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Video & Computer Game Urban Myths

BlackRiverFalls said:
just the usual b*llocks like the jetman trailer.
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Ooooh do tell!



(At one point the whole Pennington Saga was being touted by the "ghost" himself as a game that certain posters (read sock puppets) were "winning" - it was tied into Myst or maybe Myst's sequel)
 
Ooooh do tell!
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I think there may be an old thread about it somewhere, covering this and polybius among other things.

Some pillock wrote into iirc Crash magazine claiming that he'd got to level 10 on Lunar Jetman and that there was a trailer that could be attached to the lunar rover to carry more items. Which didn;t actually exist but that never stopped a bunch of people running around swearing blind they'd seen it.

There was also a spoof letter around the same time claiming a hidden switch in Jet Set Willy that opened up a new part of the map, also bollocks, but some of the programmers converting the game to other platforms liked the idea enough to put the extra rooms in!

The only old game I remember creeping me out at 2am was Avalon, looking on youtube now, it looks wtf awful and hard to imagine it was playable at all.

Btw that Majoras Mask video is well creepy. Good find. :shock:
 
BlackRiverFalls said:
Ooooh do tell!
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I think there may be an old thread about it somewhere, covering this and polybius among other things.

Some pillock wrote into iirc Crash magazine claiming that he'd got to level 10 on Lunar Jetman and that there was a trailer that could be attached to the lunar rover to carry more items. Which didn;t actually exist but that never stopped a bunch of people running around swearing blind they'd seen it.
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There was a trailer on the cover artwork, probably where the fantasist/hoaxer got the idea.
 
BlackRiverFalls said:
Some pillock wrote into iirc Crash magazine claiming that he'd got to level 10 on Lunar Jetman and that there was a trailer that could be attached to the lunar rover to carry more items. Which didn;t actually exist but that never stopped a bunch of people running around swearing blind they'd seen it.
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I remember that, and the accompanying picture...

http://electricpix.blogspot.com/2011/06 ... n-and.html
 
Quake42 said:
Now, whenever you want someone who takes the game too seriously's head to explode, you suggest that they add pandarens to World of Warcraft. At some point people began rebutting this with the urban legend (finally I get to it!) that pandarens can't be in World of Warcraft because the Chinese don't allow depictions of violence against pandas, or some such.
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Update - this may not be entirely false. There was an interview with one of the main WoW developers who stated that, although there is no law against fighting anthropomorphic pandas in China, the Chinese authorities had indicated to Blizzard (the games company) that they were uncomfortable with the proposed depiction of pandas in the game. Not least, I suspect, because some of the artwork shows the pandas as being quite Japanese-inspired.

So there you go. An urban legend which may have some basis in truth...
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Pandaren are the whole focus of the new WoW expansion.
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/game/mists-of-pandaria/pandaren/
 
Pandaren are the whole focus of the new WoW expansion.
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Yep - but the depiction now is definitely Chinese-inspired and not Japanese.
 
Another MMORPG myth, although it was used more as a scam on newbies. Runescape armour trimming. In the game, you can get 'trimmed armour' as a reward from clue scrolls. Basically, the armour your avatar wears has coloured flashes on it. Lot's of newbies fall for this, they ask where the armour comes from, and get told that a high level player can 'trim' their armour for them, either free or for a fee. They hand over their armour and cash, and the high level player buggers off.
 
Great thread! I've come over quite nostalgic reading it. I remember the master system version of R-Type had a reasonably complex invincibility cheat involving using two controllers and the reset button. I was able to get it to work once, alone in the early morning before i went to school. Thanks to being invincible i was able to get to the secret level which was entered via the labyrinth in what i think was the 4th level. I then went on the complete the game, which i had managed to do without cheating before, but i had never been to the special zone. After school, i excitedly told my dad and tried to show him, of course i couldn't get it to work again, even after multiple attempts. I wonder now if there was some sort of mechanism within the game only allowing you access to the cheat on a single occasion.
I've since seen the secret level again thanks to the invention of emulators online. Didn't quite have the same excitement factor though.
This also reminds me of the great Amiga game Gods. There were several hidden secrets in the game, including a giant treasure chest in the 3rd level If you opened it (using a giant key of course) not only would treasure appear on the floor of the room but would also fall from the ceiling. No one could ever figure out what combination of pulled levers and pressed switches resulted in it appearing and i never saw it again.
 
