Minor Things in Games That Are Super Cool

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

@Chin of Campbell Transistor has a camera themed enemy called a Snapshot that spams your screen with photos of you (the character).

 

[Jimjamflimflam]

Alpha Protocol is a game made up of these. There's so many minor choices that the game acknowledges, like if you kill random guys or just knock them out. Let an arms dealer get away so you can tail him means you get extra intel, but enemies have better guns. You can buy dossiers on various NPCs. The game tracks this, so you can use certain minor information in dialogue trees to your advantage.

I liked that you would get useful character perks for whatever mode you played in the dialogue. Act like an asshole to everyone, get some cool perks for playing a lone wolf guy, try to play suave bond instead, get some other cool perks for those choices instead. It was nice from the usual "you have to get s-link friendship ranking or else you lock yourself off from something useful."

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Having the plot matter in the gameplay side of things without calling it out. Like DQ8 the hero can't get cursed. Having the game intro play when you load your save in Wild Arms 4 wad also great since it got you into a mode of a new anime episode. Having the intro itself change is also cool but that's a pretty big investment.

 

[KittyGremlin]

Tits. I like tits. Big bouncing jiggly tits. The more the better. Put them on a woman, a man, a 50 foot sludge demon, I don’t care, just give me tits with realistic jiggle physics and your game is complete.

simple as.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Sorry to use a buzzword, but environmental storytelling. I don't mean walk and talk or ham fisted stuff, but little things like that bit in Half-Life 2 Episode 2 where you come across a chair with some empty beer bottles and grenades next to it where someone was casually blowing up zombies, or in Fallout 3 where you come across an abandoned house where there's a skeleton, a suicide note, and a bunch of empty morphine syringes.

I liked that you would get useful character perks for whatever mode you played in the dialogue. Act like an asshole to everyone, get some cool perks for playing a lone wolf guy, try to play suave bond instead, get some other cool perks for those choices instead. It was nice from the usual "you have to get s-link friendship ranking or else you lock yourself off from something useful."

I didn't know that. One other thing I liked was there was no obvious good/evil binary, and choosing a tone was more than yes, yes, sarcastic yes, maybe. Some people liked you to get straight to the point, others would think you were uptight.

Having the intro itself change is also cool but that's a pretty big investment.

I think it was Driver 3 or Alone in the Dark had an amazing feature where, whenever you loaded a game, you get a "previously on" segment explaining the story up until that point. I don't know why that was never done more often because it's a great feature.

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

Goldeneye increasing mission difficulty by actually adding more objectives or making them more difficult instead of just making the AI harder/tankier is still one of my favorite things that barely any game does.

The World Ends With You having a secondary leveling system was great too. There's no variance in stat gain, so at any time you can adjust your level to any level lower than your current highest real level and your stats drop to match it. The further you drop, the higher your droprates in encounters. It made farming to 100% pin completion a 3-4 hour affair instead of 20+ since dropping far enough would crank most droprates up to 100% and actually make the refights vs old enemy groups a fun challenge.

 

[Caesare]

I think it was Driver 3 or Alone in the Dark had an amazing feature where, whenever you loaded a game, you get a "previously on" segment explaining the story up until that point. I don't know why that was never done more often because it's a great feature.

Dragon Quest 11 has this too. When you load your game, it gives you a rundown of what's happening at the moment in the story. A great thing for an extremely long role-playing game.

 

[Mr.Miyagi]

One thing I enjoyed about Half-Life 2 and its episodes is that, when you start up the game, the title screen would change dependent on your last save. So you'd have these nice shots of the environment playing out in real-time, showcasing the level you were currently in. I forget if Portal/Portal 2 also did the same thing, think they did. Always thought that was a nice feature over just having a single, static title screen.

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

Playing FF16 and they use the pixel format for stuff like talking to the archivist about your adventures and stuff. It was in Like a Dragon too although they appear to have done away with it in Infinite Wealth.

The notes you get on characters in the trails games that expand on the lore as you play through. Every named NPC gets their own little storyline too.

 

[Jonah Hill poster]

In the PS2 version of Yakuza, when Kiryu looks up after walking around the city, he gets to see ads of Japanese fashion and flight attendants doing interpretive dance sequences on a big screen in a commercialized version of Tokyo

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

Getting rewarded for encounters that you're meant to lose or run away from. Demon's Souls has the Vanguard in the tutorial area you can beat to get some souls, healing items and crafting material as well as an extra scene where your character is killed. RE3 has Nemesis dropping great weapon parts for his non mandatory fights and sometimes healing items.

Two from Shadow of the Colossus, one is all the gimmick items from clearing the time trials, stuff like the parachute/glider and the harpoons were really cool even if they didn't do much. The other is the Secret Garden at the top of the tower, you need 2-3 playthroughs worth of stamina and really need to manage your movement to be able to endure the climb just to see this little place with no actual rewards.

This is a perfect post for this thread.

Beating Lavos early in Chrono Trigger is cool too, though most will only do so upon NG+.

