I see you didn’t have siblings.
Apparently it was in the manual, but I'm just learning it now.
Submitted 10 months ago by The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world to retrogaming@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/15ff741c-3c76-465c-ac52-a31625a30c39.jpeg
Comments
Kolanaki@pawb.social 10 months ago
cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
my brother and i would always control it just to mess the other person up :3
Shardikprime@lemmy.world 10 months ago
You could actually win Battle toads, you’d only have to get gud
dragonfucker@lemmy.nz 10 months ago
Interesting. Drag will have to pick it up from the pawn shop to try that out.
Redkey@programming.dev 10 months ago
Gamer sites on the early Internet were full of these “Easter eggs” that were really just non-obvious things with clear explanations in the manual.
One that I found particularly irrimusing (and seems to keep popping up forever) was that holding some combination of buttons on the Gameboy Advance when you turn it on “plays a secret, alternative start-up sound, then it just sits at the Gameboy logo until you press a button. That’s all it does.”
Except if you read the manual you’d know that holding that button combo overrides the normal start-up and forces the GBA into multi-play download mode, so you can play those games without having to take the cartridge out of the console. Pressing a button in that mode cancels it and resumes normal start-up, loading a game from cartridge if one is inserted.
I’ve seen some people insist that their manual didn’t say anything about this, but I have trouble believing them given that it was written in the manual for the GBA which I bought on launch day.
ClassifiedPancake@discuss.tchncs.de 10 months ago
Me when I learned that Minesweeper actually had logic and you’re not supposed to just click randomly.
cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
chip from sales guy vs web dude disliked this
SARGE@startrek.website 10 months ago
Found this out completely by accident once after my sister and I played some Mario.
I had the 2nd controller still plugged in, and while shooting the ducks I stepped on the controller and the ducks moved differently.
From the on, every time someone wanted to play duck hunt I would grab a second controller and make it harder for them.
Bonus knowledge: the original game works by a light-sensitive sensor in the blaster tip, and when you pull the trigger, the screen goes black and a white square appears whee the ducks were, in a specific order. If the game controller detects the light square, it counts as a “hit” on whatever duck was in frame. You can cheat by pointing the blaster at a white light and pulling the trigger. It will just go through them one by one as you squeeze, thinking the light is the duck square.
LiterallyLMAO@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The worst was games that required info from the manual to progress past a certain point, like star tropics. Rented the game and the rental place didn’t include the manual? Shit out of luck. And no Internet back then to look it up, either. I remember some computer games would also do things like that to prevent copying the game from a friend, like requiring a certain word from a certain page before loading.
prettybunnys@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
I owned Star tropics.
It took me a whole fucking summer to figure out what to do.
When I put that paper under the water and the code showed up …. 🤯🤯🤯
The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I bought Sim City for PC at a used bookstore, and it didn’t come with the reference page for a code it would ask you for after playing a certain amount of time.
Without this code, the game would turn on all hazards (tornados, fires, flooding, Godzilla, etc) and make itself unplayable.
IHawkMike@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Also it was black on red to make it harder to photocopy. I remember my mom being proud that she’d used the filters on the fancy copier she had at work to copy this sheet.
dan@upvote.au 10 months ago
There were rental places that didn’t include the manual?
teamevil@lemmy.world 10 months ago
One manual… where’d they get a replacement…it was like a library book, you had to return it.
B0NK3RS@lemmy.world 10 months ago
This reminds me of the MGS one where the frequency for Meryl is on the back of the game case.
RunJun@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months ago
Why not go with the direct example for MGS with switching to controller port 2?
Redkey@programming.dev 10 months ago
Because in the English version of MGS that’s not “hidden” in the manual (or on the back of the box). You get the Major calling on the radio every ten seconds during that fight, virtually screaming at you “Hey you dumb kid, switch to the second controller port already!”
B0NK3RS@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Because it didn’t remind me of that?
brax@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
I’ve known about it since ii had the game as a kid in the early 90s because of the manual. It’s def been in there all along lol
Phen@lemmy.eco.br 10 months ago
I had Duck Hunt but didn’t have the gun to play it with - nor the knowledge that I needed the gun. Every now and then I would try and fail to figure out how to play the game.
So to me, Duck Hunt is a game about a dog that laughs at you.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 10 months ago
So to me, Duck Hunt is a game about a dog that laughs at you.
No no, that part is still true.
The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world 10 months ago
This must have been a common thing, because you’re the 2nd person in the comments to mention this!
It’s funny now to think that if you couldn’t figure out a game pre-internet, you just didn’t get to play it. I know that happened to me plenty.
Phen@lemmy.eco.br 10 months ago
Back in the day we would often rent games for a weekend and sometimes we would get stuck at some point. There was one particular game that me and my friends really liked (Maui Mallard) on the genesis, but there was one specific point we didn’t know what to do. Every now and then we would rent the game again for a weekend in hopes of figuring it out. The game had basically three buttons IIRC: attack, jump and special. You could also press attack and special at the same time for a different attack. So one day I was playing it and reached the point that we all got stuck, and kept trying to figure out how to jump out of the area I was in (there was a clear exit, but too high up). My brother saw me struggling and mockingly said: “come on, do a super jump” and that made me think: can I do special + jump too? I tried it and then learned that this combination allowed climbing through short gaps (and this was the very first such gap in the game - anywhere else the combination did nothing). I was the neighborhood hero for a while thanks to that.
f4f4f4f4f4f4f4f4@sopuli.xyz 10 months ago
We had tons of pirated Commodore 64 games. Some single-player games became two-player with my little brother; “OK, I’ll drive the car while you try every key on the keyboard.”
aeronmelon@lemmy.world 10 months ago
If you press F in Skifree, you can outrun the snow monster.
megane_kun@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months ago
I only got to know this because of an XKCD comic.
LunarLoony@lemmy.sdf.org 10 months ago
you what
baines@lemmy.cafe 10 months ago
lies! my childhood refuses to believe this
Galapagon@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
I didn’t have the gun, but I had duck hunt, so I could only control the duck. Needless to say I didn’t play much duck hunt
JovialSodium@lemmy.sdf.org 10 months ago
I was aware of this, but I think it’s something we discovered by trying it out of curiosity.
Albbi@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
Back then, stuff like this spread by word of mouth somehow very effectively. I’d have a friend over and they’d just pick up the second controller and laugh when I missed the shot.
There were a bunch of other things like the cheat code in Doom, the Contra code (although I think I saw that one in a magazine) putting the Warcraft 2 game disk into a CD player to get a secret audio track.
Tarquinn2049@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The Blizzard songs were all also possible to play from the game install directory, too. Almost all of their early PC games had one of those.
InvertedParallax@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Til.
samus12345@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Oh yeah, I remember that. The control over the duck was so erratic it wasn’t really much fun.