Computer games and urban myths

I loved all those old Spectrum classics such as Jet Set Willy and Avalon, reading about Lunar Jetman reminded me of Ultimate Games great lost titles, Psyclapse and Bandersnatch, they were constantly hyped and always on the brink of release but never were. It was a great source of disappointment , Ultimate always released great games and the few screen shots unveiled looked far ahead of anything else at the time. Does anyone know what became of them? Did anyone ever play them?
 
Do you mean what became of the company? They changed their name to Rare, and worked for Nintendo, and then later on Microsoft.
 
lol I know who that was but i'm not saying.

Btw if you ever played Manic Miner, reputedly the big headed man going up and down the middle while surrounded by toilets in Eugene's Lair was a pisstake on Eugene Evans of Imagine software.
 
Apparently in ELITE [first out on BBC and Acorn Electron], where all ships were made up of about eight polygons, there was a huge monster mothership [about a mile long] floating around somewhere in that universe. This was mentioned in the accompanying book and also the manual and everyone who played ELITE, wondered if they would see that massive ship but it seems to have been just a myth. Does anyone remember?
 
I don't remember the 'generation ship' mentioned in the manual ever appearing in the Spectrum version, but the special missions were different in each version.

Ah, here we go, according to one of the programmers:

9. Are there any generation ships in Elite?

No. This was put into the documentation as part of the richness that Rob Holdstock introduced, as were "Rock Hermits". However, we added "Rock Hermits" to later versions of Elite as a result, but the graphic system couldn't cope with ships that looked sufficiently big or impressive to act as generation ships.
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Are there any current gen versions of Elite?

I mean, we have loads of games set in space, and loads of RPGs, but is there anything modern that offers that sense of freedom we got from Elite?

Basically, I want to be like a little Picard flying about getting up to stuff, not following a prescribed storyline.

I honestly can't think of anything, other than maybe Eve Online.....
 
X3 for the PC, beware though it will eat up many, many, many of your Earth hours, it's a trading and missions based game with quite stunning graphics, it can get a bit samey after a while but I suppose they all do.
 
I remember Duke Nukem 3D had lost of interesting easter eggs. There was a room that said something like "you really shouldn't be here!".
My cloudy memory thought that there was a hell level with the devil as a woman, but it turns out its just some dancer (secret 5 from http://www.3drealms.com/duke3d/walkthrough/e1m6.html )
There was also a 2001-style monolith on the moon that you could walk through.

I remember Jet Set Willy flushing the character down a toilet and going to another area. Was this an actual move?

There was the old myth that in Battlezone that you could drive your tank to the mountains.
 
sirwiggum said:
I remember Jet Set Willy flushing the character down a toilet and going to another area. Was this an actual move?
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I think if you managed to collect all the bottles and glasses he returned to the bathroom at the start and stuck his head down the loo.
 
Greatest computer game urban myth is that half life was a good game , every time i played i caused a resonance cascade, and then i would have to start again. :lol:
 
titch said:
Greatest computer game urban myth is that half life was a good game , every time i played i caused a resonance cascade, and then i would have to start again. :lol:
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It was a good game! Half Life 2 was even better.
 
sirwiggum said:
I remember Duke Nukem 3D had lost of interesting easter eggs. There was a room that said something like "you really shouldn't be here!".
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A rumour I remember from school - apologies for its distasteful nature:
Some kind of cheat or easter egg in DN3D allowed you to rip off someone's head and shit down their neck, while making a quip.

I never really played the game so I have no idea.
 
James_H2 said:
A rumour I remember from school - apologies for its distasteful nature:
Some kind of cheat or easter egg in DN3D allowed you to rip off someone's head and shit down their neck, while making a quip.

I never really played the game so I have no idea.
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Neither a cheat nor an Easter Egg, if you finished the game and killed the final baddie, thats exactly what Duke Nukem did, Whilst whistling and reading a newspaper.
 
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