0xabad1dea
@0xabad1dea

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.


xkeeper
@xkeeper
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in reply to @0xabad1dea's post:

I think my most useless piece of video game trivia has to be knowing that the "Sonic Crackers" prototype of Knuckles Chaotix doesn't run on real hardware unless you absolutely mash the buttons to start the game, because the title screen has no music and the sound driver crashes if it isn't told to play something.

In the GBA port of A Link to the Past, if you use Bombos or Ether on a screen that has a tree with an exploding bomb in it (not the dark world talking ones, the ones that fall out when you pegasus bonk them), then knock the bomb out of the tree, it'll be an exploding head instead. This replaces a glitched sprite that looked kinda like a necklace in the original.

In World of Warcraft (lol) there is an achievement to complete a certain large number of daily quests. Daily quests got largely phased out of the game in Warlords of Draenor to be replaced by world quests in Legion (shame imo but that is an entirely different thing) but they still used daily quest technology, with hidden auto accepted and auto completed quests, to manage some things behind the scenes. This is particularly noticeable if for some reason you were tracking your daily quest completion achievement, have a death knight with legion flying, and simply fly from acherus to the broken shore and see the counter increment, once per day. Now... I do not know exactly what this is used for. My best guess would be resetting daily loot eligibility from all rares on the broken shore at once. But it is how they chose to implement something.

Ocarina of Time has invisible items that you pick up when you walk on them. Most of them are rupees, like when jumping across the squares in Kokiri Forest, or up on top of the drawbridge.

There's exactly one invisible magic refill in the game. It's on top of the rotating cyclops statue in Gerudo Training Grounds, reachable by hover boots. And it doesn't even refill your magic, it just pops up with no effect!

Also, the invisible rupees on top of the biggest rock in Zora's Fountain changed values between different prints of the game. AFAIK this is the only level design version difference.

The Gerudo who gives you the Gerudo Token in Ocarina of Time wears the same color of clothing as Link. Even if you switch to a different tunic while looking at her, her outfit will immediately change color as well.

and if you pull out a bomb, her clothing starts flashing black and red in sync with it! I think they copied Link's tunic model for the clothing, which has dynamic coloring, but then never set the color so it uses whatever dynamic color was set by a previous object.

I'll share one you (generic "you") might already know, and one you probably don't:

  • You can watch the entirety of To Kill a Mockingbird in The Darkness. There's even an achievement for it.
  • Hanako Ikezawa is the only protagonist in Katawa Shoujo who doesn't go on the roof in her own story. (She goes up there in Lilly's.) Rin Tezuka is the only one whose parents are 100% irrelevant to her story.

My favorite bit of useless trivia is from Twilight Princess. It was originally supposed to have a magic meter like wind waker and ocarina of time, but it got scrapped late. But you can still "refill" the non-existent magic meter with green chu jelly. Green chu jelly isn't supposed to exist either, but you can get it by mixing a yellow chu and a blue chu, which appear together on one or two levels of the 50-floor cave whose name I forget.

You can cast Spell on the Bots in the Great Palace in Zelda 2 that King Bot splits into. This turns them into Bots. (You can however tell the difference because the King Bot splits have more health than normal ones.)

in reply to @xkeeper's post:

funnily enough most of my inane game trivia knowledge has been fried out of my brain from copious use of weed and inhuman levels of constant stress. i actually had to strain to pull some of these out.