Question going around twitter: what’s the most useless piece of video game knowledge you know? (you’re getting more content than twitter is:)
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There is a fully functional Arwing from Star Fox inside Ocarina of Time. It was a debug test for the z-targeting system.
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Majora’s Mask has calendar support for more than three days and on some days the moon is very far away.
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The Imposter Professor Oak pokémon trading card was based on a scrapped plot line for Pokémon Gold/Silver (in fact they threw out the entire plot and world map and started over)
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The Paper Mario engine supports having no boots equipped and will accordingly prevent you from using jump based attacks, though there is no way to get into this state without editing ram.
The "Golf" mini-level in Dungeon Keeper 2 (1999) was inadvertently broken by a balance patch shortly after launch. Completing this level requires playing an unpatched version of the game as it was released in 1999. As far as I'm aware, the versions which are legally for sale are fully-patched and therefore this particular piece of content cannot be completed. So this level as it originally existed is now accorded the status of oral tradition.
This is one of those side-quests where the game designers used the editor to remove 99% of the game including the regular defeat conditions, and instead construct a whole level belonging to an entirely different genre, by abusing the shit out of one obscure mechanic from a niche unit. I fuckin' love levels like this, in any game. My favorite Starcraft levels are the ones where they give you like 2 ghosts and a probe with no minerals. "Golf" was one of my favorites, despite (because?) consisting solely of a mechanic which I actually pretty hated in the mainline game.
Dungeon Keeper 2 had Boulder Traps, because it's got "Dungeon" in the title so you gotta. And you play as the Evil Character, so you can use your mouse cursor to backhand slap units. Slapping is a primary player interaction in this game (like in Black and White, which was also designed by Peter Molyneux).
It is possible, with immaculate timing, to "steer" boulders in flight via the precision deployment of bitchslaps. "Golf" was a level where this was literally the only means the player had for interacting with the level. The goal was to drive a boulder into opposing enemy dungeons, with a minimum number of slaps/puts (hence the name).
In balance patch 1.51, Boulder Traps were re-tuned to travel faster, but more significantly to also take damage from slaps. As far as I can tell, they just... didn't consider the entire level built around this thing they were patching. The move speed made the level more difficult, but taking damage made the level... literally impossible. The greens were Par 10, and the boulder crumbled after 3 slaps.
This also froze the game. Remember, the regular "defeat" triggers were disabled because you... didn't have a dungeon. The level had to manually trigger defeat based on your golf performance, and while the level did check for the boulder getting blown up under other conditions, "the player did the only thing they're literally capable of" was not something that needed to be included on the original trigger list.
The level was actually pretty well-designed in its original state. It's hard to balance such a level because, being from a different genre, it lacks many of the levers to tune things. Basically just hallway length, to affect timing. Nonetheless it actually worked. But, sadly, it was a fragile state of affairs that lasted mere months.
