5 Hidden Tricks That Make Your Video Games Actually Work

When playing Uncharted 2, eagle-eyed YouTuber Freako noticed something: When they sped up the footage, Nathan Drake's shadow would shift an entire 360 degrees. That means that either Nate is the center of his own tiny universe (he does have the ego for it), or the train he's standing on is doing a perfect circle. In order to give players all the time they need to advance, the train remains on its looped track, surrounded by nondescript landscapes, until the player reaches a scripted checkpoint, at which point it teleports to the next part of the level. So in a way, that does make them more reliable than your average real-world train system.

But that's not the only way video games have scammed you out of all the thrills of a legit train ride. In World Of Warcraft, one of their biggest dungeons is a runaway train the players are tasked with stopping before it's too late, which is pretty cool, and made even better when you realize the train isn't moving at all.

What's really moving is the entire animation field around the train, tricking players' brains into believing there's locomotion. It's a sweet illusion ... unless you look at the area from afar and realize how goofy everything looks to make this magic happen.

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That's right, every time you take out a tower or destroy a gem in an MMO, odds are you were targeting an innocent NPC who was crammed into a hellscape of stone and code to experience endless death. To make it even worse, in World Of Warcraft, that entire slave workforce doomed to die forever is comprised entirely of bunnies -- the smallest and squishiest of NPCs.

The developers have stated that with more advanced programming tools, they've massively scaled back their virtual chain gangs. But there are still over a thousand innocent, invisible fluffballs slaving away inside the machine, dying and being reborn, only to die again. If there is such a thing as karma, this is how Hitler was reincarnated.

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Whenever the game suffered a crash, Burton had it pop up a "Secret Level Select" screen instead of an error report, pretending to reward players with a shortcut, while in truth it was all a distraction so the game could reset itself. More importantly, this level select screen wasn't picked up on by SEGA quality control testing, meaning Sonic 3D passed with flying colors. Now, it was never the intention that players themselves would encounter this secret shortcut, but of course savvy cheats soon found a way. By jiggling and then punching the cartridge, the game would briefly disconnect, causing it to crash and bring players to the level select screen. Yes, you could beat the game by literally beating it.

Unsurprisingly, this wasn't the only time devs snuck a hack past QA. Burton admitted to using similar strategies with his games Mickey Mania, wherein the warp simply set players back for a bit, and Toy Story, which cleverly triggered a "minigame" while the program quietly got its shit together. It was the game equivalent of jangling your keys in front of a toddler while you chug a glass of "reset wine." Then there's Wing Commander, whose devs couldn't figure out one particular game-crashing bug. But since that bug only popped up when players were exiting, they just turned the on-screen error message into one thanking the players for leaving and hoped nobody would notice.

There was also New Tetris, for the N64, which tricked gamers into ignoring total crashes by awarding them a secret code every time it froze up and needed to be restarted.

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Way back in 2004, Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes had some surprisingly solid mirror effects ... as long as you kept looking straight at Snake, that is. Otherwise, you'd be in for a face-melting surprise.

In order to save some processing power, the game deleted every part of the character that you wouldn't be able to see from Snake's POV, making the mirror work only under the most specific of circumstances.

There were also a series of super realistic glossy whiteboards -- something even today's games have a hard time getting right. But what players are seeing isn't a whiteboard at all, but a slightly opaque window concealing another dark room that's filled with strategically placed lights to emulate a whiteboard reflection. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the designer who had to tweak that sucker.

Then there was Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons Of Liberty, a game that did the impossible (at the time). It featured glistening raindrops that truly splashed onto characters instead or firing right through them like sky lasers. But that's not what's really happening -- designers merely made the "rain effect" part of the character models themselves, and we all fell for it! Like chumps!

But when it comes to rain, even Metal Gear Solid wasn't as ambitious as Conker's Bad Fur Day, which somehow nailed perfect reflection in its rain puddles. How? Oh, just by creating a parallel upside-down dimension of the entire level and showing it through "puddles" (aka holes in the ground).

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Ah, but remember when we said the inventory was an actual place? That means any active being inside that place could interact with all of the items there. Active beings like ... horses. Freaked-out players reported items moving on their own, food being eaten, potions disappearing. Suddenly their inventories were full of tiny horse-shaped poltergeists. And when they were done horsing around, those very expensive steeds would wander beyond the bounds of the inventory map, never to be seen again.

Oh, and they would also crash the game in the process. But that's a given.

You know what else makes your gaming experience better? A Mad Catz headset.

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