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Fun Club Seemingly Insignificant Things You've Been Impressed By In Games

juuso

juuso

Koopa
I was watching the recent Summoning Salt video on Super Mario Bros. 3 world records, and was reminded of how astounded I was, as a kid, by the coins inside blocks of ice you can melt in world. It's still something I stop to spend time with when I play the game today.

Do you have any similar experiences of being impressed by something that is actually not at all significant? This doesn't need to be from your childhood, and more recent examples are equally welcome.
 
When I played BoTW I was pretty enamored with the fact that I could cut grass anywhere, and not just Specifically Designated Grass (it had been a while since I played a major video game)

I spent like an hour just cutting grass and finding bugs and fairies
 
Recently I've been playing some Breath of the Wild and after buying the entire stock of a few items the shopkeeper said something to the effect of "Wow, you're certainly doing well for yourself!" The game's character interactions follow its core design of interactivity.
 
In the second half of the Last of Us Part II, if you look down when you’re high up, the game will simulate a vertigo effect because of the character’s fear of heights.
 
I really admire water. Nice water. Great water. Excellent water. Water in games is really great.


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NabiscoFelt said:
When I played BoTW I was pretty enamored with the fact that I could cut grass anywhere, and not just Specifically Designated Grass (it had been a while since I played a major video game)

I spent like an hour just cutting grass and finding bugs and fairies
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I love the way the grass waves in the wind too, it makes the world feel so much more alive.

Mer.Saloon said:
I really admire water. Nice water. Great water. Excellent water. Water in games is really great.


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The water in the original Wind Waker has the perfect blue, and although I'm otherwise fine with how the remake looks, I really wish the water was this blue.
 
I always loved the way Metroid Prime handled environmental effects with the visor fogging up etc. but when I saw the new rain effect on the arm cannon in the Remaster... video games, friends.
 
horses not running into trees in botw if you just leave them moving forward with little input. Legit blew my mind when Aonuma brought that up at TGA in like... 2014 or 2015, and he was like "real horses don't run into trees very often, do they?"
 
The fact that you can see other levels in the distance in Super Mario Sunshine. It makes the island feel so much more alive and tangible. More games that aren’t open world need to do this.
 
Very good idea for a thread. I could think of so many things but one that instantly crossed my mind is that in Odyssey when you don't control Mario for a while he starts to fall asleep and dreams about pasta there is also a bird on his nose and I believe that bird is always different depending on in which kingdom you are in.
 
When the headlights turn on a split second after you enter caves and dark areas in MK8. Still blows my mind almost ten years later.
 
I used to spend a lot of time just cutting up signs in Ocarina of Time.
 
I could mention a whole bunch of BotW things here.. it really has so many smallish things which makes you go 'man that's cool'. Cant wait to find out new stuff like that for TotK

Things like, shade is cooler than the sun in the desert, electric arrows kills the fish in lakes.. things that makes sense, but normally just isnt in video games. I like that stuff.
 
The bars in steamworld heist. You only need to spend like 10 seconds in them but I find myself just sitting in them staring out into space while I listen to the whole song play.
 
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I always find all the neat programming tricks NES game do really cool. Be it as something mudane as "standing on this tile changes to a different one and creates a falling object with the same graphic that you can stand on, which is why it changed color" to create an illusion of the tile falling.
 
The trails that squid form leaves in the ink in Splatoon. I always forget that it happens, then I catch a glance of it as I'm playing and it blows my mind a little.
 
Just the way everywhere feels lived in in Skyrim. Go into a tavern and there’s plates, cutlery, tankards, food. Some books on a shelf. There’s likely storage areas with barrels of vegetables, meat, cheese. Chests at the end of beds have clothes, or furs. A few coins or a knife. It’s like the whole world is full of mundane stuff you can move, use, sell, drop, steal.
 
The torches in the beginning of Wind Waker (in the room where you have to jump from rope to rope): The spots of light moving and changing with the flickering of the flame just blew my mind :D
 
Metroid Prime was already the poster child for attention to detail, but one addition to the remaster that I adore is that not only does rain now run off your arm cannon, but if you tilt it up or down to look at the sky or the ground, the direction the drops flow off changes accordingly.

The fact they even thought of this speaks volumes of the care and thought that has gone into the game.
 
You can make your horse poop in MGS5, and it'll have the effect of a banana peel on ennemies' car.

Always impressed me how MGS5 was full of silly but super fun interactions like that. It was a proto BOTW and those two are still to this day the two open world games that offer you the most freedom in how to tackle problems thanks to its sheer amount of interactions you can have with its world, countless tools, and physics.
 
I'm playing Xenoblade Chronicles 2 right now and, in the game's 'Merc Missions' - where you send off teams of your different blades to do timed 'away' missions - every rare blade has their own Team Name which fits their character. They could have easily just used "Team _____" like they do for the normal blades, but they decided to add that little bit of flavour there as well.
 
In Splatoon on the Wii U, in the training area when you throw a splat bomb into the basketball hoop your inking says WOOMY or NGYES.

Always loved that lol.
 
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PixelKnight said:
Just the way everywhere feels lived in in Skyrim. Go into a tavern and there’s plates, cutlery, tankards, food. Some books on a shelf. There’s likely storage areas with barrels of vegetables, meat, cheese. Chests at the end of beds have clothes, or furs. A few coins or a knife. It’s like the whole world is full of mundane stuff you can move, use, sell, drop, steal.
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Definitely. Personally, I wouldn't even say they're 'insignificant', as that lived in feeling is one of many reasons why Bethesda's particular brand of open world is so popular. Stuff like being able to look at a book shelf in Skyrim and find multiple actual (albeit short) books to read, all with absolutely no relevance to gameplay or story, is just so unique. Honestly can't think of a single other open world game that has the same level of 'stuff' to interact with as Oblivion or Fallout 3, let alone their sequels.
 
