Enjoyed the front page link to a story on "weird game moments," but the selection given was all too brief! Can anyone else come up with some more good n' weirdies?

My contribution: the arcade game "Brute Force," wherein one of your urgent undercover police missions involves protecting a fragile glass popcorn/consession stand in a movie theater from attacks by roaming skinheads with baseball bats and mohawked thugs with machine guns.

Here's a screenshot of this crucial battle:

http://www2.webmagic.com/klov.com/screens/B/xBrute_Force.png

Telengard.

"You encounter a Level 128 Elf Lord."

"The Elf Lord likes your body. He gives you 50 hit points."

"Bad Day At The Midway" by The Residents. The whole dang freakshow was just plain wrong. In a good way.

Telengard! I remember that game! Hah.. we're old.

The entire Synapse 8-bit game "NYC: The Big Apple" was pretty dang weird, but especially the part where you're running around an automat, trying to beat some asshole on crack to the food that keeps popping out of the vending machines.

Another 8-bit masterpiece of weird: "Prisoner 2," adapted from the British television series. In there you had wonderful weird moments like losing control of the keyboard so that each key you press (no matter which ones) started typing out the word you were not supposed to say under any circumstances lest you lose the game.

Oh, man - I'd forgotten about The Prisoner. Weird, weird game. Trying to figure out what you were supposed to figure out as you wandered from one odd location on the island to the other. Like you said, keys suddenly doing something completely different from what you were trying to type. Completely off the wall.

Prince of Persia - the potion that turns your screen upside-down. Not so much non-sequitur as just plain disorienting. My non-sequitur contribution is the sequence in the original Monkey Island game where you're attempting to abscond with the Idol of Many Hands. Use stylish confetti on heavily-armed clown?

- Alan

Since there's an 8-bit thang goin' on, how 'bout the semi-game "Abuse," which was made for the Atari 800 by the same guys who did the S.A.M. speech synthesizer. "Abuse" was a text "game" wherein you and the computer try to cut each other down with insults. You were allowed to type anything you wanted, and if you could find insults that the computer couldn't reverse on you ju-jitsu-style with even more cutting insults, you'd earn "points," if I remember correctly, but there was no real ending that I know of. The game had hundreds of retorts based on various keywords and insult phrases that the user might type in, with multiple random responses possible to various popular insults in order to stave off boredom.

The really cool and (to keep this on-topic) weird moments occured when the program would pretend to have a fatal error, throwing you into BASIC, where you could type any of the various BASIC commands. However, after awhile, the game would suddenly kick back in and insult you worse than ever based on what you had been doing in this faux-BASIC, revealing that you were never actually outside the program.

A simple example: if you typed "LIST," the computer might suddenly reply:

"1) You have no friends."
"2) Your personal hygiene sucks."
"3) Your IQ is lower than a monkey's."

"No wonder you're sitting here playing this stupid game, rather than getting laid."

This hoax went as far as allowing you to access an identical copy of Atari DOS, wherein it would really let you have it if you attempted to copy or delete the game disk.

Fun shit -- for a sub-teen computer nerd such as I was at the time.

The great thing about Telengard was that it was written in BASIC, as were the other early Epyx C64 games like Apshai. So you could strategically modify various game features and game text before giving it to that buddy who begged for a copy.

Yeah, sure, the guy down the hall in the dorm got a pirated copy. But the monsters had a LOT of hit points and seemed to know embarassing dorm stories about him. :)

Since there seem to be a lot of 8-bit gaming experts in here at the moment, there was a weird game that I loved for the Atari 800 (may have also been available for Commodore 64) that I've been trying to identify for some time, but I've forgotten the name.

Basically, it was in a Transylvanian setting at night (represented by black screens with white features, kinda like "Castle Wolfenstein"), where you control a little dude (similar in size and appearance to the guy in "Lode Runner") with a joystick from the top down as he roams the grounds, inside and out, of a haunted mansion looking for the tools and/or artifacts he needs to slay the vampire (and keep at bay the other evil creatures around). The feature I remember loving about it was that the game was sometimes very quiet and uneventful as you searched the various screens which represented a nearby graveyard and the castle itself, but then these creepy messages would start to appear in a little strip along the bottom of the screen, things like "He's coming for you..." "He's almost here," and finally something like "Prepare to die!" (If I'm remembering correctly.) I think there was some sort of time limit before Dracula came out of his coffin and started hunting you down. Then these messages would start appearing, and finally the vampire would show up on screen running straight for you full tilt, and the game would turn into a chase across multiple screens/areas as you try to find weapons to defend yourself from the onrushing vampire. I think there was also a romantic interest to save from the vampire, but I ain't sure.

I may have certain details on this wrong. For some reason I always thought of this as an Epyx title, but I can never find it in listings of those. Anyone have any idea what this game was?

Xonox published a game called Ghost Manor that is pretty close to what you described, but I only played it on the Atari 2600. If I remember correctly you could change the gender of your character by flipping one of the switches on the Atari.

Thanks for the tip, Tracy. I went and looked up descriptions of the game and it sounded right on the money; then I tried it with an emulator and it's very different, unfortunately. The game I played was darker in tone, and instead of playing on one set screen at a time, as in "Ghost Manor," you could roam from screen to screen, each screen being part of a large top-down map of the area.

So close, yet so far!

"Prisoner 2"

There was another part where you played hangman, and if you lost, the game would try to format the disk.

We got that Xonox cartridge when I was a kid. "Spike's Peak" was on the other side. For some reason, something about that cartridge really creeped me out. I thought it was possessed or something. I think I made my mom bring it back.

Okay, here are three weird game moments from some more recent games:

In System Shock (1)-- there was a room that looked more or less like a theatre. No seats, but an audience area and a stage area. The audience area was full of mines. It was some sort of trap that had you fall down a slide right into the middle of these mines, but if you did it right, you could avoid the slide, go down some stairs, and wind up in the same place. I think you were supposed to toss a grenade to detonate the mines, but I didn't have any grenades. The switch you had to pull was onstage.

So I ran and jumped onstage without detonating any mines.

And Shodan popped up and said, "Nice jump."

It scared the bejeesus out of me, and really made me feel like Shodan was watching my every move. I reloaded and tried it a couple more times, but either I didn't make it or Shodan just wouldn't say it. I don't know.

Or in SMAC, after a loooo-ooong night of SMACing, I'm quitting and it tells me not to go, the Drones miss me, they need me. I was bleary-eyed to begin with, and here the game was talking to me like it knew how late it was and how tired I was, but it was calling me back.

Basically anytime the game seems aware of me really gives me the creeps.

Speaking of creepy moments, here's one of mine that may sound stupid, but it really happened.

When I first bought Unreal Tournament, I was new to online multiplayer gaming. I got into it pretty quickly, though, and ended up playing pretty late into the night against a group of assorted guys who would occasionallly taunt me, and I would taunt back.

What freaked me out was when I realized in the wee morning hours that everyone else had already left the game, and I had been playing against bots that had actually tricked me into thinking that I was taunting and being taunted by real opponents. I was in a virtual room alone by myself, and had for an hour or so thought I was actually sharing an experience with real people. It was kinda a spooky moment, late at night alone at my computer. Of course that sort of experience can only happen to a newbie... I hope.

That's hilarious!! Yeah, UT is good about having pretty good taunting. And they do have pre-set taunts that the AI will use, so...I guess you could easily not know if the AI was taunting you, or real people using the pre-set taunts.

That's really funny, though!!