- Joined
- Aug 4, 2018
After enjoying some of the 'Did you know?' posts in the Shenmue section, I thought it would be nice to expand on that and see what other interesting points there are in other general gaming areas such as...
Did you know the seemingly random blocks and towers on the PS2 start up screen actually represent game progress— so the more you play and save your games, the more blocks and towers appear!
The "real" Super Mario Bros. 2 was deemed to be too difficult for the Western audience and didn't seem to have changed in play from the first game aside from being harder. So instead, Nintendo took an existing game called Doki Doki Panic and reskinned it with Mario characters. That's the reason number 2 feels totally different - because it wasn't intended to be a Mario game at all! The Japanese version was later added to Mario All stars in the form of 'The lost levels'.
Game companies have employed some interesting anti-piracy measures to their games in the past. Examples include:
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III - Manhattan Project. If the game thought it was pirated you would deal half damage, take double damage and if you were still lucky enough to make it to Shredder... he would be invincible!
Game Dev Tycoon - If the game recognised itself as pirated, your in game sales would plummet due to.... piracy! Game Over.
Earthbound - If the game thinks its a pirate copy various things can happen such as increased enemy spawns and you will always lose the final boss battle, when you lose, the game restarts and deletes your save file!
Metal Gear Solid - A simple idea from Konami this time was to make a portion of the game (where you contact Meryl) only possible if you had the game case to hand, as the codec frequency to contact her was on the back cover.
I'm sure you lot have some interesting facts, so fire away!
Did you know the seemingly random blocks and towers on the PS2 start up screen actually represent game progress— so the more you play and save your games, the more blocks and towers appear!
The "real" Super Mario Bros. 2 was deemed to be too difficult for the Western audience and didn't seem to have changed in play from the first game aside from being harder. So instead, Nintendo took an existing game called Doki Doki Panic and reskinned it with Mario characters. That's the reason number 2 feels totally different - because it wasn't intended to be a Mario game at all! The Japanese version was later added to Mario All stars in the form of 'The lost levels'.
Game companies have employed some interesting anti-piracy measures to their games in the past. Examples include:
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III - Manhattan Project. If the game thought it was pirated you would deal half damage, take double damage and if you were still lucky enough to make it to Shredder... he would be invincible!
Game Dev Tycoon - If the game recognised itself as pirated, your in game sales would plummet due to.... piracy! Game Over.
Earthbound - If the game thinks its a pirate copy various things can happen such as increased enemy spawns and you will always lose the final boss battle, when you lose, the game restarts and deletes your save file!
Metal Gear Solid - A simple idea from Konami this time was to make a portion of the game (where you contact Meryl) only possible if you had the game case to hand, as the codec frequency to contact her was on the back cover.
I'm sure you lot have some interesting facts, so fire away!
