Quotes • Headscratchers • Playing With • Useful Notes • Analysis • Image Links • Haiku • Laconic |
---|
A game option that raises the game to significantly elevated stupidity levels. Most often this is enabled by a Classic Cheat Code, or is an Easter Egg. Often called the "B track" particularly when the changes are only audio. This is more common in Japan than in America, where the B track is often used to hold the English dialogue.
Has to affect the whole game. If one level is always like this, it's Cloudcuckooland. See also Holiday Mode for holiday or otherwise date-specific shenanigans.
Examples of Silliness Switch include:
Film[]
- Monty Python and The Holy Grail has subtitles "for people who don't like the film," which consists of Shakespeare.
- Interestingly, they're lines from Shakespeare that pretty much say what the actual line is, but more eloquently.
- The Meaning of Life DVD has a version of the film for the lonely with sounds like that of friends coming over and watching the film with you.
- Kung Pow! Enter the Fist had two extra modes, one that showed what the actors were really saying, which consists of most of the regular characters speaking the movie's original Chinese, while the inserted protagonist said strange phrases that followed the rhyme of the movie's lines, and the Book On Tape, where all the lines were said by the same neutral voice actor.
- The DVD release of Rocky Horror Picture Show has an audience participation mode that tells you when to interact with the movie and how. It also has a version of the film for the lonely.
- The Unrated Edition of teen sex comedy Sex Drive opens with several of the actors in front of a goofy green screen lamenting that most "Unrated Editions" essentially just have a couple more curse words and one or two scenes of nudity. They choose to combat this by having their unrated edition not only having those things, but it also leaves in gaffes or deliberately surreal takes of non-specific scenes and naked women randomly spliced into otherwise normal scenes. Some of them simply walk by the foreground and wink at the audience.
Tabletop Games[]
- A few things in Dungeons and Dragons, ranging from the easily-accessed and relatively mainstream Baleful Polymorph ("You, sir, are now a frog!") to the inane effects produced by the Rod of Wonder (including such bizarre oddities as "target turns randomly blue, green, or purple (no save)").
- Plenty of tabletop RPGs are either entirely designed to be this, or have optional rules and expansions to enable them. Games like Munchkin for example as crazy from the get-go, while ones like the Red Dwarf RPG can be played straight or silly at the players discretions.
- Honestly, any RPG can be silly if they players want to play it that way. Lots of spells or abilities give the player discretion over exactly what form their effects take giving lots of room for silly uses. If you can (for example) create a magical weapon from thin air, it will often have specific rules but no fixed form. While the intention might be to allow players the scope to chose the standard swords, axes and big sticks, the player could just as easily pick a teddy bear, can of beans or knotted hankies. The effect is the same, but the style is somewhat different.
- Two expansions for Magic the Gathering (Unhinged and Unglued) are exactly this. Using them adds lots of silly mechanics that make the game fun but somewhat insane.
Video Games[]
Action Adventure[]
- Onimusha 4 included various different costumes for all 5 characters (such as dressing as characters from Street Fighter) and silly weapons such as the microphone stand instead of the staff. Sadly the weapons were rarely useful.
- Spider-Man for PS1 unlocked B-track mode, which let you play the game with a bunch of really weird changes. Some of these were merely audio (Scorpion and Jonah now yell "Marco!" and "Polo!" during their chase scene) and some were video (Mysterio's helmet now has a goldfish in it). Some made parts easier (Doc Ock is now 1 foot tall and his claw range is similarly shrunk), but others made it harder (instead of merely having to cross an underwater tunnel with electrified walls, turrets, and moving platforms, now you have to do it while racing The Beatles in a Yellow Submarine).
- Spider-Man (the game of the first movie) featured cheats that left you with the frankly absurd situation of a miniature Spider-Man with a head three times his own size.
- Or how about reskinning Spidey as anything from a generic cop to Mary Jane. Doubly funny is playing the level Coup D'etat as Mary Jane and using her to save herself from a runaway parade balloon. Not to mention the ending cutscene.
- Tenchu 3 also has a similar mode that changes the cutscene dialogue into nonsensical craziness: the main quest of the story involves finding out what the Big Bad's new invention is (toilet paper) and people referring to their status in the previous games, while the secondary character Tesshu's story turns into a nonending stream of gay jokes and an unsuccessful attempt to get back with his old boyfriend(s). This is made even funnier by the fact that the person who VAs Tesshu is gay in real life as well.
