Warupichi

September 11, 2012 6:41 AM

Did You Know Gaming? explores video game secrets, bugs, trivia and obscure ephemera.
posted by griphus (31 comments total)

well I guess it was a secret to everybody.
posted by The Whelk at 6:49 AM on September 11, 2012 [5 favorites]

Pro tip
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 6:56 AM on September 11, 2012 [12 favorites]

What an awful site design.
posted by crunchland at 6:58 AM on September 11, 2012 [5 favorites]

@crunchland

i think it's some kind of ironic joke or something that means that they're smart for not being very good
posted by This, of course, alludes to you at 7:07 AM on September 11, 2012

also, wow, people use ohinternet
posted by This, of course, alludes to you at 7:08 AM on September 11, 2012

The "new game+" feature in Chrono Trigger is a secret?
posted by Nomyte at 7:16 AM on September 11, 2012

I believe the ending after defeating the boss early in New Game+ is the secret.
posted by griphus at 7:34 AM on September 11, 2012 [1 favorite]

And even then it's not much of one because you can get it midway through the game in a much less obscure manner.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 7:48 AM on September 11, 2012

(The Wayne's World Thing is very nifty, though)
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 7:49 AM on September 11, 2012

This site started out strong, but the bar for "trivia" has since gotten pretty low.
posted by Jonathan Harford at 7:58 AM on September 11, 2012

Is rendering all textual content into images the way of the future? It makes sense - they want people to be able to share their content on Reddit via imgur or whatever - but it's pretty sad for anyone who still dreams of a semantic web.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 8:19 AM on September 11, 2012 [4 favorites]

Is rendering all textual content into images the way of the future? It makes sense - they want people to be able to share their content on Reddit via imgur or whatever - but it's pretty sad for anyone who still dreams of a semantic web.

Clearly all of this bandwidth is spoiling us. I clung to the dream of banning attachments and image files from my mailing lists for longer than I could realistically get away with. Now I just run a billion attachments and scripts to block the parts of the internet that annoy me, and live in blissful ignorance of whatever it is people are writing on images these days.


...seriously, that site is ugly. I still enjoy the occasional bit of gaming nostalgia and trivia, but I couldn't stomach that site's design.
posted by Stagger Lee at 8:25 AM on September 11, 2012

Actually, I have seen every ending in Chrono Trigger, including the "secret" one.
posted by mrgoat at 8:33 AM on September 11, 2012

Is rendering all textual content into images the way of the future? It makes sense - they want people to be able to share their content on Reddit via imgur or whatever - but it's pretty sad for anyone who still dreams of a semantic web.

You already know the answer.
posted by Blue Meanie at 8:43 AM on September 11, 2012

…including the "secret" one.
posted by Nomyte at 8:43 AM on September 11, 2012

Under their "Angry Birds" link, they report that the human race has collectively played 200,000 years worth of the game. That dubious factoid would seem to discredit everything else on the site.
posted by Bromius at 8:51 AM on September 11, 2012

Angry Birds stands at about 1,000,000,000 downloads, so 200,000 years works out to about an hour and forty minutes per download, which (as an average) doesn't seem too out there.
posted by griphus at 8:59 AM on September 11, 2012 [3 favorites]

More on Angry Birds stats.
posted by griphus at 9:03 AM on September 11, 2012

...but it's pretty sad for anyone who still dreams of a semantic web.

Forget semantic web. It's pretty sad for anyone who wants to do a simple text search. Like Google.
posted by DU at 9:15 AM on September 11, 2012 [3 favorites]

And the award for most depressing use of arithmetic on Patriot Day 2012 goes to griphus!
posted by MCMikeNamara at 9:36 AM on September 11, 2012

I just learned that all pilots in Starfox are willing amputees and I'm not sure what I think about it. DO A BARREL ROLL! CHOP OFF YOUR LEGS! screams the bunny.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 10:35 AM on September 11, 2012 [2 favorites]

Yeah, a lot of this I either already knew, has to do with foreign localizations (which is a world of random trivia far exceeding my capacity to care), has to do with removed WIP features of Smash Bros. or Kingdom Hearts (meh), or are only kinda, sorta interesting. Some are obviously trying too hard, like saying the use of a graphic of the Earth recolored to be frozen in Kirby 64 suggests the game takes place in a post-apocalyptic future.

On reflecting Phantom Ganon's magic with a bottle in Zeldas Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker. both refer to a quirk of Link to the Past, were you could reflect Agahnim's magic with the Bug Catching Net, possibly because of code reuse between that item and the Sword.

The "biggest map in any video game belongs to Daggerfall" one is destroyed utterly by Minecraft.
posted by JHarris at 11:57 AM on September 11, 2012 [1 favorite]

A few are genuinely interesting, like the joke in Snake's codec conversation joke in Smash Bros. Brawl when he's fighting against Sonic actually being a reference to Sonic's voice actor in the Japanese version of the game that didn't translate to English versions. But it's then followed up by a patently bullshit one about humans only being able to push buttons 16 times a second. It's a mixed bag throughout.
posted by JHarris at 12:02 PM on September 11, 2012

16 clicks per second is definitely way too high. That' about 3x faster than a world class StarCraft player. It's equivalent to 192 words per minute, or about as fast as an AK-47.

For straight-up "button mashing" I've seen someone do 12 clicks per second and it's absolutely insanely fast. I can't imagine them actually playing a game at that speed though.
posted by ShutterBun at 1:42 PM on September 11, 2012

It's not too high; it might be too low. Takahashi Meijin, formerly of Hudson Soft, was famous for being able to push a button that fast. But either way, no citation was given for that being the maximum of human accomplishment in terms of depressing a sprint-loaded switch.
posted by JHarris at 2:52 PM on September 11, 2012

(and in point of fact; I'm a pretty fast button presser myself, although I don't know how fast)
posted by JHarris at 2:53 PM on September 11, 2012

Here's a few points of comparison. I'm unaware of any human clicking faster than 14 clicks per second, even in relatively short bursts.

Korean professional StarCraft player at about 5 clicks per second (using fingers and mouse)

AK-47 at 10 rounds per second

Mouse-clicking at about 13 clicks per second.

World's fastest typist at about 13.5 characters per second

M16A1 at just under 16 rounds per minute
posted by ShutterBun at 4:20 PM on September 11, 2012 [1 favorite]

It's just painful to read that video-game-style text.
posted by IndigoRain at 7:55 PM on September 11, 2012

No, now you are aware of it, because I just told you.

That's not enough? See for yourself.
posted by JHarris at 7:58 PM on September 11, 2012

Okay, that seemed a little harsh of me, heh. But Takahashi's button-pressing skills are well-known in Japan, and I can probably reach 10-12 presses per second myself.
posted by JHarris at 8:13 PM on September 11, 2012

Occasionally, you'll just get patent bullshit about things like how F-Zero X is somehow named after StarFox. Site could use a bit of editorial guidance, though for the most part they're at least generally sort of interesting.
posted by DoctorFedora at 11:27 PM on September 11, 2012