Little touches in games that made you smile

[Sacman]

In Deus Ex...

California is below sea level now...

America has almost completely fallen apart while some citizens still blindly declare there faith in the government...

The Kill Codes...

Not having to kill anyone...

0451...<.<

characters being able to speak philosophy without going out of character...

really bad accents...

in game lore that helps build character, flesh out the world and add to the gameplay without taking the player out of the experience...

How the designers generally picked a theme and stuck with it...

the familiarity of all of the conspiracies... you know Greys, Chupacabras, sewer labs, sentient AI's, ect...

being able to kill children without having to install a mod...<.<

 

[Shoggoth2588]

I'm playing the first 6 Mega Man X games after having grabbed the Gamecube collection and love how, in the first at least, stages change as you defeat each of the Robot Master...Mavericks...things.

 

[teebeeohh]

i have to say the shirt in uncharted. however the fact that drakes hair seems to be made of concrete always that for me.
pretty much every game that gives me the option to wipe out everyone.
oh and i liked that in deus ex the super trained, highly augmented agent works better with a pistol than with a machine gun. because the ability to have rapid fire is kinda useless if you are designed to have perfect aim and superhuman reflexes.

 

[Schmeiser]

In psychonauts you have this ability to watch everything from someone else's eyes or point of view, and my god is it fun to see how everyone else sees you the main character.

 

[TheFederation]

in batman arkham city

Spoiler

after you get kidnapped by the Mad Hatter, when you go back to where you were drugged, there is a tea set standing there

 

[evilmongerofdoom666]

In The Binding of Isaac:
When you destroy piles of poop, the leftovers are a smiley face.
When you enter a room, you always pee yourself a little.
If you try to use the Bible item on Satan, you get insta-killed.

Those are some little things that make me smile.

 

[King of Asgaard]

The attention to detail in RDR.
A violent storm will light up the sky with each bolt of lightning.
Before a storm, the wind sounds louder and stronger and, in the forest near Blackwater, you hear the leaves rustle when you just walk under them.
The night sky is full of stars which are multi-coloured like in real life.
The interactions between John and random NPCs adds a layer of depth to the world.
The trophy/achievement for tying a woman to a rail road track could feature on this list, but it made me laugh maniacally while twirling a (then) non-existent moustache, rather than smile.

 

[shimyia]

well... the most recent one is the ValVe, Gearbox puzzle in Half-Life: Opposing Force.
it is funny cuz the developer of Opposing Force is an expansion of Half-life which is Valve's IP.

also there are a LOT in Dungeons of Dredmor:
like a shield with the lambda symbol (reference to Half-life);
a "sleeve" item with acutual stats (pretty good ones too) but you don't have any place in the character screen to equip it XDD;
a "Horardric Cube of Lutefisk" which is a reference to Diablo 2

and many, many more

 

[Gottesstrafe]

GTA 4 has loads of cool stuff infact so did all other GTAs. i love all the billboards and adverts with innuendos on them it goes to show that they care about us by putting silly jokes on every sign, even the bowling alley sign looks like a cock and balls

Rockstar does a lot of set dressing, which I'm very appreciative of. All the effort they put into the radio shows to make driving less monotonous is probably my favorite touch. I think my favorite ones are the ones in Vice City Stories and San Andreas.

Speaking of San Andreas, remember that part where you hijack a bulldozer and in the construction yard in San Fierro? I'm in stitches whenever I get to the portion with the foreman in the portajohn (he says additional dialogue each time you push it).

 

[Wintermoot]

in Deus Ex HR two police officers are referencing Robocop and one of the computers has as user "R. Deckard" that made me smile

 

[busterkeatonrules]

One for me was Double Fine's dedication to whatever situation can pop up in that game as well as really fleshing the whole of it's world out. For example:

-Outside of a few solitary moments the Clairvoyance ability has little to no use. But you can use it on everyone to see how they view Raz, by using a cheat code you can actually go to all the people in camp and do just that. You can even do it with enemies(bears seeing Raz as a picnic basket is just made me giggle).

- You temporarily get a turtle called Mr. Pokeylope, you can very quickly finish using him for the task you need to complete... But then you can just go and show him to EVERYONE. And they all have a reaction, fully voiced too.

- You can actually listen in on conversations characters have and look around the camp to see the silly little things they are up to outside the storyline, you can even view some cutscenes only by backtracking in some of those cases.

Psychonauts is one awesome game, all right. The thing that impressed me the most about it, is that there apparently aren't any hints whatsoever about how to get to Agent Cruller's secret underground base - I'm pretty sure you're just expected to randomly jump down some random, hollow tree stump without any kind of clue that you should be doing so. Which I did within my very first hour of playing the game. Tim Schafer KNOWS that the player is going to get stuck/bored/curious and just start trying random stuff like that!