- Spider-Man (the game of the first movie) featured cheats that left you with the frankly absurd situation of a miniature Spider-Man with a head three times his own size.
- In La-Mulana, equipping either the Twinbee or Penguin Adventure ROMs along with Gradius 2 can turn coins into bells or fish; equipping both Yie Ar Kung-Fu ROMs turns weights into tea. This is a Shout-Out to the second-slot cartridge bonus in the Gradius games for MSX as well as a Shout-Out to the other games.
- In Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, you get "Doughnut Drake", which is a skin for Nathan Drake that adds 200 pounds.
- This was in the original, too. There was also the Next Gen Filter, which made everything as realistic as the rest of the market.
- Killer 7 has a secret game mode titled hopper7, where the only available difficulty level is Face The Swarm, and most of the enemies are replaced with giant grasshoppers that die in one hit. Unfortunately, only one level is available in this mode, and you have to beat the game once, then beat it again on Bloodbath difficulty in killer8 mode, to unlock it.
- The Wind Waker, after you complete it, allows you to replay the entire game... in your PYJAMAS.
Action Game[]
- Lego Star Wars had modes that made the silly games look even sillier. Such unlockables range from turning all lightsabers purple to turning all lightsabers into brooms.
- In the second and third games, you could use the in-game character maker to create such characters as Princess Darth 3P0.
- There's also one that turns all of the Grappling Hook Pistol cords into daisy chains.
- Hasn't anyone remembered the standard extra mode which has been around since Lego Star Wars II... THE DISGUISE MODE!!. On its own, it's already hilarious to see characters from Princess Leia to R2-D2 wearing a big nose, glasses and a huge handlebar moustache, but it's another thing for the same thing to happen to vehicles, even the vaguely life form-like ones such as AT-ATs. And the best part? It even happens in the cutscenes!
- Rebel Assault 2: The Hidden Empire featured a Theater 1138 mode, where the subtitles are replaced with silly parodies. The title is a play on Mystery Science Theater 3000 (you even get the classic 'front row seats' overlay, with Darth Vader and the two droids) and THX 1138.
Admiral Sarn: Lord Vader, I smell popcorn. |
- The relatively obscure indie game Lugaru has a spare animation file that was never used ingame. Renaming it so that it replaces the walking animation causes everyone to BREAKDANCE everywhere.
- So, in No More Heroes, what is your reward for getting all of the clothing from Area 51? Before the final area, you can buy a set of clothing based off of Bizarre Jelly, Travis's favorite anime. The full outfit is ungodly expensive, but it's almost worth it just to see Travis wearing an incredibly silly and gaudy outfit at his most emotional later in the game. Since the cutscenes are in game, he'll be wearing the mess during the most dramatic moments.
Adventure Game[]
- The first and second Quest for Glory has "Silly Clowns" in its options menu. Turning it on will generate cursing golfers in the desert, et cetera.
- Some of Sierra's games had boss buttons that switched to obviously fake spreadsheets. A player would have to restore a save or restart the game in order to continue.
- The Legend of Kyrandia III had "Helium Mode", which caused all the characters to speak with a squeaky voice.
Beat'Em Up[]
- If you inserted the disk of the old Apple II game Karateka into the drive upside-down, the game would load and play... upside down.
- The video game adaptation of The Incredibles has cheats that allow you to make your head bigger, make your head smaller, make the game go faster or slower, makes every object in the game "flashy" (known as "disco mode"), and make random objects different colors.
Driving Game[]
- The Carmageddon series features standard pick-ups that temporarily do silly things, such as making the pedestrians big-headed, stupid, slow-mo, or lightning-fast, giving your car jelly suspension, tweaking all of the physics to match that in a pinball machine, and much more.
Fighting Game[]
- The Soul Calibur games feature unlockable joke weapons. Most of these weapons looked silly (tambourines, brooms, oars) and they all have strange sound effects when used.
- And don't get us started on the possibilities with custom characters. For one, you could have a Hard Gay character with Cassandra's Critical Finish.
- Dreamcast/PSP beat 'em up Power Stone 2 had a bunch of weapons, some available by default and some smithable. Among these weapons were a tennis racquet and a giant trout.
- After unlocking the cheat mode in WWF War Zone, the player can take the elevator to the secret level with additional settings, two of which are "Beans" and "Ego". The former changes all hit and grunt sounds to farts and burps, even more hilarious when playing with female characters. The "Ego" mode makes the wrestler's head grow bigger with every successful hit or move. It doesn't explode, however, just resets to normal after the max size and starts all over again. Both modes can be turned on simultaneously.
