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Text in games that are (almost) impossible, or just very rare to come across...

Super Mario Sunshine contains some entertaining hidden lines (impossible to see without cheating, though):

"I wanna be loved by
you. Just you nobody
else but you.
I wanna be kissed
by you alone.
I couldn't aspire"

"Stand by me"

"When the night has come"

http://tcrf.net/Super_Mario_Sunshine#Placeholder_Text

The Last Lombax said:
The secret message in Sonic CD : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idheGtky7os
You need to access to Sound test menu, enter the numbers in the video and you'll get the creepiest message ever including creepy Sonic, weird text and scary music.
Click to expand...
This one still creeps me out. Imagine a kid triggering it by accident.
 
Krejlooc said:
Wow, I'm a huge wonderboy fan, this is awesome. I have an original launch SMS controller from 86, how do you hold L and R together at the same time? It has a ball in the middle of the pad that it pivots on, preventing you from hitting two directions at the same time like that.

I know the game inside and out, I'd love to try this.

Ha, that's funny, it's translated into english in the north american and european version. That means the TecToy release actually used the JPN release as a base for the Monica game.
Click to expand...
Sweet! Oh man, I would absolutely love if you or someone else could manage to pull this glitch off and somehow capture the section I'm talking about, in whichever version of the game. Unfortunately, the details on how to pull it off are foggy in my mind now and if it wasn't for that discussion I found about the glitch I wouldn't even be 100% sure about the L+R on the d-pad thing. As far as I can recall that's it, you just try to forcefully press left and right at the same time and WB/Mônica will spazz out a bit, after that you jump and s/he will start scrolling vertically. Then if you keep holding right (or left) you can just go your merry way through the stage.

Regarding the ball on the d-pad, I do remember that the Brazilian Master System controllers I owned were smooth in the middle. I searched and according to this site that's the case for the Master System II, so I think maybe that particular model didn't have the directional restriction, or at least it wasn't as strong? I remember we used to pull the glitch with ease back then so I assume that would be the case.

i5nAyi8TO9Zmv.jpg


In the discussion on the SMS Power topic I linked in my previous post, albino_vulpix also mentions this:

-I can do it with a standard SMS controller, but only the ones with the flatter, smoother dpad (the ones without the clearly defined circle in the center)
-Interestingly, the Mega Drive pad works fine when the console is in Japanese mode
Click to expand...
So it looks like it isn't possible to do it with the Master System controllers that have a thumb stick slot or are textured in the middle, making the whole thing even more obscure than I thought it was.

edit: re-reading the SMS Power thread I only now saw that there's a link to a TASVideos topic where the glitch is also discussed. Apparently the OP does it (I can't seem to get his videos to work), so that would mean it's feasible to do on emulators. I'll have to look into this later, haha.
 
The Last Lombax said:
The secret message in Sonic CD : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idheGtky7os
You need to access to Sound test menu, enter the numbers in the video and you'll get the creepiest message ever including creepy Sonic, weird text and scary music.

Bonus:
There are another messages in Sonic CD :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjE1cnMe2Fg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euULXNvYQXM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8ZpW30K5gY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiabB_BnL4Y
Click to expand...

Going by the Youtube comments, does the text really translate to 'Fun is infinite with Sega Enterprises' / 'Fun is infinite with the Devil'?

Also holy shit, I had no idea that was where the Batman-spoof muscular Sonic came from.
 
In Dragon warrior iii if your save gets corrupted you'll get a screen accompanied with that eerie cursed sound saying that Zoma erased your imperial scrolls of honor. I haven't seen this since I was like 10 years old (I'm almost 32) and haven't been able to find much about it but it's true. My memory of the specifics might be off slightly
 
Zee-Row said:
Didn't Areth in FF7 have some unused text that would trigger if you did the gameshark code to keep her alive after disk one?
Click to expand...

Krejlooc said:
IIRC it was generic text.
Click to expand...

Like the reasoning someone gave for the Mario game, it was probably due to event planners not being too clear on plot progression, so some characters have dialogue before or after you get them. FF7 does have examples though (re:my earlier post)
 
ponpo said:
Like the reasoning someone gave for the Mario game, it was probably due to event planners not being too clear on plot progression, so some characters have dialogue before or after you get them. FF7 does have examples though (re:my earlier post)
Click to expand...

