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aurahack

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30 Days of Gaming : Day 18

By aurahack 12 Comments

Shit! I missed a day. Or two. ... or 3. School's keeping me busy, 'kay? :( This and me being away from home at night has prevented me from updating as frequently as I should and for that, I apologize. Which reminds me, if any of you who sent me a PM are reading this and I haven't replied to anything to you've written me, I'm horribly sorry and I swear I will get back to you. Stuff just gets pushed back in the Inbox real quick and I end up forgetting about it. >< 
  
Now then, onto the good stuff! 
 

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Grand Theft Auto

 
So, the original category for today was "Favorite Protagonist", which I thought was a little silly because I distinctly remember answering that on, like, day 2 or something. With that in mind, I thought up a new category that could allow me to write about something I've been wanting to write about for a while now and that is the many hidden secrets of GTA.   
 
Let's go back in time a bit, back to the olden days of Grand Theft Auto III. Most obvious of them all was the "hidden" sign behind a wall on the second island of Liberty City.  
  
The Gateway Secret 
The Gateway Secret 
This was the first time I'd ever seen an easter egg in a game. My cousin had shown it to me when playing it in front of me and I lost my shit. I couldn't believe that a developer would put hidden messages in games like that and it started a fire in me that's yet to peter out. The dreaded Caravella-itis, where I need to find and collect EVERYTHING. Because of that sign and just how great it was when I saw it for the first time, I've since loved to find all the fun little secrets developers put in their work. And if there's one series that there's been more than it's share of secrets, it's GTA. Now, honestly, I could write up a delectably well-written blog entry about this stuff but it's 22h30, my girlfriend is in bed and I'm exhausted from being up so early. So instead, I'll run down a list of all of my favorite secrets, and even myths, that I've encountered in GTA. Maybe you'll know of them, maybe not. Either way, it'll be a fun trip down memory lane for one of us! 
  

  • Dick Building

 How convenient that all those guests would be there at that particular moment... every night.
 How convenient that all those guests would be there at that particular moment... every night.
Dude, I was, like, 14 when I played Vice City. This was hilarious back then. ... still kinda is, honestly. Lights on a building shaped like a penis is a relic of a time gone by, I tells you. 
 

  • Cement Shoed Victims


LOOK AT THOSE POLYGONAL FAT MAN NIPPLES 
LOOK AT THOSE POLYGONAL FAT MAN NIPPLES 
This was a pretty great one, since it was rumored to be completely false for a while. He was said to be located somewhere near where the biker bar was, but for as much as I tried finding him, I never did. Fucking impossible is what it was. That is, until the day that I actually found him. Oh, how did I ever flip. All that searching was finally validated. 
 
... and then I went back to just seeing how badly I could flip my car over off the steps near the hospital on the third island. 
  
 

  •  Bigfoot Myth

 
When GTA: San Andreas came out, I got pretty heavy into this one forum community that I honestly can't remember the name of. They were just dudes finding glitches and such and through there, I found the rumor of Bigfoot actually appearing in the game. What you needed to do was head to the woods on the second island when the weather was foggy and look through a sniper scope in the distant forest. He would, apparently, eventually appear. Hours spent just searching and searching, only to have it be debunked by Rockstar, saying that there was no such thing in the game. 
 
A bummer, but a testament to just how fucking insane that game was. That urban legends were appearing and spreading like wildfire... that's pretty special-- something no game has yet to replicate.
 
 

  •  Plane Crash

 
Another urban legend that quickly spread across the forums, although this one turned out to be true! In extremely rare cases, a Dodo plane would just fall out of the sky near the player and explode. Nothing else. I thought that was pretty silly until it happened one single time in the 150+ hours I dished into that game. Fun stuff, especially when you tell your friends about with no evidence to prove it or replicate it!  
 
 

  • Heaven

     
If you flew through the ceiling, there was a warp point in the black nether that would warp you to the outside skybox in which all the other buildings were located. 
If you flew through the ceiling, there was a warp point in the black nether that would warp you to the outside skybox in which all the other buildings were located. 

