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

Re:Wow

[Jackmn]

On behalf of the last few decades, I'd like to welcome you to the computer industry and something called "easter eggs".

Easter eggs are usually small things. This was a significant chunk of content that the developers likely put a fair bit of time into making.

Am I missing something??

[consonant]

And this story is filed under "Politics" because...?

Re:Heretic 2

[CelticWhisper]

I played that game endlessly with a friend of mine when I got it--Doom was all but forgotten. One of our favourite cheats (and one which, to date, has not been implemented again in any game to my knowledge) was the "/EKG" command, which activated Engine-Killing Gibs mode. This resulted in at least a 4x increase in the amount of blood, gore, and flying severed body parts on the screen any time an enemy was killed with an explosive weapon (of which there were a LOT).

The real fun bit behind that code was what we noticed one day in the midst of one of our regularly scheduled slaughterfests. Eyeballs from slain baddies would not just fly through the air--rather, they would hit the screen and actually slide down it from their point of impact. And best of all, by pausing the game to admire a particularly messy room-clearing, we noticed that the severed arm careening through the air at us was giving us the finger. Little tidbits like this, among other things like the -dopefish command-line option, smiley faces on charred skeletons, and a super-secret bonus item that was actually the lead developer's head floating in midair and making loud belching noises, are why I yearn for the gaming days of old when games were made by teams of 10 people instead of entire corporate divisions where nobody knows anybody. The humor and charm was lost somewhere along the way.