I had read that things like that are in so that if the game tries to call up lines from party members you aren't supposed to have, it has something to call up instead of having nothing and messing up. Does the same thing happen if you put Flashback Cloud or Sephiroth in the party?
 
turnbuckle said:
In Dragon warrior iii if your save gets corrupted you'll get a screen accompanied with that eerie cursed sound saying that Zoma erased your imperial scrolls of honor. I haven't seen this since I was like 10 years old (I'm almost 32) and haven't been able to find much about it but it's true. My memory of the specifics might be off slightly
Click to expand...

Shining Force 2 for the sega Genesis has something similar. There is a witch brewing a pot that takes care of your save data after the title screen. But one day when I turned it on she says she lost it or something horrible like that. Made it even worse that I was at the very end of the game. I kinda appreciated that they made it seem like something happening due to a witches negligence rather than a boring machine error message. Sadly can't find it via google image search.
 
Dying soldier in the back alley in Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time.

The Soldier in the Back Alley is a character from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. He is a Hyrulean Soldier who appears only once: right before Link enters the Temple of Time with the three Spiritual Stones. The severely-wounded soldier can be found in Hyrule Castle Town's Back Alley, and if Link speaks to him, the soldier tells of Ganondorf's betrayal of the Royal Family of Hyrule and of Princess Zelda's escape. The soldier recognizes Link from Zelda's descriptions of a "forest boy". After his story is told, the soldier takes his last breath and dies. If Link tries to talk to him again, Navi will inform Link that "He's not moving anymore."
Click to expand...

Source: http://zelda.wikia.com/wiki/Soldier_in_the_Back_Alley

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgmPa6RUfR0

Also... Metroid Fusion.

4izRMqp.png
 
The Last Lombax said:
The secret message in Sonic CD : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idheGtky7os
You need to access to Sound test menu, enter the numbers in the video and you'll get the creepiest message ever including creepy Sonic, weird text and scary music.

Bonus:
There are another messages in Sonic CD :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjE1cnMe2Fg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euULXNvYQXM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8ZpW30K5gY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiabB_BnL4Y
Click to expand...

What does that text translate to?
 
Andrefpvs said:
What a fantastic idea for a thread. I love talking about small details like these.

My contribution: -- did you know? In Pokémon Red/Blue/Yellow, there is actually an event where Professor Oak gives you 5 Poké Balls. Most people think the tradition of getting 5 free Poké Balls at the start of the game began in Gold/Silver, but nope, it's always been there! The things you need to do are so specific that most people miss it.

How to trigger it:

  1. Don't evolve your starter Pokémon or catch any other Pokémon.
  2. Don't buy Poké Balls.
  3. Defeat your Rival on Route 22 (the Route to the Pokémon League) before heading into Viridian Forest.
  4. Go talk to Oak afterwards.

NOYfZOr.png

tjVSK35.png

2RmYenI.png

nEFCVPx.png

e7uLvnj.png


This event is so rarely seen that it even missed Quality Assurance during beta testing! You can tell because after he gives you the balls his next dialogue goes outside the boundaries of the text box (in Red/Blue) or is missing a letter (in Yellow):

8poWXgC.png
Click to expand...

Mindblown.
 
Another Final Fantasy VII one. If you go to the altar(or whatever it's called. The place where you use the Ancient Key later on) in the City of the Ancients immediately after Cloud rejoins your party (so before you go down to Junon and get the submarine). Cloud talks about how the altar reminds him of the Lifestream and that Aeris had been there earlier. The scene is obscure since there's no reason at all to go there immediately after getting Cloud back. I didn't even know it existed until a playthrough last year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvBm9g2GsDo
 
If you sell your equipment for an escapipe at the start of Phantasy Star III, you can bust out of a jail cell with it and break the game's scripting. If you talk to the king, he'll say something along the lines of "Clever move, but unfortunately you can't progress, so reset the game and try again."
 
Andrefpvs said:
What a fantastic idea for a thread. I love talking about small details like these.

