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

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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

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.

Heretic 2

[__aaclcg7560]

I think it was Heretic 2 (based on the Quake engine) where you type "GOD" in the game console, you got a message saying, "So you think you're God?" and bad guys would appear out of nowhere to kill you. I don't remember what the code word was for god mode. Maybe it was "DOG".

Re:Heretic 2

[AFCArchvile]

For Heretic 2 (Quake 2 based), the godmode command was "playbetter".

Raven had an interesting theme of easter eggs in the cheat codes. For Heretic, using Doom's godmode cheat would result in "Trying to cheat? That's one..." printing on the screen; type it two more times and you instantly die. Entering the all-weapons cheat for Doom would take away all your ammo and weapons and print "Cheater, you don't deserve weapons" on the screen. Of course, there were functional cheat codes, but they were different from the parent Id 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.

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.

51: This story ending up in Politics

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF Zonk?

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:google cache

[schwartzg]

Good cache

Easy... Baldurs Gate 2

[fuo]

with the Throne of Bhaal expansion iirc.

In the middle of a cave/dungeon you encounter another party of adventurers, a low-level party; they're bragging about having Magic Missile, etc. (you're about level 8-9 at this point i think). one of them walks up to you and starts talking, the conversation goes south and you end up fighting each other, and you destroy them with no effort...

once you kill them all you see the "Loading save-game" window appear and there you both are BEFORE the fight. they choose a different course of action this time around and you part ways :)

Re:Easy... Baldurs Gate 2

[Jaqenn]

It was 'The Immortal', which was on PC, NES, Genesis, etc. Here's the wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortal_(compute r_game)/

I only played the NES and Genesis version, but I seem to recall that the coffee thing was not in the Genesis one. Was this an NES exclusive?

Am I missing something??

[consonant]

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

Fahrenheit

[LarsWestergren]

The server seems Slashdotted, so I haven't read the article, but for me the prize goes to Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophesy in the US) a.k.a Our Dog Ate the Last Third of the Script, Honest.

CONTAINS SPOILERS:
Lukas Kane, the main character, dies early in the game, but like Neo comes back to life with SuperMatrixPowers. Later in the game as the earth is about to end, there is a tender love scene between him and policewoman Carla Valenti (this scene was removed in the US version of course...). First I thought - nice, a fairly adult treatment of love and sex (unlike Samantha's earlier strip scene in front of Tyler), sort of a "two people at the end of the world seeking comfort in each other" thing. But then I remembered - Lukas is dead! People in the game have commented that he doesn't breathe anymore, his skin is cold and he doesn't have a pulse! Sooo wrong... The Wikipedia article has a nice explanation for the botched ending though.

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.

Not just easter eggs

[Moraelin]

It's not just easter eggs, but a really odd and incoherent collection of stuff they found weird in games, or about games, or somewhat related to games... and some of it isn't even weird if you think about it.

E.g., they pick on the fact that the main character in Undying was designed to be appealing to a gay man. Well, having played the game, you wouldn't notice it, and certainly not think there's anything weird about that character. He's not camp or a cross-dresser, he's just a young and fit Irish soldier, fresh from the trenches. He'd probably look just as sexy to a woman too, and, honestly, there was no point where I thought "dude, this guy looks gay". If anything, it's a fit and macho kind of a character, not the effeminate kind. I can live with playing a character like that.

If I'm allowed the detour, though, reading the whole story just gives me one of the details that _do_ make me say, "thank goodness they asked a real novellist for help." I mean, I knew they had originally crammed all the worst cliches in a game until Clive Barker talked them out of it. Now I find out that the protagonist was supposed to be some _count_ too. How cliche is that in a supernatural theme?

E.g., under "The Art of Evil" they pick on... not something from an actual game, but on Sony's reaction to a player's distasteful fanfic about Dark Elves.

E.g., "Twisty History" has them pick on the fact that Sierra heavily photoshopped a castle, instead of using the real castle. Well, gee, ya think that games might not really match reality? I never would have guessed ;) At any rate, unless you know what the real castle looks like, chances are you'd never suspect anything in the game.

E.g., "Strumpets of Silicon" picks on erotic clips or movies where some porn star dressed like Lara Croft. I'm kinda at a loss how that would count as weird, much less as weird in _gaming_.