First-Person Shooter[]
- Goldeneye 64 and Golden Eye Wii have an unlockable Paintball Mode and Big Heads Mode.
- The culmination of this silliness is every enemy in the game having the physique of a gorilla, huge bobble-like heads, and Dr. Doak's face.
- The N64 version also had the Fast Animations and Slow Animations cheats. Turning these on would either make enemies run extremely fast or run in slow motion like they were in Baywatch. These cheats also applied to James Bond and other NPCs in cut scenes. For one hilarious example, turn Fast Animations on and complete the Antenna mission to watch James fly off into the background without hanging on the helicopter!
- Serious Sam had four ways of depicting blood: red, green, none or flowers. Flowers was by far the most fun.
- Serious Sam also had several "outfits" that the titular character could be given upon starting a game, including a Santa Claus outfit. Needless to say, a game with multiple Santa Sams and flowers is about as ridiculous (and funny) as it gets.
- Serious Sam HD has changes this around a bit — red, green, hippies, kids or none. Hippies is more or less flowers again, but kids has characters bleed and explode into candy, toys etc.
- Alien Hominid is already silly, but has a similar flower-blood option for added surrealism.
- The Time Splitters series has loads: 8 Bit mode, Human Gun Sounds, Giant Head Mode, Rotating Head mode...
- Monkey Butler mode: A multiplayer deathmatch mode where whoever has the lowest score gets an army of monkeys to help them out.
- In Team Fortress 2 whoever's running the server can set the "birthday" console variable (cvar) from 0 to 1 to enable "Birthday Mode". Every character wears a party hat, gibs are replaced by presents, and hits cause balloons to rise from the target (several when you kill them).
- The censored German version is also pretty much set in a similar mode, with gears and toys replacing gibs, and this actually available to everybody else — just launch the game with "-sillygibs" as a parameter.
- Some servers, with fan-made levels and sounds, can turn into this trope.
- However, it's hard to make TF 2 much more ridiculous than it already is.
- Team Fortress 2 may be the perfect example of Silliness Switch activation, considering Valve was originally trying to go for something remotely serious and just couldn't get it to balance properly, so instead made the whole thing a Black Comedy.
- In the Medal of Honor games, there is a cheat that replaces characters hats with random scenery objects including (but not limited to) giant doors, huge chunks of gold, railroad cars, airplanes, and guns.
- Medal of Honor: Underground and its Panzerknacker Unleashed! level, full stop. Dancing dogs with guns, evil Terminator nutcrackers (the titular Panzerknackers), and zombies that EXPLODE when killed, for a start.
- Call of Duty 4 has these which can be unlocked after finding special items in the game, with effects such as making all explosions produce tires and making the game look like a silent movie (with sepia tone and piano soundtrack)
- World at War also gives you the option to spend levels throwing rocks, or using the ubiquitous paintball mode. Not to mention the popular Nazi Zombies mode, which has since received DLC of its own.
- The already very tongue-in-cheek Wide Open Sandbox First-Person Shooter Postal 2 had "Insane-o" mode, which armed the citizens of the town with random silly weapons, including throwing scissors, grenades, and molotov cocktails. There was also "Enhanced Mode" made available when you beat the game; you urinated napalm, and your assault rifle fired scissors.
- It also had a cheat to turn everyone (literally EVERYONE) into Gary Coleman as a (phenomenally tough) police officer complete with police NPC behaviour, and to make shotguns and assault rifles fire screaming, yowling cats. Combine this with infinite ammo cheat, and you're frantically gunning down the onrushing hordes of catchphrase-spouting midgets with an assault rifle that fires cats on full automatic because it's the only thing that'll STOP him. Who needs hallucinogenic drugs when you've got videogames?
- The newest Map Pack for Halo 3 includes Golf Clubs as a weapon, and giant Golf Balls as props. Before this there was a map which launched random pieces of debris at you. It's a lot stranger than it sounds.
- Some of the effects of Skulls. For Halo 3 and for ODST, "Grunt Birthday Party" makes a headshot on a Grunt make it explode into confetti with children cheering. And in Halo Wars there's one that makes Scarabs shoot a magical beam of rainbows and love.
- I Would Have Been Your Daddy Skull in Halo 2, 3, ODST, and Reach makes characters spout alternate (read: funnier) lines.