My contribution: -- did you know? In Pokémon Red/Blue/Yellow, there is actually an event where Professor Oak gives you 5 Poké Balls. Most people think the tradition of getting 5 free Poké Balls at the start of the game began in Gold/Silver, but nope, it's always been there! The things you need to do are so specific that most people miss it.

How to trigger it:

  1. Don't evolve your starter Pokémon or catch any other Pokémon.
  2. Don't buy Poké Balls.
  3. Defeat your Rival on Route 22 (the Route to the Pokémon League) before heading into Viridian Forest.
  4. Go talk to Oak afterwards.

NOYfZOr.png

tjVSK35.png

2RmYenI.png

nEFCVPx.png

e7uLvnj.png


This event is so rarely seen that it even missed Quality Assurance during beta testing! You can tell because after he gives you the balls his next dialogue goes outside the boundaries of the text box (in Red/Blue) or is missing a letter (in Yellow):

8poWXgC.png
Click to expand...

Oh wow, I can't believe I've never heard of this before. Is it still present in FireRed / LeafGreen?
 
Green Mamba said:
Despite Final Fantasy X being very linear for most of the game, it's possible to backtrack all the way to Besaid for much of it (prior to Macalania Temple) and a lot of the NPCs in those areas have new dialogue as the plot progresses. Like the people on the dock in Besaid will comment on Yuna being engaged to Seymour, which is an event that happens all the way in Guadosalam.

Also, in Persona 4 there is a ton of difficult to see dialogue in dungeons. Sometimes a random pair of unused party members appear in empty rooms (especially in dungeons you've already completed). Talking to them elicits dialogue between them. It's not to hard to encounter this event in the game, but what most people don't realize is that the dialogue is based not only on which two characters are present, but their respective Social Link level as well (and Golden adds extra costume related dialogue). There is a ton of it and most people will only just barely scratch the surface of what's there.
Click to expand...

Persona 2 is similar, it has new dialogue for every time there is a little event. Which mean for example, all the town NPCs dialgue will change if you before you enter a dungeon, after you entered and after the event inside the dungeon itself.
 
Scarl said:
Oh wow, I can't believe I've never heard of this before. Is it still present in FireRed / LeafGreen?
Click to expand...

Yep, but now the event happens automatically after you get the Pokédex, so it can't be missed. The text is even based on the "hidden" Red/Blue/Yellow event!

1OLqSWv.png

4zQQJVs.png

jfN0cNN.png
⬅ And they fixed this one :-)
 
GrumpyAlien said:
Shining Force 2 for the sega Genesis has something similar. There is a witch brewing a pot that takes care of your save data after the title screen. But one day when I turned it on she says she lost it or something horrible like that. Made it even worse that I was at the very end of the game. I kinda appreciated that they made it seem like something happening due to a witches negligence rather than a boring machine error message. Sadly can't find it via google image search.
Click to expand...

Exactly! I want to say it also showed Zoma while it was displaying the text but I could be wrong. The only thing I'm certain is that something like what I described definitely happened to me and it happened a couple of times. The joy of being hooked on that game as a child while playing on an NES that would randomly crash/reset.

Can't find an image of it anywhere though :(
 
Really enjoying this topic and want to see it keep going.

Although there are no ways to see them without cheating, there are a few interesting debug items you can manage to equip yourself with in Planescape: Torment. This is the description for the Sword of Wh'ynn (from The Cutting Room Floor).

The Sword of Why'nn - also known as the Cheater's Blade - looks more like an ornamental dagger than a combat-worthy blade. Though not particularly well balanced, it has been enchanted with powerful magicks and is thus more effective in battle than a more 'common' knife. The Sword of Wh'ynn's greatest power, however, lies in its ability to let its bearer cheat: by merely holding the 'sword' aloft in a suitably melodramatic pose, its owner will beat whatever game the artifact's been found in.
Click to expand...

And while it's not text, there's the hidden sequence break ending to Shadow Complex. If you manage to get yourself back to the starting area soon after the game begins, you get the "Plenty of Fish" ending and (and an achievement, I think). http://youtu.be/fojskO4jpDg?t=52s
 
Syril said:
I had read that things like that are in so that if the game tries to call up lines from party members you aren't supposed to have, it has something to call up instead of having nothing and messing up. Does the same thing happen if you put Flashback Cloud or Sephiroth in the party?
Click to expand...

