spitfire

Question going around twitter: what’s the most useless piece of video game knowledge you know? (you’re getting more content than twitter is:)

1. There is a fully functional Arwing from Star Fox inside Ocarina of Time. It was a debug test for the z-targeting system.

2. Majora’s Mask has calendar support for more than three days and on some days the moon is very far away.

3. 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)

4. 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.

this puzzle from the Imperial City level of Dark Forces (1995) is based on this scene from Brazil (1985):

Thankfully I wrote out my best example already: https://cohost.org/graham/post/100827-how-my-friend-and-i

Other contenders off the top of my head include:

• The special pokeball from Gold/Silver was "miscoded" so that it only helped same gender catches rather than opposite ones
• Halo 2 has a giant soccer ball in the skyscrapers above its campaign
• There is a copy of Delfino Plaza in the sky above the regular one in Super Mario Sunshine
• There's an easy way to get Mew in Red/Blue via memory exploits that you can perform in under an hour with the stock game and only one actual glitch
• Star Fox Adventures and Diddy Kong Racing both have a red-orange triceratops named Tricky in them
• Killing an opponent by having them be run over by an unmanned vehicle in Halo Combat Evolved would cause the respawn timer to be longer than running them over yourself
• The Age of Empires 2 horse and camel sounds for units from the stable come from a common sound fx library that continues to get used today, even on Game of Thrones

All game objects in Rayman 2 & 3 have internal names only used by the level editor. Despite most editor data being removed from the retail builds of the games, the names remain in the game files. Some of them are inside jokes/references:

• The red and purple birds flying in the background of some levels in Rayman 2 are called "Francesco", "Pickwitt" and "Coco", allegedly after one of the developer's pet parrots.
• In the Clearleaf Forest level in Rayman 3, all enemies are named after football players. There's also a set of 3 cages called "Johnny_Cage", "David_Cage" and "Nicholas_Cage".
• In the boat level, there's a cannon model called "FuckingCanon" and a spawnable cannonball entity called "FuckingCanonBall".