Reminds me of when I was a kid and raced the same track over and over something like 1000 times on a game to get enough money to buy the fanciest car in the game rather than building my skills enough to do races where I would actually make decent money on each race and only have to do 5 or ten to buy said car.
On one of many playthroughs of the original Phantasy Star, I saved up 15K for the Diamond Armor by killing low level baddies and then breezed through the game until the end game.
When we were kids, my cousin figured out a way to make Fallout 2 playthrough much easier. From the starting location, he would immediately head down to a particular late-game location in which you could acquire a Power Armor (the second-best armor in the game). He avoided getting killed by high-level random encounters by discovering that you could escape almost any of them if you mashed "A" key during loading screen - this would guarantee you started the turn-based combat before the random enemy could spot you, and 99% of the times would let you escape. After reaching the target location he'd acquire[0] the Power Armor, and start a quest chain that let you acquire Advanced Power Armor (the very best armor in the game). After that, the game was much easier.
Ah, videogames were so much more fun when we were kids, and didn't have that much time pressure.
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[0] - I'm fuzzy on the details here; it probably involved attempting to steal it from the shop and reloading game on failure. I later improved this step by just buying it for money, after exploiting a "repeatedly steal merchandise from a guy and sell it back to him" infinite money generator bug that was available near the starting location.
Here is what you do:
1. Max theft or whatever and small arms (whatever it's called)
2. Walk down to the trading post.
3. Attempt to steal the Bozar rifle. Reload until you succeed.
In San Francisco. It was (AFAIR) in the lower left corner of the map. Like I described, you could get there easily straight from starting location, if your "A" mashing skill was good enough.