To be honest I'm not sure, but I don't think so. The dialogue in FF7 happens per character but also per party slot (e.g. Barret may have different text if he's the second slot rather than the third slot in your party) so for someone like Sephiroth to have dialogue it would have to be specifically programmed in to be with Sephiroth. I think if you did something like mod Sephiroth in your party, he would either say nothing or get replies that aren't because of him being Sephiroth but something else in the programming (e.g. since character slot 0 is normally defaulted to Cloud, it might just assume he is cloud; if you use Young Cloud in the debug room, I think some of his values assume he is Cait Sith with a different model, etc.)
 
ponpo said:
To be honest I'm not sure, but I don't think so. The dialogue in FF7 happens per character but also per party slot (e.g. Barret may have different text if he's the second slot rather than the third slot in your party) so for someone like Sephiroth to have dialogue it would have to be specifically programmed in to be with Sephiroth. I think if you did something like mod Sephiroth in your party, he would either say nothing or get replies that aren't because of him being Sephiroth but something else in the programming (e.g. since character slot 0 is normally defaulted to Cloud, it might just assume he is cloud; if you use Young Cloud in the debug room, I think some of his values assume he is Cait Sith with a different model, etc.)
Click to expand...

That reminds me, Baldur's Gate does something similar. If you happen to kill a plot-requisite NPC that has scripted dialogue, a character named Biff the Understudy will appear and deliver those lines instead of the intended character. Stuff like that is programmed in to keep the game from crashing.

Link: http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Biff_the_Understudy
 
Here's one I can't find any other info on anywhere:

In the PC version of Omni-Play Basketball, there was a halftime show, the "Nick and Bob Show," where two commentators would discuss the game situation and stats up to that point.

One time, the show went off track, with the commentators saying stuff like "Hello, are we still on? What is going on right now? What happened to the lights?" And then a bunch of garbage characters, which kept going until I manually skipped the show.
 
Niosai said:
Is that a slowed-down N64 Ganondorf laugh in that first link there?

Also, someone already pointed out the message, but in Spyro 3, after you got that message, the game would change. Gems and collectables that would normally be there disappeared, and I believe that if you tediously made your way to the end of the game to the final boss, it would send you back to the beginning and erase your save file.
Click to expand...

Very similar. Not sure if they're the same

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSiqsSHYQQo
 
M3d10n said:
Different parts of the games are worked on at different times and by different team members, so it's likely that when that message was coded into the game it wasn't known that it would never be triggered by normal means or during earlier stages of development it was possible to get 99 stars in a normal run.
Click to expand...

Even aside from this possibility, it's standard practice to code in caps like this. Due to the huge number of possible events in the game (e.g., with chance time as OP mentioned), it's hard to say for sure that no player will ever exceed 99 stars. At the same time, you don't want the player to ever see weird UI bugs. The easier solution is to just hard-code 99 as the maximum and write a special message, rather than coding the UI to accommodate 3-digit star amounts.
 
UncleSporky said:
Not using a game genie, it's beating the boss while wearing various costumes. You may have required a game genie to accomplish this I suppose. :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY4eoHPelf4
Click to expand...

There might actually be some Game Genie side effects that enable different text. It's so hard for me to say though, because this is something that I haven't messed with since I was a kid. But some Game Genie codes would change the sky to a blue or orange colour instead of black when Mario was falling to the ground with the wand, and the king's text would be different.

Though it probably was pulling text from the different suit costumes, like you said. Or maybe I was just using costumes via Game Genie, and I didn't know it.
 
Had all pokemon in pokemon blue and you get a little dialogue from the people at game freak in Cerulean and a little certificate. I thought it was pretty cool
 
aaaaaa said:
Metroid Fusion has a secret path (with dialog) that was clearly intentionally included, but is virtually impossible for human players to reach.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUmEoAoSzK0
Click to expand...
Actually, with the D-pad of the original GBA, I didn't find it too hard to manage. I welcome you to check out a playthrough/speedrun of Super ZeroMission ;-) Stuff like that is basics in that romhack.

http://www.metroid-database.com/reviews/mszm.php

I get what you mean though. It probably wasn't until people started investigating sequence breaks in Fusion that that message was found.
 
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