We sittin' here talkin' 'bout practice...again.

 I've been out of practice with this blog. I'll be honest, I've had a ton to write about, but can't seem to get back into the rhythm of typing is all out. So this may just be a throwaway article, but who knows, maybe you can help make something of the idea behind it.

 Having just checked out a Smash Bros. Melee video via Kotaku and GameTrailers, I immediately wanted to stand up and applaud. For a couple of years, I've often wondered what secrets are still out there in our games that have yet to be discovered. Apparently, in 2008, someone figured out how to play as Master Hand through a glitch at the character select. That's seven years after the game was released, which is astonishing, especially when you consider just how fanatical fans of the game are.

 How many more secrets are out there? Sure, Aeris isn't coming back, but that's only because we've intentionally butchered that game in order to find a way and forced Squeenix to make sure that they gave us answers. That's one in a million cases where we can honestly say that something just isn't in the game without the use of outside help like a GameShark. For the rest, gamers are usually left in the dark about what is and isn't there.

 To be clear, I'm not talking about glitches, though the Smash Bros. glitch suggests that there is definitely gold in the results. No, I mean actual secrets that we just haven't discovered. If someone found a hidden revelation in the plot of Final Fantasy VI, there would be a HUGE response. What if there was a stage in the original Super Mario Bros. that no one ever found? What if there was a hidden room in Super Metroid, and someone turns up tomorrow and shows the world how to find it? What if someone managed to sneak Mega Man into Super Street Fighter II?

 These are all quite specific, and largely implausible, but you see where I'm going with this. All of those examples can be disproved by means of ROM utilities, and the bigger the game, the more you can bet that several people have wasted nights upon nights digging through the sprites, texts, and maps of each game. Trust me, it happens all the time. Some genius took the time to discover an empty room in Final Fantasy VII that was never seen in the game. The problem was that the room couldn't be accessed within the game, and nothing was ever scripted to happen there. It was just a floating room within the code that never got used. People do search for this stuff, and people have ever offered cash rewards for it as well, which is another topic I've previously mentioned.

 The unfortunate part is that because of these methods, we sort of already know what isn't in games that we really want. We kind of eliminated that on our own through technology. If we can break into a game, we will. There will be no extra, undiscovered scene from Persona 3 because someone's already dug through the entire audio and text of the game just because.

 But what if? What if a game we've loved for years had one last thing it was hiding from the whole world? Wouldn't that be something? I'd love to see it happen, even if the odds are very slim. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit