10 of the Biggest Video Game Lies of Your Childhood

Introduction

Video games are kind of an amazing thing. They're not real, but we don't consider them lies, at least until you take them apart. Hi folks, it's Zaid Ikram, and today on Speed Tool, here are 10 of the biggest video game lies of your childhood.

Number 10

Starting at number 10: the Capitol and the Washington Monument in Fallout 3. This is one of the oldest video game tricks in the book but a good place to start. When you first exit the vault in Fallout 3, you get your first view of the Capital Wasteland. Two of the most prominent objects in the distance are the Capitol building and the Washington Monument. It gives the impression that there's a huge open world there, and in the case of pretty much any other Bethesda RPG, that would be true. But Fallout 3's open world has a dirty little secret. To get the game running properly on consoles, they had to split the Capital Wasteland into two different cells. You can never just walk into the greater DC area. The only way to reach places like the Washington Monument and the Capitol is to take a tedious trip through the Washington subway system. So these two major landmarks aren't there when you see them from the outskirts; they're just extremely low-poly cardboard cutouts meant to give the impression of a seamless open world. It's easy to see for yourself: just turn on no-clip and fly towards the Capital Area to see for yourself. It's an Xbox 360 Potemkin village over there. Just remember, you can visit these places; it's not a total fraud or anything. But what you're seeing in the distance from most of the map isn't there; it's just a background element meant to give the impression that it is. Now, a lot of video games use tricks like this to hide loading zones, but when you're a kid, you just buy into the fantasy. You think everything in the game is real—well, as real as it is in the game—but it often isn't even that real. The Capitol and the Washington Monument are fake.

Number 9

At number nine: in Mass Effect, sprinting is a lie. I felt a little betrayed when I first heard about this one. Mass Effect was Bioware's first attempt at real-time action. It is a classic game, of course, but the original version of it could be pretty awkward. A lot of racing games pull this trick where they make it appear you're going faster than you are by using effects to give the appearance of speed, but it doesn't match one-to-one what they're telling you. Like, you're not going 200 mph in the game world for technical reasons, but they're going to try and trick you into thinking you're going that fast anyway. Mass Effect pulls a similar trick. When you start sprinting outside of combat, the camera shakes and the focus gets narrower to make players feel like they're going faster, but they're not. When you're in a fight, sprinting does make you move faster, but outside of combat, the game slows down your general movement significantly, sprinting included. I don't know why they don't make it so you can't sprint outside of a fight if they don't want you to. It seems like it would probably be extra effort to nerf it, like changing the behavior, rather than just disabling it outside of a fight. I don't know. The most likely culprit is they don't want you to move through environments too quickly with loading, kind of like how in Gears of War the game would make you stop and walk at certain times. It's the game giving itself enough time to load the next area. Mass Effect is bad enough with the elevators, but at least it doesn't have a lot of forced walking segments. Some of the blame has to go to Bioware's inexperience with action games at the time, though, because the other two Mass Effect games came out on the 360 and had perfectly functional sprints. So clearly, they were able to learn from their mistakes in the first game. It's funny, if you're just playing this game casually, you'll probably never even notice that sprinting is no different from just running. It felt kind of slow, but literally no different. That's a hell of a lie.

Number 8

At number eight is Dante's Inferno and the health bar lie. This is another one I never noticed. So many games give us health upgrades that increase our life bar, and we just assume they're doing what they're supposed to be doing, and most of the time they are. Now, with Dante's Inferno, I never would have known this unless a developer came out and said it, but apparently in Dante's Inferno, there was a bug where if you died or quit the game, your health would reset back to the baseline, but it wouldn't show. Your health bar would stay longer, but your actual health values would just reset back to the starting number. It was a bug, and if that's where it ended, it wouldn't be a lie. But here's the thing: they only noticed the bug very late into development. All the playtests had been done with that bug in place, so the game was entirely balanced around your main character never getting any health upgrades. So instead of just dropping the health upgrade system and rebalancing the entire game at the last minute, they shipped the game with the bug and just didn't fix it. I don't think I'll be able to trust health upgrades ever again. Thanks, Visceral Entertainment.

