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.

Blizzard EntertainmentApparently, even with a nine-digit production budget, you can't improve on cartoon "woosh" lines.

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.

Blizzard EntertainmentStill a hell of a lot better than that other train.

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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.

Blizzard EntertainmentIn a game wherein you can summon a demon, this is far and away the most evil thing.

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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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.

Origin SystemsSure, all the great classics end on a blank DOS window.

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.

NintendoAmong other stuff lurking in that game.

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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.

KonamiSure, some programmer didn't see their family for a month for this, but that is a pretty snazzy-looking whiteboard.

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!

KonamiThat or his poncho is on fire.

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).

RareWhich seems weirdly ambitious for a game where you can kill enemies with a stream of weaponized urine.

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Let's backtrack. One of the leading pioneers in MMORPGs, Ultima Online, was all about offering freedoms you couldn't get in single-player games, like killing the lead game dev or destroying the ecology of a fantasy planet. But one of the smaller, less appreciated freedoms was the ability to put your stuff wherever the hell you wanted.

The more mainstream inventory systems in games like Diablo or Resident Evil separate everything in neat slots. But Ultima Online had a huge pile of stuff hastily bundled inside a bag, even featuring overlapping items. The trick was that Ultima's inventory wasn't some system menu, but an actual location -- a tiny map with the coordinates of where all your items lived. And seeing as it all had to travel with your character, the most convenient location was ... you. You were your own backpack, so to speak.

The realistic-looking, hidden-location-based inventory was a hit. That is, until the arrival of horse pants. Ultima's devs wanted to put rideable horses in the game, but having digital people realistically interact with digital animals is a pain in the ass to program, so they came up with another neat trick. When a player clicked on their steed, instead of mounting a horse, they would in fact equip pants that looked just like said horse, and gave them appropriate speed bonuses. Meanwhile, the in-game horse would be put away in their inventory, to be released whenever the player decided to dismount. That's how insane video game development is; this was the easy way.

EA Games700,000 for a horse? Maybe instead of dragons, our brave heroes should be fighting inflation.

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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