I should also mention The Simpsons: Hit and Run. (Basically, GTA: Springfield.) OK, the game was probably a bit rushed. The controls are a bit clutzy, and there are places where a false move might get you stuck in the scenery. With an open-world driving game with the option to engage in some really reckless stunt driving, this is of course inevitable no matter how much playtesting is done. Most developers in this situation would have just pushed the game out on the streets and forgotten about it, but the makers of Hit and Run included a feature that I've never seen in any other game:

If you get stuck, just hit Select! This makes your car respawn on the nearest road with no penalties whatsoever. This really impressed me. They ACCEPT AND ACKNOWLEDGE that the game isn't perfect, so they give the player a quick and easy way to fix things.

 

[wolf thing]

In Dark Souls, I found rubbish as an item that literally serves no purpose AND the item's description questions what sane person would pick such a useless thing up...cheeky buggers.

But for all time, it has to go to this conversation between three splicers in Bioshock 2:

in dark souls you can give the rubbish to snuggly the crow and he will give you a large titanit chunk so it does serve a purpose, however secret it may be.

 

[cerealnmuffin]

In Icewind Dake II, if you don't kill an opponent, he turns up later to fight you. You can get around this fight by carrying corpses around and showing them to this opponent, who will get freaked out.

In Prey, Don't Fear The Reaper by Blue Oyster Cult plays whilst you're being abducted.

"See you starside," after the credits in Halo: Reach. I loved Marathon, so it gave me a smile.

I also love stuff you can do in games, but isn't necessary, like greeting people in RDR by pressing B on xbox

That's a thing you can do?!

Also in Icewind Dale 2, there is a dead cat lying around the beginning town. Games train you to pick everything up, so I picked up the dead cat and the leader of the fort was like 0___o why do you have a dead cat? They also pock fun at fetch quests and that it is an "experience building moment" ^^

 

[RustlessPotato]

The Snip.

That's a thing you can do?!

Yeah ! Marston will go "howdy partner" and stuff like that . But you have to do it near an npc though.

The Snip2: The Snippening

Haha, yeah. The first time I read that achievement I was a bit flabbergastred , but it was indeed pretty cool.

 

[Pegghead]

In Dark Souls, I found rubbish as an item that literally serves no purpose AND the item's description questions what sane person would pick such a useless thing up...cheeky buggers.

But for all time, it has to go to this conversation between three splicers in Bioshock 2:

in dark souls you can give the rubbish to snuggly the crow and he will give you a large titanit chunk so it does serve a purpose, however secret it may be.

Ooh, thanks for the tip! I'm not terrifically far into the game so I'll be sure to do it when I see him.

 

[Vhite]

Sacred 2. More easter eggs and references than you could ever count.

 

[ReadyAmyFire]

Yes! Yes! Yes!

FINALLY a human being that LIKED MGS4.

I loved MGS4.
I just really really disliked the ending.

I loved it too, but I felt if I hadn't had such fond memories of Snake as a nine year old it wouldn't have had the same magic. I finished it all in a 20 hour session when it came out.

I quite liked the ending up until the graveyard scene. Bit I felt everything else was tied up rather well. Didn't see the whole Para-media-Dr. Clarke, SIGINT-Donald Anderson thing coming at all.

 

[Snowpact]

In the credits of Fable: The Lost Chapters, it not only states all the people that worked on the game, but also things like: 'Total amounts of pizza's eaten during development', 'Number of babies born during development' and 'People married during development' which not only made me smile, it really puts the game and the massive amount of time that goes into making it into perspective. It makes you realize that people can literally work full-time for three to five years, just to entertain you (and also to have an income, I guess).

It also made me realize that game developers eat a lot of pizza.

 

[Scarim Coral]

The little character-specific dialogues after a battle you sometimes get in Xenoblade are one of those details.

This

Reyn: "You can't spell 'rainbow' without Reyn, baby!"
Melia: "Dunban, I think you need to have a talk with Reyn...."
Dunban: "No. Let us pretend that didn't happen."

And also Melia think Riki is so cuddly which Dunban think Riki is the most cuddly Nopon there is.

I switch to all part members variation just to heard the party specific dialogues.

 

[piinyouri]

Yes! Yes! Yes!

FINALLY a human being that LIKED MGS4.

I loved MGS4.
I just really really disliked the ending.

I loved it too, but I felt if I hadn't had such fond memories of Snake as a nine year old it wouldn't have had the same magic. I finished it all in a 20 hour session when it came out.

I quite liked the ending up until the graveyard scene. Bit I felt everything else was tied up rather well. Didn't see the whole Para-media-Dr. Clarke, SIGINT-Donald Anderson thing coming at all.

The graveyard scene was what I meant.

Kojima just went crazy on that part.
It starts off really good, but after the first two hours of dialouge, I was laughing because I would say "Surely that's it right?", then another scene.