81. If, for some strange reason, you still have a Madden NFL 06 save game on your memory card, a special Madden van will be unlocked when you start up Burnout Revenge on PS2.
82. The Metroid series doesn’t take place in any kind of order, so the plot can be confusing. Chrologically, Samus’ adventures take places as so: Metroid (NES), Metroid Prime (GC), Metroid 2: Return Of Samus (Game Boy), Super Metroid (SNES) and Metroid Fusion (GBA). Make sense now?
83. In the first Max Payne, Max’s face was digitised from series writer Sam Lake, but in the second game they used an actor called Timothy Gibbs, who starred in ladies’ favourite Sex And The City.
84. At the end of a game of Civilization IV, players are rated based on their performance by a comparison to one of 10 world leaders. The lowest rating compares the player to former US Vice-President Dan Quayle, who is legendary for such wisdom as "If we do not succeed, then we run the risk of failure".
85. PC hit Grim Fandango was originally titled ‘Deeds Of The Dead’, but was changed because LucasArts didn’t want a reference to death in the title. In a game primarily about death, the afterlife and the grim reaper. Yes.
86. The Secret Of Monkey Island came with a code-wheel copy protection system, in which you had to mix and match pirate faces and assemble their names. It was taken out of future releases as it proved too annoying.
87. In Japan, insanely difficult shoot-‘em-up Ikaruga came with a DVD of the country’s top players completing levels with unbroken chain combos and beating the bosses in record times.
88. In Germany, copies of Medal Of Honor: Frontline had to be reprinted because there was a swastika on the back cover. The developers also had to go back into the game and take out all the Nazi flags and other paraphernalia.
89. In the first Fallout, if you create your own character with less than 4 intelligence you can't converse with anyone; your only dialogue options are various grunts or other guttural noises. This makes the game insanely difficult to finish.
90. The secret boss Kurt Zisa in the first Kingdom Hearts was named via a contest held by Squaresoft in the US to promote the game.
91. Brutal PC FPS Kingpin featured a boss called The Jesus, named after the character from The Big Lebowski. He even repeated some of the lines from that film, including the immortal “Nobody f**** with the Jesus!”
92. A commercial for horror game Siren was pulled in Japan after complaints from parents. The advert featured a girl knocking on a window from the outside, begging her parents to let her in. The view then switches to the inside and shows the terrified parents, in fear of their daughter, who is revealed to be a bloody zombie. Sony said that the fear factor made people uncomfortable.
93. There’s a difference between the Japanese and US versions of Resident Evil 4. It occurs whenever Leon is killed by Mr Chainsaw. In the US version, his head is chopped off by the ‘saw. However, in the Japanese version, it cuts off part of Leon's face, exposing half of the front of Leon's skull and a single eyeball.
94. The first game to go online with Sony’s terrible PS2 network adapter was SOCOM: Navy Seals.
95. One of the player forms you can unlock in Rez for the Beyond’ levels is simply Morolian. This is the name of the alien invaders from UGA's previous game, Space Channel 5.
96. Thanks largely - we hope - to being bundled with a Wii-mote, Wii Play has sold around twice as much as Halo 3, shifting some 16 million copies.
97. Many of the in-game sounds and even the main font in Streets Of Rage for the Mega Drive were lifted directly from Revenge of Shinobi, and the special attack police car was ripped directly from E-SWAT: Cyber Police. How lazy.
98. More German censorship, this time Command And Conquer: Red Alert. Hitler (who is key to the plot) was removed from the intro cutscene, and all the soldiers were replaced with cyborgs.
99. Starcraft is the first computer game to have ever physically made it into space. It was sent aboard Shuttle mission STS-96 on May 27, 1999 by Mission Specialist Daniel T. Barry , who is also a Starcraft fan.
100. If you select a sheep four times in Warcraft 2: Tides Of Darkness (keep clicking it with the left mouse button), the sheep will say “bo-ram-u”. This is the sheeps’ password from the 1995 movie Babe.
101. In the original Japanese version of River City Ransom, the characters wore schoolboy jackets and belonged to high schools instead of gangs. This was changed in the American version because the jackets could be mistaken for bath robes and beating up evil gang members seemed like a more worthy cause.
Nov 14, 2008
From the useless to the trivial - it's our first 101 factarama
