Revisiting Revelations

When you play a game after a period of time goes by, you might notice something you hadn't before. Here's a partial list of events like that that I can actually remember.

List items

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  1. Doom

  When you pick up a limited use item, you will often see a simple, on-screen indicator that the item is currently active, which will go away when it expires. With the partial invisibility globe, you can see your weapon flash between invisibility and visibility before you lose it, and the chem suit and invincibility each add screen coloration which flashes when it's expiring. I assumed the Berserker Pack obeyed the same rules. It wasn't until subsequent playthroughs that I found out that the Berserker Pack breaks from that behavior. I remember playing episode 2 and noticing that the red tint from picking it up sort of just disappeared after a while, rather than flashing. Upon testing my punch elsewhere, it was a revelation, at least to me, that the berserker pack remains active until you exit the level, rather than having an expiration limit.

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  2. The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall

  It wasn't until much later that I even knew witch covens were in the game, and there are weird spells and quests that surprise me even now, despite how limited they are in any specific venue, but what I'm writing about may not be interesting to everyone, but was a bit mind blowing to me. Many pieces of clothing in Daggerfall can be changed to look different. "Use" a piece of clothing, whether or not a character is wearing it, to see if it's one of those pieces that have an alternate view. Hooded capes, for example, can be clicked to take the hood off, or to brush the cape back over the arms (one shoulder or two). While the vanity stuff may not matter to some people, I like to try to make the character look a bit less like a train wreck, so I'm really happy about this. That's an advantage sprites have over polygons: you can easily have a few frames depict wildly different things without worrying about graphics cards. Of course, they usually have to be facing in the same direction :)