If we could turn back time
These days crusty gamers are constantly complaining that the industry is in a downward spiral, abandoning everything that once made gaming great. 99% of the time we think those people are being far too cynical, but not when it comes to unlockables. Todays hidden extras are nothing compared to the good old days of our youth.
7. Big head mode
When most developers made the switch from pixels to polygons in the mid-1990s, it was a boon for playing in three dimensions, and it also meant it was much easier to mess with a characters art assets. You could stretch the polygon to the point of absurdity, which is what happens with big head mode. The ridiculous extra-expanded skulls appeared in games as diverse as Tony Hawk, Madden, and Mortal Kombat, as well as most Rare-developed games like GoldenEye and Banjo-Kazooie. But as the 2000s rolled on, those giant craniums werent seen as often.
6. Always on fire
In the 90s, kids had crazy slang. Bad meant good, shake your booty meant to wiggle ones butt, and on fire meant doing well. In fact, when we were playing NBA Jam particularly well, the announcer would shout, Hes on fire!--and to prove it, the ball would actually get set ablaze. If players wanted to experience that for an entire game instead of a handful of baskets, the Always on Fire cheat was just the trick.
5. Paintball mode
We spend so much time in games shooting guns that firing ammo has become incredibly pedestrian, with the sounds of gunfire becoming white noise. As the audio gets increasingly boring, devs should dig up the Paintball mode that was seen in multiple late 90s shooters. The colorful power-up transformed GoldenEye and Perfect Darks weaponry into paintball guns, and every shot painted the environment in primary colors one dot at a time.
4. Mirror mode
Racing games emphasize realism more and more with each hyper polished, reflective chrome-embodied entry. That not only goes for accurate car controls, but also for emulating real world race tracks down to a stop sign or a blade of grass. For all this impressive realism, we miss the days of finishing all the courses in a racing game, then immediately playing them again, only backwards.
3. Pedestrian riots
Grand Theft Auto started a revolution in gaming due in large part to the appeal of its sandbox gameplay. Sure, the stories were well written, but having an entire city full of civilians to incinerate with no consequences was as much excitement as many needed from GTA. And if fighting average pedestrians ever lost its appeal, you could input a code that would make everyone in town go completely insane, attacking whoever was closest to them. At that point GTA just became about survival.
2. Bo Jackson
Bo Jackson was a god among men in the late 80s. He played baseball and football on major league levels, starred in Saturday morning cartoons, and, according to Nike, he seemingly knew everything. Meanwhile, in Tecmo Bowl, he was easily the best player football had ever seen, giving gamers a distinct advantage over the guy who didnt pick the Los Angeles team. He later became an unlockable in 2004s NFL Street 2, but that should just be the beginning for Bo.
1. Tofu
The Resident Evil games stumbled onto its greatest unlockable by testing the hit detection in Resident Evil 2. When the title finally shipped the devs included a mode that replaced the character models with boxy collections of soy. This not only made the main characters of RE2 and RE3 look like total goofs, but the soy made the game harder than ever. In Tofu Survivor mode, you were trapped as the health food and only had a knife to protect you while you searched for a helicopter.
