister out of my hair for a while.