You may remember a post I wrote about a rather monotonous game called “Quest 64”. It is truly one of the most boring games in existence (even worse than “Chain of Memories”), but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its secrets. Like all secrets, this one took me a while to find out about. Nevertheless, there had always been a location of the game that just seemed strange to me. Because every time I played this game, I always wondered why the desert was so darn big. If you wander about Dindom Dries, you will reach a part of the desert that consists of nothing but an endless expanse of dunes, while the map fades away to nothing. Of course, I knew the desert couldn’t really go on forever, but there were times I’d try to see where I’d end up if I just started walking, and I never got anywhere. It would always just get to a point where, no matter how long you walked forward, you would never get any farther from what lay behind.
Then, one day, I found that there really was more to that seemingly endless desert than I had originally thought. There was, in fact, an abandoned town or some other such thing hidden out there amongst the dunes. The directions I found said to keep walking until you saw a diamond on the horizon, and if you keep heading towards it, you’ll eventually reach it. So the next time I was in that section of the game, I started walking and watching the horizon, not entirely sure what I was expected to see. I walked, and I walked, and then there it was, a diamond, floating mysteriously ahead of me. I was almost there. I started walking towards that diamond, like a parched traveler following a mirage, but this was no mirage.
Once I followed that diamond for long enough, I stumbled upon this ancient, pyramid-like structure, complete with palms and flowing water, not to mention lots of treasure chests and those bubbly spirit things. It was really quite cool finding this place, and it made me appreciate the game a bit more. Because, you see, “Quest 64” really is a bad game. But, not all games have secrets like this, and not all games give you secrets that actually reward you with useful items like this one did. Secrets are often fun and give you a sense of pride when you share them with others, but this one also served to make the rest of your (boring) quest just a little bit easier, and it was much appreciated. I commend any game that does this for their players, and it’s all the more surprising in a game that’s lacking in all other areas. But, in terms of secrets, “Quest 64” doesn’t disappoint.
And if you want to see this secret for yourself, I have provided a video below, thanks to my endless supply of kindness (sorry if it’s hard to see the floating diamond I was talking about in this video):
Video from Youtube User: Blaise Huskins
Dindom Ducks
Real Secrets are a rarity in games these days, and whole areas have always been rare as far as secrets go. They really feel special when found and by extension make their game that much more special.
My perfect example of such a secret is the first Insomniac Museum in Ratchet and Clank 2: Going Commando. I can’t remember if I stumbled upon it or unlocked it, but getting to wander those halls filled with goodies that didn’t make into the main game…that was just…special. :)
I loved the Insomniac Museums, too. They were the best secrets ever made. (And as someone once pointed out, you have to be an insomniac to reach it. Unless you just change the PS2’s clock, of course.) You could just spend so much time in them, and I don’t know why more companies don’t do that. It proves Insomniac loves us.
As bad as “Quest 64” is, I’ve always had a much higher opinion of it after that. Still a bad game, but not as bad as I first thought.
That’s pretty awesome!
It is. It is indeed.
Quite a find! I’m pretty terrible at finding secret places in games. I usually end up blindly stumbling across them, like those little, creepy spaces in the Portal games that contained scribbles and writing all over the walls. They were startling enough to make me forget where I was going at the moment and made feel like I had entered a horror game!
I remember finding those scribbles in Portal 2. I even found some when I went through this weird gap in the wall, and they freaked me out, too. They were pretty cool, because they were out of the way, but they were indeed strange….