E.g., "The Madness of Malkavians" is even weirder in itself, picking on something that's expected and a trait of that bloodline. Newsflash: Malkavians _are_ mad, and ghouls _do_ pick the traits of their master. It's like elves having long ears or dwarves being short: that's the whole idea. It would have been weird if you played a Malkavian and you were perfectly sane.

Plus, if they actually wanted to pick on something weird from that particular game, there's a scene where you talk with the news anchor on your TV set, and he tells you a joke.

E.g., "Plot, The Magic Dragons" sees them picking on the fact that an old PC RPG's has... quests. No, really, you end up doing quests for some dragons instead of instantly hacking and slashing them, and everything else that moves! How weird is that? Well, not at all. Just because PC RPGs for a long while meant just dumb hack and slash, doesn't make quests weird.

E.g., "The Mother / Whore Dichotomy" picks on the fact that Roberta Williams posed as Mother Goose on the cover of one game, and as one of the supposedly naked girls (you can't actually see anything naughty, if you ask me) in a jacuzi on the cover of Softporn Adventure.

First of all, it seems to me like it's a false dichotomy in the first place, as one can jolly well be both if she so chooses. (Even prostitutes and porn stars have kids, you know. Plus, where do you think pregnant porn comes from?)

Second, and more importantly, being seen from the collarbone upwards in a jacuzi doesn't make one a whore. Now if she had sex on camera or something, that might qualify as a "whore", but if showing a bit of skin makes one a whore, then you've just filed 99% of actresses and singers as "whores". It takes a mindset worst than even the biblethumping belt to go that far. And having worked on a softcore game doesn't make one a whore. It can mean anything ranging from "oh well, I'm not going to hand in my resignation just because the company makes a softcore game", to not giving a damn about it, to actually having some interest in softcore... which isn't horribly weird even among women. At any rate, it's ju

Corrections and precisions

[BlackCobra43]

This encounter happens in Abazigal`s Lair, the 4th dungeon of the Throne Of Bhaal expansion.

-Your party is roughlty level 30 to 35 at this point; epic heroes that slay dragons and eat demiliches for breakfast. Of course, this only make the situation funnier :)

My favorite board gaming ones

[edremy]

Those of us old enough to remember actual board games have a few wierd ones too. (See the "Murphy's Rules" section in old Dragon magazines)

My two favorites (I have both games)

You can't commit suicide with a .45 magnum in Car Wars. People have 3 hit points- 1 wounds you, 2 makes you unconcious and 3 kills you. A heavy pistol does 2 points of damage...

In a civil war game about the battle of Pea Ridge, there's a rule called "Designer's Great Great Grandfather". The DGGG was an officer in one confederate unit in the game. Every time that unit takes damage, you have to see if the DGGG is killed. If so, the game ends instantly without a winner since it's obvious the game couldn't possibly exist

Secret of Monkey Island

[kalirion]

I love the part in the first chapter of the first game that happens off screen:

THOK
THOK
SMAK
Guybrush comes out and places back the priceless Ming to its place.
Guybrush : Better leave this here.
(proceeds back to the room)
THOK
ooh!
Hypnotize quarrelsome rhinoceros
ow!
KRASH!
Push
Sheriff : No!
Push red button
Sheriff : Not the red button!
KABOOM

WUMP
WUMP
WUMP
WUMP
Look at tremendous yak
Guybrush : It's a big, ugly, hairy yak wearing some wax lips.
Push tremendous dangerous-looking yak
Guybrush : I can't move it.
Pull tremendous dangerous-looking yak
Guybrush : I can't move it.
Pick up staple remover
Use staple remover on tremendous dangerous-looking yak
THOK
Suddenly, the painting is shocked and Guybrush is thrown through it, making
a hole in the wall.
Walk to books
Pick up Manual of Style
Guybrush : I'll need this. I must be nuts!
(jumps back into the hole he made earlier)
Pick up wax lips
THOK
KRASH
Guybrush : (loud voice) Acck! ...gophers!
Pick up gopher repellent
Use gopher repellent with gopher
Use gopher repellent with another gopher
Use gopher repellent with gopher horde
Use gopher repellent with funny little man
SMAK!
KRASH
Look at fabulous idol
Guybrush : It's beautiful!
Open lock
Guybrush : I can't open it. Uh, oh!
Pick up heavy chair
Use heavy chair with sheriff
THOK
Guybrush appears from the door on the second floor.
Guybrush : That should hold him for a while! If only I had a file I could get the idol!