- Rise of the Triad had the "dopefish" command line switch, which would add references to the Dopefish from Commander Keen complete with belching noises, replace the level titles with nonsense phrases, and other odd effects.
- Turok: Dinosaur Hunter featured a number of Silliness Switch cheat codes. The standard small-enemy and big-head modes were there, of course, but perhaps the most notable ones were "Quack Mode" (which severely degraded the quality of the game's graphics, in a Take That to Quake) and "Disco Mode" (which added rave-like flashing colors to the background and caused the enemies to dance).
Hack and Slash[]
- God of War has the — wait for it — Cod of War (See page image).
- Among other silly clothes.
MMORPGs[]
- One of the language options in Guild Wars (Bork! Bork! Bork!) changes all the text in the game as if spoken by the Swedish Chef from The Muppet Show.
- The now dead and forgotten MMORPG Asherons Call 2 had a "Batman" blood option — enemies would explode with POW, BIFF, WHAP type 1960s Adam West Batman effects upon being hit, which would also cause the blood textures on NPCs (NPCs skin took battle damage as you fought them) to BIFF style stickers.
Party Game[]
- Amazing Island featured the "Piggy" option, which inserted pigs into all of the mini-games. In some, the pigs only appeared in the background, but in others, they became parts of the games--such as standing in for balls and boulders.
Platform Game[]
- Super Return of the Jedi for SNES has a Debug code that allows you to play as any character you want in any sidescrolling stage. Among these Characters are Wicket the Ewok and Princess Leia in the famous slave bikini. Normally you're restricted to using Luke Skywalker for fighting Darth Vader and the emperor, but with the Debug code...yeah. As a side effect, the Debug code gives you infinite thermal detonators and lets you skip right past the 3D levels, making the game stupidly easy.
- Banjo-Kazooie had the secret reward of replacing the main character's model with that of... a washing machine with eyes. This transformation recurs in Banjo-Tooie, but as a necessary part of the gameplay.
- A necessary part of gameplay that shoots tighty-whiteys as its main attack. The Banjo-Kazooie series has its odd moments.
- Prince of Persia had a mode that let you turn the screen upside down.
- After beating the Special World in Super Mario World, it activates a mode where, for one example, Koopa shells are replaced with costume Mario heads.
- Obscure puzzle game Zapper has several "silliness cheats." Since the main character is an insect, one of the first is the "Bug Eye," which makes the entire screen look kaleidoscopic. Another is the ability to change the look of the "protection" power-up, which normally looks like a helmet, into things like a top hat or a Funny Afro.
- In Ratchet: Deadlocked, it is entirely possible (through skins and cheats) to end up as a "Landshark" fighting a million copies of Captain Qwark in a blizzard (indoors), while flanked by two robotic guards with cigars. Ratchet and Clank Up Your Arsenal has the option of playing as a talking snowman with a gun.
- In the Game Within A Game Vid-Comics in UYA, it is quite possible to put Qwark in a tutu by actually inputting the Konami Code-resembling sequence that Al calls out (it's Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Circle, Square, Square).
- Because of the inherent silliness of the Ratchet and Clank games (a floating disco ball that causes every enemy on-screen to dance uncontrollably is a standard weapon), even outright ridiculous bonuses like a purchasable pair of glasses with a mustache on them seem hardly out of the ordinary.
- In Iji, fragging Yukabacera gets you his scrambler, which replaces the normal contents in the Tasen and Komato logs (including Dan's) with all sorts of grammatical errors and nonsensical text. You are warned, when you get it, that prolonged use could drive you crazy.
- A recurring Scrambler error seems to be about some sort of "missile pony".
- Assassin Asha, who exhibits a vile dialogue in normal circumstances, has every line replaced with single e-motes, heart symbols, or onomatopoeia resembling something of a toy train or car.
Asha: TOOT TOOT |
- Also, the game's ultimate hidden item, the Null Driver (which requires finding almost every other secret), combines this with Interface Screw to impressive effect. Especially if you use both it and the Scrambler.
Rail Shooter[]
- Typing Of The Dead is, contrary to the other examples, is a silliness spin-off. Instead of guns, you're forced to use keyboards (yes, literal keyboards, you even see the keyboard backpacks on James and Gary). Hilarity already ensues, right? Well, with this device, you'll have to shoot zombies by typing out words and sentences! In everything else, though, it doesn't make the game any more Lighter and Softer... at least until the very-very ending.