  This was probably GTA: San Andreas' biggest glitch/secret. Inside the first gym near Grove Street is a hole in the ceiling in which you can fly through using a jetpack. When doing so, you access an area of the sky that's above the actual ceiling when in the normal game world. See, what Rockstar did was create all of the building interiors and set them in a normally-inaccessible area of the sky. When a player would walk through the entry point in the game world, it would warp them to the appropriate building in the sky. Since everything was closed off, players wouldn't know they weren't actually in the middle of nowhere. There were no streets or anything up there, but every interior had a set location across the vast map. Restaurants, gyms, cutscene backgrounds... all of them were up there somewhere, but the biggest area of them all was...   
 
   
 That's right, Liberty City. There was one mission in the game that had you travel back there to kill some dude or something, but you returned back to SA as the mission ended. If you managed to get there, (Flying the jetpack for that long was tricky. If not done properly, you'd fall into a secondary skybox that was filled with water.) you could walk around in a small section of it too, which was neat. Hot coffee ain't got nothing on this secret, if you ask me. 


  • Jimmy Hoffa 


Probably the most widespread urban legend of them all is the Vice City-based location of Jimmy Hoffa's dead body. The game wasn't particularly the best with handling camera clipping, so driving a boat under the bridges in Vice City would cause the camera to clip through the supports and effectively let you see through them. It was told that if you did it on the northwestern most bridge (That connects Prawn Island and... whatever the fuck the second, bigger island was called), Jimmy Hoffa's body would be incased in the concrete inside it. Clever, but completely false-- on that bridge and every other in the game. 
 
 

  • Happy Easter! 

 
This is just depressing me. Why isn't there cool shit like this in games anymore? 
This is just depressing me. Why isn't there cool shit like this in games anymore? 
Oh, self-awareness. There was an accessible helipad on the second Vice City island that, if you jumped off at the right angle, would lead you to a hidden room with a nice, big chocolate easter egg.  
 
Now, there are many other secrets in the series, from easter eggs to funny signs, but all of them pale in comparison to the biggest one of them all.  
  

  • The Ghost Town 

This was fucking huge. The opening cinematic to GTA III (which details your main character robbing a bank and escaping) was in-engine and "recorded" in a little town set far off into the nether northwest of the third island. There were two ways of seeing it, one of which is the excruciatingly frustrating way of actually getting there. 
 
   
The Ghost Town doesn't actually have any solid ground (that I can remember, at least) and is the size of... about a single city block. There's nothing particularly special about it other than it being a floating part of the city that shouldn't really exist, yet is there for people to discover anyways. If you could manage to fly the Dodo, it was an incredibly satisfying reward that I'm glad Rockstar left in. 
 
Oh, and the second way of seeing it was climbing up the mountain on the third island and using a sniper rifle to peek through the mountain and zoom in on the city that would render-in when zoomed out to the max. 
 
... heh, childhood. 
 

Days of Gaming Recap!

Feb 13th, 2011 - Day 1: Your Very First Videogame
Feb 14th, 2011 - Day 2: Your Favorite Character 
Feb 15th, 2011 - Day 3: A Game That Is Underrated   
Feb 16th, 2011 - Day 4: Your Guilty-Pleasure Game     
Feb 17th, 2011 - Day 5: Game Character You Wish You Were  
Feb 18th, 2011 - Day 6: Most Annoying Character
Feb 19th, 2011 - Day 7: Favorite Game Couple    
Feb 20th, 2011 - Day 8: Best Soundtrack  
Feb 23rd, 2011 - Day 9: Saddest Game Scene  
Feb 26th, 2011 - Day 10: Best Gameplay (Part 1)  
March 11th, 2011 - Day 10: Best Gameplay (Part 2)    
March 12th, 2011 - Day 11: Gaming System of Choice    
March 13th, 2011 - Day 12: Game Everyone Should Play  
March 15th, 2011 - Day 13: Game You've Played Over Five Times   
March 16th, 2011 - Day 14: Current Gaming Wallpaper   
March 17th, 2011 - Day 15: Game You're Currently Playing     
March 19th, 2011 - Day 16: Best Cutscenes  
March 21st, 2011 - Day 17: Favorite Antagonist
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