A Thought: Hardcore Mode · 6:44pm Jul 20th, 2014
Not enough to be a story, but:
Gary looked over his new pony avatar once more and clicked "Let's Go!". The PonyPad screen gave him a swirling "Please Wait" message. He'd heard that the game tailored itself to your preferred playstyle, so he'd bought a copy to see what it'd do for him. How could you adapt some frilly pony game for a real hardcore action gamer?
The scene faded in to show his unicorn in an apple orchard under sunny skies. He rolled his eyes. Generic so far. Then that white horse sailed down from the sun to land before him and give him his first quest or whatever. "Good morning, my little --"
Then a meteor splattered him across the orchard in a shower of red pixels. "GAME OVER. PRESS R TO TRY AGAIN."
Gary gaped at the screen, then hit R just from being too stunned not to obey. His pony was back in the orchard. The white horse arrived. "Good morning, my little --"
Gary dived backward just in time for the meteor to knock a crater into the spot where he'd been standing. The big horse blinked and finished, "...pony?"
He found himself in the shade of a tree, too far away to use the interaction button on the quest-giver, so he started to walk toward her --
And an apple slammed down from the tree and splattered him across the orchard in a shower of red pixels. "GAME OVER. PRESS R TO TRY AGAIN."
Ten repetitions later, Gary had gotten the moves down for surviving the first ten seconds of play. Dodge the meteor, roll past the falling apple, leap away from the falling tree, then listen to Celestia long enough to hear her introduce herself and get the quest. Finally, a window appeared at the top of the screen saying, "Quest Received: I Wanna Be the Stallion. Simply escape the orchard."
Okay, thought Gary; I can do this! Challenging gameplay but basically what I'm used to.
Then the quest window fell and splattered him across the orchard in a shower of red pixels. "GAME OVER. PRESS R TO TRY AGAIN."
Blame this on NuclearPony and on the game "I Wanna Be the Guy".
Even the quest window is out to get you?
Ah, video games.
Oh wow. I'm pretty sure I've played this game.
While it might not work as a full story, perhaps you could make a somewhat longer version for Tiny Morsels of Satisfaction.
...Why can't I upvote blog posts?
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Even the Windows StickyKeys menu is out to get you in IWBTG! (The real menu tends to pop up because of the game's controls, so the game runs with the idea by having a version of it literally trying to kill you.)
In playing the game again while writing this I found out that there's a sequel. One player on YouTube gets killed around eight times on the stage select screen.
"I Wanna Be the A.I.!"
"Very well... Welcome to Nightmare mode. This will delete all your saved games. Continue?"