- Despite this game's Affectionate Parody status, Fridge Logic ensues as well. First: how the hell James and Gary see what they should type? Second: from where do these backpacks fire?!
Real Time Strategy[]
- The early 1990s strategy game Global Conquest had two kinds of chance cards — "Tame" (Native Defection) and "Wild" (New Ice Age, Solar Flares).
- The Age of Empires series includes special cheat units like lazerbears, machine gun cars, a giant animate bust of George
WashingtonCrushington and, in Age of Mythology, the exploding chicken meteor god power. (The code is 'Bawk Bawk Boom' in capitals, if you're dying to try it out.)- Type in "GOATUNHEIM". It will turn EVERYTHING into goats. All your villagers, all your heroes, all your soldiers, all your opponent's soldiers...everything. Of course, if you're playing online, this will piss your opponent off, but you gotta admit, it's pretty funny.
- Age of Mythology also has the cheat TINFOIL HAT, which randomizes who controls every unit and building on the map, adding extra computer players to make it even more random.
- The Star Wars game Galactic Battlegrounds (built on the same engine) had a super-powerful Simon the Killer Ewok. The wiki claims he's a thousand year old mercenary who has lent his services to anyone who knew how to call him, and has been spotted, along some of his comrades, on either sides. This is said to be as canon as Max aiding Kyle Katarn, which was also an easter egg.
- Populous had expansion packs and a level editor that added some perfectly reasonable scenarios (including a desert world, a winter world, and worlds based on historical periods) and some less so (like a candy world, a world of pigs vs. wolves, and a world based on computer components).
- The SNES version had these built in.
- The original Command and Conquer game had a file containing mouth-made versions of the gun shot sounds. However, enabling them seemed to require some manipulation.
PEW PEW PEW |
- And let's not forget the Dinosaur Fun Park missions in the Covert Operations expansion pack. Or It Came From Red Alert!, the (bastard hard) Giant Ant missions from Red Alert's Counterstrike.
- Red Alert also had the lunar skirmish map, which not only takes place on the moon but also swaps around all the units' weapons, resulting in flamethrower troopers now throwing artillery shells with their bare hands, helicopters that shoot V2 rockets, machinegun fire coming out of the barrel of tanks' cannons...
- By editing the "rules.ini", you can potentially create your own Silliness Switch mode similar to the one above for any map. You could train Einsteins who shoot Tesla bolts from their bare hands or technicians who lob V2 rockets before running around in panic.
- If you enter the code "disco" into Warcraft II, you get an alternate soundtrack that is... well, you know.
Roguelike[]
- Perhaps the silliest example in existence is Nethack, which, much like its predecessor Rogue, has a hallucination status effect. This effect not only rewrites most of the in-game messages into Surfer Dude (or maybe Stoner Dude) speak, but also randomly replaces the names of enemies with those of various pop-culture monsters like Vorlons, Daleks, Tribbles, The Luggage, and Godzilla.
- It also comes, by default, with many of its Silliness Switches turned on. It is possible to compile a much more sensible version of Nethack that removes all the kitchen sinks, Hawaiian shirts, the expensive cameras, the Keystone Kops...
Role Playing Game[]
- The Paper Mario games allow you to equip badges that change the sound of your attacks to things like slide whistles and crickets chirping. Using this against one of the bosses in Paper Mario the Thousand Year Door actually makes the battle easier, though it's not required.
- The original Japanese .hack games had an alternate comedy dialog track unlocked by beating the game. Among other things, it had characters believing Aura to be the ghost of a pet hamster.
- Black Isle Games had their share of silliness. Planescape: Torment had 'placeholder' dialogue that could be accessed that is full of Jive Turkey, and Baldur's Gate had a cheatcode that summon killer chickens, and the infamous Cow Kill Spell.
- In Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal, Cow Kill is one of the wild surges that the Wild Mage class randomly gets, and as such becomes accessible without needing any cheat (though it's got a pretty low probability of occurring). In fact the whole Wild Mage class can be considered a sort of in-universe Silliness Switch: it's a legitimate class, but it's only available to the player and wild surge results range from gender-swapping random characters to summoning squirrels.
- Neverwinter Nights has a console command entitled "dm_cowsfromhell". It summons cows to kill everything in the same area as the player by flying out of a portal from hell and crashing into them in an explosion of Ludicrous Gibs.