Number 7

At number seven in Half-Life 2: The Skybox itself is a trick. When Half-Life 2 came out, it had one of the most impressive skyboxes of all time. If you don't know, the skybox is exactly what it sounds like a giant box that surrounds a map with texture on it, simulating a sky. There are a couple of different ways to make them work depending on the game. Sometimes they just surround the player; other times, they're more like projections. If you cheat, you can find a little skybox somewhere in the corner of the map. Even other times, they're just giant boxes that surround a level. What made Half-Life 2's skybox stand out was one specific feature: the Citadel. This gigantic alien structure dominates the skyline of City 17. You can see this thing from literally everywhere, and even now, it's still a pretty impressive sight. What makes it unique is that it looks like it's part of the game's world, not just a JPEG, but like a 3D object, like there's physically something there. But there isn't. It's a trick. If you fly out to see it, you'll never reach it because the Citadel in the distance is a projection. If you want to find the real Citadel, you have to look around the corners of the map. It's a small 3D model that level designers stashed somewhere you can't normally see, and using a camera, they project this tiny little model onto the skybox, making it look enormous. It's pretty clever, but it gets even crazier when you start getting into stuff like Half-Life 2 Episode 1, where you're right next to the Citadel, and they start modeling part of it in the game world while the upper half is a projection. It's a pretty brilliant optical illusion that is almost entirely seamless.

Number 6

Number six is BioShock, a smaller one but it always drove me crazy. So here's the thing: in BioShock, you can only hold about 500 bucks. That's the limit of extra cash you can have on hand. You try to pick up more, and the game's going to stop you. That's not the problem here, though. The problem is that for some reason, the money counter has four digits on it, implying that you can hold between $1,000 and $9,999, but that is a lie. You can only hold $500. Maybe I'm being petty here, but it's unnecessary. Like, cut off one of those zeros and I'd have nothing to complain about. Sure, most people talking about lies in BioShock would probably talk about, you know, the whole "would you kindly" thing, but that's a narrative lie and it's a good one and kind of important to the story, while the extra zero is completely pointless. I'm guessing the decision to limit the amount of cash on hand was probably a late decision, so they didn't get around to changing the UI elements for the money. I'd wager it had a big impact on the difficulty of the game, and changing the amount of money to something larger would probably make the game a lot easier and therefore, in a lot of cases, probably less good because that game is balanced well. But that doesn't make this annoying to me for whatever reason.

Number 5

Number five is quad damage in Quake 3. The original Quake introduced the quad damage power-up into the world. It's been a mainstay of ID software games ever since. These things started showing up in Doom games, even though the OG Dooms did not have them. I'm happy to have them, of course. Picking up one of these suckers is very satisfying. Who wouldn't want to do four times the amount of damage? The only problem is that in at least one Quake game, the name of the item is a total lie. I'm talking about Quake 3 and by extension Quake Live, the still surprisingly popular arena shooter. I remember wasting hours playing this game as a kid. It was also an amazing multiplayer game. It's still fun to play today, but there's one black mark: the so-called quad damage power-up doesn't do what it says. It doesn't multiply your damage by four; it does it by three. Which makes you wonder why it's not just called tri-damage. It's weird because it's not great having a downgraded power-up, but if that's what we're doing, why not call it what it is? It's probably one of the most blatant lies in video games. It's an item that says in its name that it does four times the damage, but in Quake 3, it doesn't. It does three times the damage. It's one of those stupid lies that doesn't matter and probably has a perfectly good reason for being in there, like the balance of the game again. But I mean, it's literally like mathematically false information. It drives me nuts.

Number 4

Number four is the improved shield in Halo 2. Speaking of grudges from the past, let's talk about shields in Halo 2. I'm not sure if enemy weapons just got stronger or if the overall balance has just changed, but after Halo 1 made you feel like a walking tank, Halo 2 goes in a different direction, a more lethal one, which is fine if that's what Bungie wanted to do. Halo 2 is still a great game, but right at the start, they hit you with one of the most spurious lies in all of gaming. During the prerequisite calibrations opening sequence, the technician says your new armor shields are "extremely resilient, very efficient." Sure, I guess, fine. Compared to a plastic bag, tissue paper, or cotton—I don't know cotton can be pretty resilient. But a slight breeze can knock out the Chief's shields in Halo 2, and yet somehow they think they can get away with saying the shields are new and improved. They're not. Yeah, I know, it's just a stupid line of flavor dialogue, but it sets the expectation that your shields will be stronger. And I know the real meat of the game is in the multiplayer. Getting the balance right was extremely important, but there's one Halo game where I started to get sick of the beep-beep-beep warning sound whenever your shields go down, and it's this one. Am I hyper-focusing on something that doesn't matter? Absolutely. But that's what we're here for on this one, right? That's what this list is for. Don't tell me you don't agree. There is no reason to say that these shields are better.

