Walking around in the box used to crack me up - it got you killed, but it was as funny as hell. If you switched to FPS view whilst in the box, you got a little oval hole shaped view of the action, too: and if you looked at the girl through the hole, she’d say funny things.
The gravity gun in Half Life 2 was great, for the sheer array of stuff you got to fling at guards: in the later levels there were inexplicable melons in the kitchens of the devastated apartments, which would burst when you flung them. There ain’t nothin’ like taking out a Combine soldier with a well-aimed melon to the gourd.
I just started playing the Beyond the Sword expansion. There’s a sci-fi mod where you colonize star systems instead of build cities, and command starships instead of soldiers. The first tech that allows you to build battleships is called Shock and Awe. The icon for the tech is a portrait of Donald Rumsfeld.
I’ve always liked how when you zoom way in on a city in Civ IV, you hear music appropriate to the civ and its era. An american city during the renaissance era has “You’re a Grand Old Flag” playing with minuteman-esque drums and flutes. In later eras, you hear the same song played by a jubilant orchestra. It’s fun to zoom in on egyptian, indian, japanese, aztec, and russian cities to see what they sound like. If the city is of a nation that’s at war with you, you hear war drums.
Yes, I’m almost positive that’s it. I was watching a friend play it and was really tickled by that detail.
I just started playing God of War, and I love how each enemy must be killed in a different way. It just makes so much sense. Brilliant game, relentless action, love it.
Mine is pretty simple, but I spend fascinated hours messing around with it.
In Elebits, in edit mode, you can edit your own levels with any mundane objects from the game. I’ll make an outdoor level, turn the gravity off, and meticulously place, say, a bathtub filled with rubber ducks (large and small) in the middle of a cul-de-sac. I’ll set the objective ridiculously low and the time as high as possible, and then spend time playing with rubber duckies in zero-gravity. I’ll toss the whole tub full of ducks into the air first, and watch those float off and eventually just hang there in the sky. Of course I will have scattered random ducks everywhere else, and go around tossing each of those up, too, seeing if I can hit another thing.
My husband watched me doing this for about an hour one day, with the rubber ducks, before finally turning away and doing his own thing at the computer. Much later on, when he finally turned to look at the television again, he was surprised to see that I had switched from rubber ducks to roasted turkeys. I told him the ducks had gotten too close to the sun.
I play with the edit mode more than I play the actual game.
The game also interjectsh hic! hiccups and random Hs after wordsh with the letter S, and monstersh read as being sheveral levels lower hic! than they actually are.
Also, if you keep initiating conversations with NPCs, they get progressively more irritated:
“Peace be with you.”
“Can I help you?”
“What can I do for you?”
“What do you want?”
“Don’t you have anything better to do?”
“Quit it.”
I love Half-Life 2 (and thought FEAR had good graphics, though the insanely monotonous, repetitive office-building level design kept me from completing the game - I need more interesting scenery, I guess.) But I’m getting a little sick of games where all the enemies are wearing GAS MASKS. It’s so obviously a half-assed effort on the part of the programmers: they didn’t want to go to the trouble of making separate facial models for all the different guys, so they stuck ‘em all in gas masks (those guys’ peripheral vision must really suck, by the way.) So I liked that Far Cry actually went to the trouble of at least trying to get different faces for the bad guys. Even though they could have done a better job (all the faces kind of looked the same - all the mercenaries looked like Abercrombie models.) But at least they tried.
Speaking of Half Life 2, I loved the commentary included on Episode One and Lost Coast. It was really cool to see all the thought that went into that game.
Not if it was “several years ago,” it wasn’t. Dark Corners just came out last year, and (as far as I can remember) they didn’t do any of the meta-game stuff like pretending to power off your console when your sanity got too low, they just played with the audio and visuals. olive is definitly talking about Eternal Darkness.
I’ve been playing Overlord on gametap and there are lots of amusing bits to it. One that I love is the jester that follows you around the tower saying flattering things about you. The various titles he calls you by change as you proceed through the game.
One of my favorite bits is after you smack him about a bit he starts calling you ‘Bully of Jesters!’ in a slightly annoyed but still mostly reverential manner. That just cracked me up. Or your advisor will tell you that ‘Evil deeds won’t just do themselves.’ if you hang around the castle too much. All kinds of fun little tidbits.
