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[Hempuli‽]

...And then you dive underwater just to realize that most of the iceberg is below the sea level! And that'd be it.

[Mr. LL]

...And then you dive underwater just to realize that most of the iceberg is below the sea level! And that'd be it.

OHSNAPS YOU KNOW MORE THEN YOU SHOULD 
Assassin time.

I don't normally use a walk-through unless I get really stuck, not normally for finding secrets :/

[Aquin]

Yeah, that'd be neat.  Most people walk right and stay on land.  So just make the rest of the iceberg accessible via an ocean dive on the left side of the map.  Most players will just walk through the surface on the right and finish the game.  They'll never realize the depth they missed.  :D

[Paint by Numbers]

And then the people who do go underwater will find the joke's on them when they realize the real meat of the game is in the caves within the iceberg.

[Aquin]

Yeah and those foolish cave-dwellers will never realize the iceberg sits on top of an underground volcano.  They'll never think to swim through all that lava to get to the final temple.

No hang on, I got off-topic somewhere. 

[Mr. LL]

Yeah, that'd be neat.  Most people walk right and stay on land.  So just make the rest of the iceberg accessible via an ocean dive on the left side of the map.  Most players will just walk through the surface on the right and finish the game.  They'll never realize the depth they missed.  :D

Hmm that's an idea. I could use that. But if I do or not, I won't tell. Anything past like the first screen would probably be a spoiler :D

The point of the game would be, you're GOING to have to play through multiple times to get everything. But there's different paths so yea.

[C.A. Sinner]

If you check the early episodes of Chrontendo, he runs into a lot of those kinds of games.  There was even an RPG shmup that was an icebergvania.  Weird early stuff.

Should I feel ashamed for never having heard of Chrontendo? 

Also what's that icebergvania RPG shmup? I demand links!

But anyway, there's something special about games that have lots of obscurely hidden stuff. It adds a certain "mystique", which I think is the main reason why La Mulana is so popular. Demon's Souls is a pretty good example of a recent mainstream (but still somewhat niche) game that does this. The levels seem perfectly linear at first glance but there's tons of forks, hidden pathways, etc, a lot of which lead to very useful items and in a few cases even optional miniboss fights and awesome shit like that.

[Aquin]

http://chrontendo.blogspot.com/

If you have any love for the famicom, I just destroyed your free time this week.

Zunou Senkan Galg is the name of the shmup you're looking for.  It's covered in episode #6.

[Seth]

If a writer of a prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. The writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

I sometimes think that the sense of there being more than you can find is more important than that stuff actually being in game.

[Aquin]

Well that clears up where the "iceberg" part of the name comes from.

Man, that's truly an awesome statement.  I think that might be why I can still play Mario 3 to death.  I always feel like there's one more thing to see, although after all these years I'm sure that's no longer true. 

[Hempuli‽]

The idea of 'icebergvania' is really inspiring; it gives me a lot of nice but too ambitious ideas. But yeah, best secrets are those that you find without any help!

[Melly]

With the internet games like this seem almost hopeless as far as maintaining their secrets for more than a month or so. There are people out there hopelessly addicted to games and to finding everything in games. These people will chew your game and spit out secrets.

I've been devising ways to fight them. Ways that require more than 'use every item in every inch possible'.

[Eric McQuiggan]

It's easy, make up a shit ton of lies and propagate those lies in all the regular game cheat channels. You could also make up a ton of secrets and have very difficult and obscure requirements to get them, like real world time of day and stuff like that.

[C.A. Sinner]

It's easy, make up a shit ton of lies and propagate those lies in all the regular game cheat channels. You could also make up a ton of secrets and have very difficult and obscure requirements to get them, like real world time of day and stuff like that.

I remember that from when Pokemon was still new and I was a wee naive little kid. I remember one "rumor" going that you could catch Mario as a Pokemon. Ah, fun times  :D

[Rumrusher]

Or, one could just stick a secret wall in a game that can be only open by solving the riddle on a Rouge-like site(some fake in game domain, or real), that would open up a long and tedious dating sim, where beating it leads to opening the wall. Which reveals a dusty room with tally marks which counts up to 100 but one is bloody and a slightly rotten corpse of someone you met not to long ago with a note saying "I been waiting for you.". picking up the note earns you both "the note" and "the forgotten son" which is the description reads " baby fetus painted in gold... that looks kinda like you".

Now I think of it if any game had that secret like that I would just quit the game right there due to the trouble of it all. Worst be it's the last 'item' to get then not only you get a anticlimactic 100% surprise but the halls of the area is dead no activity no will to explore just memories of the forgotten.

then you unlock mutliplayer.