Number 3

Number three: the FEAR AI. The original FEAR is often praised for its reactive and intelligent enemy soldiers. They do honestly seem pretty damn smart when you're playing the game, but in reality, it's all just a bunch of smoke and mirrors. The thing that made the enemies feel like living, breathing things was how they would call out and communicate with each other. They'd call out if they were flanking or if they were going to throw a grenade. They'd seemingly respond to your movements and formulate a plan to take you on. As a player, it seemed like you were up against calculating and dangerous enemies, but in actuality, it's just a lot of clever scripting. All that enemy communication that seems like they're planning and working together—it's not group intelligence. Instead, each enemy can act. Sometimes they'll come straight at you, sometimes they'll go in a different direction, which makes it seem like they're trying to surround you. But really, it's just one of the few possible actions an enemy can take, and they mostly select at random. The clever trick comes from the fact the game keeps track of what action the NPC chooses, and when they do, it tells a different NPC to yell out what they're doing. So when combat starts, one enemy decides to attack directly, and another goes down a random hallway. Then that signals the first guy to shout out "Get around him" or something like that, giving the impression that there's somebody giving orders. They do this thing all the time, and it makes it seem like the enemies are talking to each other and working together. It's just a series of NPCs acting independently. The game just has someone say what they're doing, which makes it seem like they're talking to each other. Now, AI in games is almost all just smoke and mirrors. It's almost impossible to make a truly intelligent enemy, and even when you do, they end up more frustrating than fun to fight. It's just more fun to fight enemies that seem smart rather than ones that are smart because it kind of lets you know how smart you are, and I'm not here for that. I'm here to blow away a bunch of bad guys and feel awesome.

Number 2

Number two is the helicopter lie from Left 4 Dead 2. It's probably one of the most benign lies on the list, but I always think it's interesting when a game presents a situation where it seems to be tense but it isn't. In the final mission of The Parish in Left 4 Dead 2, the game tells you you need to hurry across the bridge because your escape helicopter is going to leave in 10 minutes. You feel like you have to rush to the end as quickly as possible, but the helicopter doesn't ever leave. It just doesn't leave. It stays there. You can hang out on that bridge for the rest of your days, and it will never leave. The time limit is just there to make you think it's a mad dash to the escape when in reality, you can take as long as you want. That doesn't make it easy, of course. You can still get killed by swarms of zombies. They're attacking you pretty much non-stop, so it's not like you're going to want to sit in place and not do anything. But that time limit is meaningless. It's just a thing to make the final stretch of this campaign a little more exciting.

Number 1

And at number one: mirrors in Duke Nukem 3D. We've probably talked about this before, but I love the way old games would use pretty rudimentary tricks to make their worlds appear more realistic. Take, for example, Duke Nukem 3D and its mirrors. They appear to be exactly what you'd think—a reflection. But the build engine was not capable of reflective surfaces. A lot of games still struggle with reflections. It's getting better with ray tracing and all of that, but we're not even going to pretend that there is ray tracing in the build engine. So Duke 3D wanted to do something in contrast to Doom or Quake, which was to make things that are at least somewhat recognizable as a real place. So something like a bathroom would have stalls, sinks, and of course, a big mirror where you can see yourself. How do they do that? Simple: it's not a mirror, it's a window. It's not a loop, it's a spiral. No, they just copied and pasted the room in the reflection and put in a copy of Duke that follows your inputs but is mirrored. It's honestly a little creepy when you realize there's just another Duke over there copying everything you do, but it's also a solution for a problem. It works and it looks good. I remember the first time I saw a mirror in Duke Nukem 3D, and I was like, "What? How are they doing this?"

Bonus

I do have a quick bonus for you too. Not anything from the actual game, but Project Milo at E3 2009. Look up the presentation from E3 if you want to see just a shameless nonsense thing. You've never seen anything as obviously fake as this demo of the game Milo from the king of over-promising himself, Peter Molyneux. It's not even trying to look like something real. And Peter Molyneux has the gall to say, "What you're seeing is not acted or scripted." It's off the charts on the nonsense meter, one of the most obviously fake E3 demos of all time. "Goggles, put them on like this. Notice what she did? This wasn't acted, she felt the need to reach down for those goggles."

Outro

And that's all for today. Leave us a comment and let us know what you think.And as always, thank you very much for reading this blog. I'm Zaid Ikram. We'll see you next time right here on Speed Tool.