i love love loooove unused game content, and i've spent hours of my life just browsing through it on the fucking wiki ever,
which is a host to some of my favorite examples of cut content i'll talk about on this page, as well as heaths more of information that can be rendered addicting at times. it's the wiki effect, and i'm not immune to it.
in the gamecube version of animal crossing, the unused paper plane item is an enigma that starts off silly, but with disasterous consequences. it's corrupted in the inventory, and when dropped, will display a small paper airplane decal. once you enter and exit a building, however, the plane will multiply. it'll do it again. and again. and then your game crashes. and if you did this enough and then saved, you could get a ruined save file that crashes by the title screen.
you can throw the planes, but once they land, you'll be stuck in place, softlocking the game. what little fun you can have with such a game-breaker is instantly ruined.
another interesting unused item, or should i say, dummied out, is the DUMMY. you can actually obtain it through an oversight with the igloo minigame, which puts DUMMY in the prize pool. it looks like the little triangle fucker in the corner of this page, and the model is re-used for a lot of other unused items, including some trophies.
debug menus are pretty common in older games, but gold and silver had a particular menu that is held a little closer to me than the usual ones -- it allowed you to change and save pallete swaps for pokemon and trainer sprites, as well as tilesets for maps. it uses a simple hex slider for this, lets you alter both normal and shiny palletes, and also lets you check if a pokemon can learn a certain move...or a trainer. how useful.
firmware is not immune to unused content. the wii was originally going to be able to play dvds as well as game discs, and some assets this exist from this time on older wii models. it's like how microsoft wanted to only let blu-rays play instead of dvds, and it totally flopped for their console, but for the wii it didn't because it's the wii.
OTHER SHIT I LIKE
- you were supposed to be able to play as an octoling in splatoon 1, which wouldn't happen until splatoon 2's dlc campgain.
- the entire last two levels for the unreleased and dumped cheetahmen 2 were unacessible as result of a bug, unless you used another bug involving abusing the power button of your NES.
- a scrapped enemy with corrupted textures in super mario rpg: legend of the seven stars lines up exactly with some pre-release art of a fight with what could've been.
- hal rooms in the kirby series were originally meant to be unaccessible, but now are made to be found, albeit very hard to do so. they originated in kirby's adventure.
- there's a surprising amount of games with humorous or downright violent programmer comments.
