Use This Site to Get a Deeper Look Into Your Favorite Video Game Cards
Part of what makes video games so damn fun is pure research. We gamers of the 90s remember how huge Ocarina of Time seemed in Hyrule Field for the first time, or how realistic Liberty City seemed in Grand Theft Auto III . While these games are still fun to explore today, modern technology makes that exploration a big step forward, allowing you to fly all over the map at your convenience.
Noclip , created by Jasper St. Pierre , looks modest at first. As soon as it loads, you are greeted with an almost completely blank screen, except for a list of 75 games in the upper left corner, grouped by system. The list draws heavily on Nintendo with games such as Mario Kart Wii , The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword , and Super Mario Galaxy , but there are plenty of other titles here as well, including Half-Life , Portal , and Dark Souls .
When you click on play, you see all the available levels and areas for you to choose from. Some games have tons of options; others, not so much. Compare the open world to the rest: some games have one big world to explore, while others have many different areas tied together.
Take for example a game like Skyward Sword . It has a huge number of areas to test. When you select one, like Skyloft, the site loads it into place. Depending on the game and the size of the area, it may take up to a minute to load. But once it does, you’ll find a true recreation of the selected level in crisp high definition.
There are no NPCs, enemies, items, and the like. These are empty areas, as if you just finished developing them in the game engine. You are here to explore these areas in a way that you could not on your N64, Wii, PS2 or whatever system you remember them from. Using the WASD keys on your keyboard and the cursor, you can fly around the area, looking at different parts of the map from above or below.
It’s below and beyond the main boundaries of the area where you’ll find the most intriguing views of your game. It’s amazing to see how these maps were built, what the developers hid under the surface or behind the walls (if anything), especially if these barriers lead to another area that you can explore later. It’s also interesting to see how they achieved certain effects with certain shaders and textures that you might not be able to notice otherwise.
Skyloft in particular is interesting because the main land itself isn’t very big, but the sky is big. You can take your time flying around the area, checking out the various islands as well as the three portals to the ground below. Head under the clouds and you can see how far these portals go and how far apart they are.
The sheer number of titles here, combined with endless research, makes this a site that you can spend a lot of time on. You can check out the entire map of Pokémon: HeartGold and SoulSilver at once, or compare the difference between the N64 and 3DS versions of Ocarina of Time . In short, it’s just really cool.