The 50 Weirdest Moments in PC Gaming

Via GameSetWatch, a feature on the personal site of the well-traveled games journalist Richard Cobbett. The Circe Du Strange details fifty of the strangest, most out-of-place game elements in the history of PC gaming. From classic text adventures to games released in the last few years, the piece outlines some mighty odd design decisions. "30) Command and Cretaceous - While the original Command and Conquer suffered from really bad expansion packs, the first offered a particular entertaining secret. Adding the -funpark parameter when running the game opened up a top secret set of five missions that pitted the standard armies of GDI and Nod against. dinosaurs. For no reason. There was even a briefing movie and bonus music track. And developers Westwood didn't even mention it."

Comments

google cache

[erbbysam]

I couldn't get to the page... here's the cache version from google: http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:jT6FOBaQYw8J:w ww.richardcobbett.co.uk/codex/articlelibrary/filin gcabinet/the_50_weirdest_moments_in_pc_gaming/+htt p://www.richardcobbett.co.uk/codex/articlelibrary/ filingcabinet/the_50_weirdest_moments_in_pc_gaming /&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a

Re:Heretic 2

[VGPowerlord]

I don't know about Heretic 2 - but in the original Heretic if you typed "IDDQD" (invincibility in Doom) then it would kill you instantly. I don't remember what the message was, but it did say something just before it killed you.

Although it doesn't run too well under XP and I'm too lazy to start Dosbox, I ran the game. It says "trying to cheat, eh? now you die!"

Re:TES 4: Oblivion

[Anonymous Coward]

The Skingrad potions master starts asking weird questions about necrophilia for no apparent reason. Boy is that ever creepy.

Creepy, yes, but it's not for no reason.

  Background: Dark Elves began as the Chimer, and when they broke from the Altmer, their new religion was a mix of ancestor worship and Daedra worship. The Tribunal put the nix on most of the Daedra worship (except for the four "good" Daedra) while still permitting the veneration of the dead. However, worship of the other, nastier Daedra Lords never wholly went away.

  The Alchemist at Skingrad is a worshiper of Sanguine, the Daedric Lord of Depravity. Of course, a religious interest in ever-greater acts of wickedness would lead her in one particular direction -- since there's nothing more depraved in Dark Elf culture than getting overly friendly with the deceased. The Dunmer are notoriously relaxed when it comes to sexual behavior, but that sort of thing is religiously offensive to say the least. So, the alchemist fled Morrowind for places where tombs aren't so carefully guarded and constantly visited.

  Easter egg: She's had to move once before, though -- you can see what's left of her last business location, east of Imperial City, just past the far shore of the Rumare. It's near a three-way crossroads, the easterly of which heads towards Cheydinhal, I think. Easter egg inside an easter egg: everything's burned to the ground, all except for some potions of fire resistance. Heh!

  Anyway, she's placed there to give you directions to Sanguine's shrine, which is fairly out-of-the-way for obvious reasons, and she had to have a backstory to explain how she would know the location of the hidden shrine.

  The TES guys don't fuck around when it comes to backstory.

Re:Fahrenheit

[thatrichardguy]

Fahrenheit was definitely on the shortlist. The only reason it didn't make it into the article was that at the time (it was written almost a year ago now) was that the best stuff to mention - all that nonsense with the Cyborg especially - seemed too much of a spoiler for a then-fairly recent game.

Re:Heretic 2

[The Evil Couch]

There actually was a Dog mode in Rise of the Triad (early FPS. Probably the first to introduce pseudo 3D. Based off of the Wolfenstein 3D engine?)

Your viewpoint dropped about 4 feet, your weapons vanished and instead of hands in your view, there was a great big doggie snout. If I remember correctly, you gibbed people when you bit them. It was ridiculous, excessive and fun. Then again, so was pretty much everything else in Rise of the Triad.

Not dinosaurs... Ants!

[chipotlehero]

If I remember correctly, the missions were actually against giant ants, not dinosaurs!

The wikipedia article for the expansions appears to confirm this wikipedia article[wikipedia.com]

Re:Not dinosaurs... Ants!

[thatrichardguy]

That was the Red Alert expansion. The original C&C expansion had dinos.

Re:Not dinosaurs... Ants!

[Jaqenn]

As others have mentioned, that's Red Alert. As others have not mentioned, there was a hidden reference to it in the manual for the game. Morse code lines the edges of the manual pages which translates into radio chatter from an ant attack.

I tried to paste the translation here, but the comment lame-ness filter is stopping me (too much whitespace). Go to http://www.the-spoiler.com/STRATEGY/Westwood/red.a lert.2.html and search the page for the phrase "5.4.1 Morse code in the manual".

Re:Wow

[Xentor]

Excel 97... But it's not really a game... Just a simple 3D engine with some terrain mapping and the application credits "rolling" on the face of a "hill".

Still...

Best. Easter. Egg. Ever.