I love knowing how games are lying to me, and this breakdown of graphical tricks in Half-Life and more is an incredible peek behind the curtain: "The underwater concrete is just literally wobbling"

Cover art for Half-Life: Blue Shift — (Image credit: Valve)

Games have been lying to us for years – and I love knowing how those wonderful lies work. Sleight-of-hand tricks have been the backbone of graphical innovations for years, and even the most cutting edge games have some clever shortcuts hiding behind the curtain. A thread full of these tricks has been making the rounds on social media, and it seems everything from Halo to Half-Life has incredible technical cheats laying just below the surface.

For Halo, it's simply blurry tires. As Weird West developer Joe Wintergreen explains in a Bluesky thread (highlighted by PC Gamer), Bungie didn't actually implement motion blur for the spinning wheels of the Warthog in the original Halo. Instead, the devs are simply "swapping out the warthog tire texture for a blurry one when they're spinning fast. Fake motion blurrrr." Responses to the post suggest that this kind of trick is actually pretty common in any game that has a car in it, but the technique's been invisible to me for decades.

half-life blue shift does a classic fake reflection where it's just the same room under a glass floor. lots of old games did this, but ue1 games didn't! deus ex had real reflections. cool
— @joewintergreen.com (@joewintergreen.com.bsky.social) 2026-02-10T20:33:16.407Z

Another fun trick comes from Half-Life. In the expansion pack Blue Shift, certain rooms have very floors, with the entire room appearing to reflect on the surface. But that's no real reflection. Instead, an exact copy of the room is simply sitting upside down under your feet, and the "floor" is actually just a transparent window pane. "A classic fake reflection," as Wintergreen calls it.

But my favorite example comes from a far less famous source: Zen Garden, a 2014 Unreal Engine 4 tech demo built for iOS. Here, there's a pool with what appears to be proper refraction featuring light shimmering through the water. But no, Wintergreen explains: "the underwater concrete is just literally wobbling."

meanwhile the Zen Garden ue4 mobile tech demo looks like the swimming pool has cool refraction shader stuff going on but it's actually offsetting the actual verts down there in the shader. the underwater concrete is just literally wobbling
— @joewintergreen.com (@joewintergreen.com.bsky.social) 2026-02-10T20:33:22.343Z

Some players treat these tricks as affronts to their highly developed gamer sensibilities – hello Starfield rain box – but really, this kind of thing is the stuff great art's always been made of. Heck, 2025 game of the year Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is still blowing the mind of more experienced game devs for its clever use of development "shortcuts."

Various Half-Life titles dominate our list of the best FPS games.

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.

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