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.

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

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 :)

Am I missing something??

[consonant]

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

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: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.

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 :)

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.