I just want to piggyback off the Xenoblade 2 mention and add to it (allowing me to uphold my reputation as a fanboy).

As Plum says above, each merc team has their own name.

But each blade has unique voice lines in the affinity chart too. More impressively, blades have have loads of unique conversations after each battle.

Some see them talk to different drivers, some to other blades. But there’s lots of unique dialogue there.

Add in the blade quests - some more than others admittedly - and there’s a huge commitment to character throughout the game. They even have different lines depending on the pouch items you equip.

Take too much damage while using Pyra? Mythra will force her transformation, say she can’t watch you struggle anymore and stop you from switching back to Pyra.

Just great stuff.


I‘d also like to mention Super Mario Odyssey. No matter what you do, you’re rewarded for it.

Even if you manage to get ’out of bounds’ or up on top of something you thought impossible, they’ll be a pile of coins there.

A wink from the devs to say ’we knew you’d make it here’. Wonderful stuff.
 
NarohDethan said:
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This! Standing on correct steps on stairs! This was in BotW and lately I've seen it in Pokémon SV and Immortals. When on stairs, character stands on correct stair steps. In the olden days, character treated the stairs as a diagonal ramp and their feet were on that invisible ramp. Other shaped objects acted like they had invisible surface too, especially rounded ones. Now the characters stand straight up on any object, with their feet directly touching it.
 
The original Xenoblade. Every area you can see in cutscenes except the after the final boss cutscenes can be visited, with most being secret areas.

Civilization VI, how the city center changes based in population, buildings built, and era change.
 
9-Volt said:
This! Standing on correct steps on stairs! This was in BotW and lately I've seen it in Pokémon SV and Immortals. When on stairs, character stands on correct stair steps. In the olden days, character treated the stairs as a diagonal ramp and their feet were on that invisible ramp. Other shaped objects acted like they had invisible surface too, especially rounded ones. Now the characters stand straight up on any object, with their feet directly touching it.
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I don't think I'll ever get over realistic physics engines. Something in my brain just always lights up whenever I see an apple roll down a hill in Zelda, or a crazy chain reaction in an immersive sim like Prey 2017
 
Fashion Police Squad (a boomer shooter made with 2D sprites on low-poly 3D backgrounds) had this one bit where the sprite of a fire extinguisher on a subway reacted to the lighting around it and I remembered that so strongly it was the first thing to pop into my head here.
 
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The people in Rollercoaster Tycoon. You can have hundreds of them running around the park, going on rides or whatever. But they're all individual. They have their preferences, they get hungry, they need to go to the bathroom. You can follow one around the entire park if you want. Pretty sure I was running the game on a 350mhz Pentium II at the time. It's magic!
 
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Plum said:
Definitely. Personally, I wouldn't even say they're 'insignificant', as that lived in feeling is one of many reasons why Bethesda's particular brand of open world is so popular. Stuff like being able to look at a book shelf in Skyrim and find multiple actual (albeit short) books to read, all with absolutely no relevance to gameplay or story, is just so unique. Honestly can't think of a single other open world game that has the same level of 'stuff' to interact with as Oblivion or Fallout 3, let alone their sequels.
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I think it all just lends itself so well to situational storytelling. A body on the floor, blood on the table, a plate with good on it there? Looks like they were killed when eating a meal, which begs the question, ‘why?’. Silver everywhere, fine clothes in the wardrobe? Nobility. When you find a hut with just simple furniture, wooden plates, a few food items? The NPC is relatively poor. Bags of herbs hanging all over the place? Probably a kindly old herbalist.
Or a witch

Another one for Skyrim- when you startle a fox/deer and they just run off. I like seeing harmless animals in games, it gives the sense that the wilderness isn’t just an arena full of monsters (or typical rpg combat fauna like wolves) with combat stats.
 
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Deus Ex is full of good ones for sure. One that blew my mind reading about online back in the day was that planted explosives have enough thickness to stand on and you can effectively create staircases with them!
 
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The earliest memory i have is with Batman NES, I remember me and my father being impressed by Batman's moving cape when he jumped. For some reason I'm still carrying that memory with me and at the time we thought it was so realistic

Other than that, to many to mention and to remember honestly.

The sense of wonder in SMB3 and SMW and Yoshi's Island.
The idle animation of Sonic
The never ending CODEC combos in MGS1 , MGS2 and MGS3
The Music in MGS3 (I dont know if qualifies as "insignificant" but i was completely blown away)
The dialog in the LoK series
 
I have this weird thing I do where I will always check to see whether or not objects in-game have branding. Things like food, stores, tools, etc. I always love it when games go out of their way to make fictional brands, and to me it demonstrates a level of care when making their world and assets compared to games that don't do this.

I'm talking real branding, either in-universe branding or licensed branding, and not a bag of chips that just says "chips" or a can of paint that just says "paint."
 
Grassland Groove is already a standout level in Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, but the very ending, when the music swells (and at any time you can choose to end the level, which I'm sure a lot of people do, missing what comes next entirely) and the buildup resolves into "Dooo-nkey Koooong". It's... almost a religious experience.

 
In general the added amount of bones and over all higher quality of textures, models, and animations in New Horizons is amazing, but there's one small thing that always makes me weirdly giddy. The characters have one extra bone in their feet, that allows the toes/front of the foot to move separately than the rest of the foot. You can barely notice this in-game but it makes the walking animation for all the characters much more realistic, especially if they're climbing stairs or a ramp.
 
I don't really like the Uncharted series (too many reasons to discuss), but I was really impressed when in the first game Elena bit her lip. I know it's not really that big of a deal, but it helps character to feel more human. Also, I don't remember any other game that did it (and I originally played U1 in 2016).
 
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