10 Video Game Secrets Devs DIDN'T Want You To Find
5. Realistic Lightsaber Damage - Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast
Shift and tilde.
For gamers of a certain age, that magic combination will have provoked a wry smile of remembrance. Many an FPS in the 90's and early noughties used this basic command to bring up the developer's console, allowing gamers to cheat to their hearts' content. Invincibility, all weapons unlocked and level select were the basic bread and butter cheats, but Jedi Knight II took things in a decidedly more brutal direction.
Jedi Outcast garned a T for Teens rating on release, but anyone who entered "g_saberrealisticcombat" in the developer's console was treated to an experience that rated D for Dismemberment.
Simply put, this cheat code turned protagonist Kyle Katarn into a walking threshing machine. Storm troopers, dark Jedi and everything in between were swiftly divested of their limbs by Katarn's lightsaber, with each battle scene soon resembling the aftermath of Leatherface losing his temper in a mannequin factory. The carnage may be bloodless, but the mountain of bodyparts left strewn in Katarn's wake turned many a gamer into giggling converts to the darkside.
This level of carnage felt wildly out of place in Star Wars (which may be why the developers opted to hide it), but that just increased its grim allure. Especially when you combined it with a mod that added Jar-Jar Binks to the game...