 

[Michael Wade]

I hesitate to call this minor but I love anything with destructible environments and ragdoll physics.

 

[Waifu Denier]

Anything like in Elder Scrolls where when I loot an enemy it's exactly what they look like they are carrying. I want to take the armor they are wearing, have the loot be something logically there rather than 10 gold 3% chance of random drop.

 

[Kane Lives]

Although the Prime games are somewhat famous for the effects your environment have on Samus's Visor (your screen), this is the only time a direct attack is made on your interface. It's a really cool little sequence that makes me wish they had done more things along those lines.

The hacking enemies in Roboquest does a similar thing. One type simply slathers your UI in junk and hides key UI elements, while another reverses your movement inputs. The latter also features a small minigame where you can input a series of buttons onscreen to break the "hack" instantly.

 

[𝕺𝖑' 𝕯𝖎𝖗𝖙𝖞 𝕱𝖆𝖙𝖘𝖔]

As a NY faggot I've always just admired the extreme attention to detail in the GTA 4 world. Even the little subtle architectural differences between different neighborhoods irl are reflected in the game.

For example compare Frankfort Station:



To the real world 125th street station:

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

I think it was Driver 3 or Alone in the Dark had an amazing feature where, whenever you loaded a game, you get a "previously on" segment explaining the story up until that point. I don't know why that was never done more often because it's a great feature.

I never played Driver 3 but Alone in the Dark(200 had that and it was pretty well done. It didn't explain the whole game up tot hat point all the time, just the relevant parts for the section/episode you were playing. Such as why are you there, what are you doing and which are the relevant characters(if any) right now.
This was actually useful, the game allowed you to skip sections/episodes if you wanted and those segments was like an "on last weeks episode of..."
I only used that feature once because I had no fucking clue how to progress, maybe I had softlocked myself or triggered a bug that wouldn't go away by reloading the save.

Evil Within had a small detail that was really neat but also made me wonder how much time and money they spent on painting that set of textures, iirc it's briefly seen in maybe two segments of the game (the intro part and when she's trapped in a watertank)

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

There's probably a thousand things I've seen throughout the years that would count, but I can't think of one to bring to mind specifically right now. Stupidly.

The Randall Clark storyline in Fallout: New Vegas's Honest Hearts DLC. He's an NPC that lived through the last war. You never meet him, the closest you get to that is finding his skeleton, you just read his journal entries over time as you explore the DLC. There's no real point to it.. It's not a real quest or anything. You just read what happened to him surviving after the war. It's also some of the best writing in the game.

 

[Judge Dredd]

The Randall Clark storyline in Fallout: New Vegas's Honest Hearts DLC. He's an NPC that lived through the last war. You never meet him, the closest you get to that is finding his skeleton, you just read his journal entries over time as you explore the DLC. There's no real point to it.

I think if you follow his journals, they do eventually lead you to his unique weapon. A custom rifle with crooked sights that are still functional enough that he never fixed them.

There's something similar in Point Lookout, albeit with quest markers. Where you follow the footsteps of a Chinese spy and eventually complete his mission. When you do you're locked in a room with poison gas instead of getting a reward. It's a bit more gamey than honest hearts, but kind of similar. There is also a serial killer staying in one of the hotels that startled me when I first found it.

That kind of stuff is some of the best story telling in Fallout, and supposedly Fallout 76 was nothing but that originally, but people complained there was no people in it so that was undone.

Evil Within had a small detail that was really neat but also made me wonder how much time and money they spent on painting that set of textures, iirc it's briefly seen in maybe two segments of the game (the intro part and when she's trapped in a watertank)

There's been a few games that do that kind of thing. It's a nice detail. I want to say the Noir outfit in RE2 Remake does that, but I'm not 100% sure. Speaking of which. That's another game where the stock outfits get dirty and damaged as you progress.

There was a platform game on PS2 I forget the name of (Haven?) where whenever it rained, your character would put their hood up.

 

[Book Thief]

Character models changing as you progress through the game.

This was my favorite part of playing Gauntlet: Dark Legacy. Your adventurer starts the game looking like a nobody with dingy weapons and armor, but every time you level up to a multiple of 10, your character changes appearance slightly. So your Knight might go from wearing gambeson and holding a club, to getting a shield, to gaining some chain mail, eventually plate mail, and your club changes to a morning star that gets more elaborate and ornate the further you go.

Oh, and each Class had four colors to choose from, each with their own unique theme, with Red being Barbarian, Blue being Medieval, Yellow being Egyptian, and Green being Tribal. This means that each of the 8 character classes has 40 different models, totaling 320 different player models. And that's before we start talking about unlockable secret characters and characters unlocked via cheat codes.

 

[Rick The Stick]

Special Intros in the Street Fighter Alpha and 3 series. Super minor character based interactions before the round starts.

For example: Ken putting Ryu in a headlock and giving him a noogie in the Alpha games, or them giving eachother a fist bump in both series. Or how Alex and Hugo have an Andre The Gaint/Hulk Hogan staredown in 3.