- Phantasy Star Portable lets you play as a bikini-clad elfgirl using a boulder-spitting baby dinosaur as a rifle, and wield maracas, lumps of meat or a lollipop as weapons.
- Ultima VII part two has alternative subtitles for the intro movie that feature an army of muppets.
- Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden allows you to change the dialogue to Al Bhed. Completing the game unlocks the option to change names and portraits to Victorian Steampunk.
- Final Fantasy VII has a Joke Weapon for every character, ranging from a baseball bat with a nail in it for Cloud, a mop for Cid, an umbrella for Aeri(s)(th), etc.
- Fallout: New Vegas has a 'Wild Wasteland' perk, which will reinsert a lot of the Shout Outs from the other game, such as the Holy Hand Grenade.
- Mega Man Battle Network 3 and on has a Navi Customizer program called "Humor", which makes Megaman.exe tell a bad joke instead of help you if you talk with him in the overworld. If you're controlling Megaman, though, Lan tells the groan makers.
Shoot'Em Up[]
- The old Apogee Shoot-Em-Up Raptor: Call of the Shadows had a cheat code which caused a number of new, silly enemies to be inserted into the ordinary levels — which also increased the difficulty somewhat, since some of them were genuinely tough. With that activated, your high-tech jet-fighter might come under assault from coconut-throwing monkeys, giant cows packing internal missile-launchers, or cybernetically-enhanced geckos... It is also automatically turned on when the game is run on the dates of some of the developers' birthdays.
- Tyrian featured the Supercarrot as a playable ship (with a ton of armour to boot) and assorted food-based weaponry — oranges, hotdogs and banana nukes.
- What makes this doubly absurd is that this is not presented terribly much as an easter egg or cheat code, but rather a frequent and natural consequence of gameplay. Food-based ships and weapons are occasionally mentioned in data packets leading up to this possibility.
- Tyrian 2000 goes even further. The entire final episode revolves around the fruit-cult you've seen mentioned throughout the game. Also, a new hidden ship is the Pete's Pretzel Truck. It uses pretzel weapons.
Simulation Game[]
- Sim Ant had a feature that added cartoon graphics, sound effects and gags.
- Transport Tycoon Deluxe had a Toyland mode, where all the vehicles had faces. It was actually slightly harder than the normal missions, since all the vehicles were really slow and broke down a lot. It was also slightly depressing if your happy Thomas the Tank Engine-esque trains crashed and erupted in a massive fireball.
- The PC city-building game Pharaoh has cheat codes which trigger some very comically disturbing events. One causes the guards in city towers to shoot cows at enemies, while another causes any hippos grazing on the Nile to dance on their hind legs wearing pink tutus.
- Its Spiritual Successor Zeus: Master of Olympus has a cheat that gives your goatherd deliverymen cheese suits (they deliver cheese, after all).
- Typing in "arrrrwalktheplank" as a cheat code in Free Space 2 would cause a cartoony pirate ship to warp in, complete with the design team's faces on the crew. That's right. A wooden, old-fashioned pirate ship... IN SPACE!
- Warship Gunner 2 has extra missions where you go to stop a guy from singing karaoke, cleaning up islands, go on dates, and fight a giant dried squid, among others. While commanding a battleship. Presumably in the shape of a rubber ducky or shark. Also, fourth wall ceases to exist and everyone's probably high.
- Naval Ops: Commander is similarly silly in its Area G missions, which include swatting dragonfly fighters and shopping by going between ports.
Sports Game[]
- Tony Hawk skating games often let you turn on things like disco mode, which causes colours to change wildly, big head mode and baby mode.
- Microsoft Golf had the ability to set different .wav files for various sounds in the game. It came packaged with two predefined sets: Regular and Silly. Hitting a tree in Silly mode would result in a bullet ricochet followed by a falling tree sound and someone yelling "Timber!"
- Backyard Basketball has cheat codes allowing for really big and really small heads.
- The official game of the 1998 World Cup had a code that let you play on the moon, with all players replaced by aliens.
Survival Horror[]
- Unlock the Princess Heart costume in Silent Hill 3, wear it, fire the Lethal Joke Weapon Sexy Beam, and see if you can still find the game horrific....
- The costume itself is pretty horrific.
Third-Person Shooter[]
- Beating Metal Wolf Chaos gives you lots of extra weapons such as a fireworks gun, a money gun and a shark gun. It also has a second silliness switch, but that one comes jammed in the 'on' position.
- Oni featured a cheat code that would turn all the characters into bobble heads. This also made fighting quite a bit more difficult, but amusing. It also made headshots quite a bit easier.
- Jet Force Gemini had three "cheats" that you got for collecting ant heads. The first made all the blood rainbow-colored. The second made the three playable characters proportioned like children (meaning Lupus became a puppy). The third was called "Ants into Pants", and turned all of your ant-like enemies into stick-figures wearing oversized pants.
- And that "stick figure wearing oversized pants" is actually Rare's mascot, Mr. Pants. He even has his own GBA game!
- The Third-Person Shooter part of the old Die Hard Trilogy game had several. You could make everyone fat, for instance. Or have killed enemies float up to heaven.
- Star Wars Battlefront II has a cheat that unlocks Party Mode, which adds comic book style effects and confetti bursts to attacks, especially lightsabre blows.
- Gears of War 3 adds Mutators for Arcade and Horde mode. They are grouped into "Easy," "Hard," and "Fun." The "Fun" Mutators are this trope in spades, doing things such as adding a laugh track, causing headshot victims to run around firing at random (called "Headless Chicken"), and making all characters chibi-shaped with high pitch voices.
- The developers often invoke this for holiday/weekend multiplayer events, which have included things like boomshots that fire exploding chickens and giving everyone jack-o-lanterns for heads on Halloween.
- Tomb Raider Anniversary has many unlockable costumes and one of them is an imitation of Lara's low polygon model used in the original game. This makes her look incredibly blocky compared to other characters, her breasts looking like she stuffed traffic cones in her bra, and the fact that her lips don't move during a cut scene makes it even more hilarious.
Wide Open Sandbox[]
- Grand Theft Auto III had cheats to make all the pedestrians attack you on sight, or make them attack each other, or give them all weapons (making the former two more interesting). Other cheats took away the car bodies so everyone drove around on the chassis, hovering where the seat would be, or made the cars tiny so you dragged full sized people out of nowhere when you stole them. Vice City let you turn all the cars pink or make hordes of women follow the main character around.
- There's also the exploding cars cheat, which when entered causes all the cars around to explode. Because you can write it real fast on the PC (just type "BANGBANGBANG" over and over again), you can grab an amphetamine pill, type the cheat over and over again, and see how this cheat combined with Amphetamine Bullet Time can send the cars flying hundreds of meters sky-high.
- Pleasantly, it's possible in Vice City to combine the "Ladies Man" cheat and the helicopter in a very special way to produce flying women.
- Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. Possible to have hordes of Elvis (Elvii) and fast food employees rioting through the city while any car hit goes flying into space.
- The Grand Theft Auto Liberty City Stories hack which turns all cars into ever-bouncing pinballs of unholy death. Just punch a car and it's down the block and around the corner. Then a bus falls on you.
- Grand Theft Auto IV also has this. The idea is based on the fact that each car has a stat that governs the car's friction. Higher numbers mean that the car has higher friction and loses speed quicker. Minus values mean that the car gains speed with more friction. The average friction for a car is around 0.49. Guess what happens when it's set to -9.
- Given the nature of the Saints Row games, it's not surprising that they too have some very off beat "cheat" codes. The second game has raining men, which causes people to randomly fall from the sky, and Ascension, which causes any dead character to float up to the sky. The two combined is quite hilarious.
- In Batman: Arkham City, holding LT and RT or L1 and R1 and spinning the right analog stick circle at any point in the game causes every single character in the game to gain a giant head, hands and feet. Amusingly enough, since most of the menu screens are populated with the ingame characters doing various things, this code works on them as well: this is especially noticeable during Riddler's Revenge, where using the code causes his face to fill up most of the stage select screen.
Web Original[]
- The website Everything 2 has "Spy On Other Users" in preferences — turning it on will randomly add stupidities like "--is fighting smelly cheese" into the user list.
- Facebook has "Pirate" as one of its language options. Take a guess what it does.
- Facebook now also has Leet Speak as a language option. Besides the obvious, it also changes things like relationships to "probably sleeping with" or "hooked up with", and the infamous like button to <3.
- Similarly, Google has not only Pirate, but also Swedish Chef, Elmer Fudd, and Hacker localizations.
- Dinosaur Comics is already pretty silly. Unless you'd rather be reading something else.[1]
- The May 30th, 2003 comic looks even more like a Pokey the Penguin comic now.
Mindgames, son.
- ↑ If you can't find it, check the news article.