Hahaha, so we can have a seasonal Sully?
(Copy/paste new VSP into old VSP) Hey look, a Sully Christmas!
...
...No, I haven't seen it suggested before. It's an interesting proposition, nevertheless.

Another thought - How about hidden dungeons that can only be accessed at a given time of year? Granted, you could cheat your way into them by changing your computers time, but not if you didn't know they were there.

I'm also enamoured of the idea of "hiding" things in the map (for example, information on how to access aforementioned hidden dungeons by say - writing a hidden message with two tiles that look the same. By using a different VSP though, one of the tiles would be changed and the message would appear.

though admittedly it would be FAR easier to do something like this with plain scripting.

In the spring you can see the treasure chest under the tree that was hidden by summer's leaves on the tree, autumn's leaves on the ground, and winter's snow?

Dear god, int22, if that's not an excuse for a Time Machine in the game, I don't know what is!

Optional content, yes. Optional content is good. But the whole idea behind an option is you're aware of it's existance.

The thing with dungeons available at a certain time is that you wouldn't even know they exist unless you discovered them by chance.

Taking Knights of the Old Rebulic (highly brilliant game, I recommend it to anyone and everyone. Even if you hate Star Wars. Trust me) as a prime example, there are plenty of things you have a choice in doing. The fun comes not in discovering you have a choice but in *making* the choice.

And a Time Machine game: I like it! Reminds me a little of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. Oh, and of course the supremely brilliant Chronotrigger, lest we forget. The most exciting aspect of those, though, is seeing the consequences of your actions play out and then being given the chance to alter them. Making the game world reflect the player's personality like that makes for a deeply personal experience.

KotoR is OK. Baldurs Gate and Planescape Torment leave it standing though.

Heck even Icewind Dale is better than most of the games that Bioware is churning out these days. They're not bad, but they've lost something. It's like they've gone "sod the epic adventures, we make the same amount if we produce something smaller with less content".

But I digress. Super Sekrit stuff is teh pwn. I still remember the first easter egg I accidently discovered: The christmas stuff in Rise Of The Triad. Damn, that was cool :)

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Heed your own advice: Animal Crossing has a calendar to inform you of seasonal events, thus satisfying my requirement for the player to know about them. And I have AC and HM:AWL. HM got staggeringly dull after a while, though. I still play Animal Crossing, though I spend most of the time on it drawing shirt patterns.

And on another note, I am a *huge* Bioware fan and I must say that Icewind Dale is bloody awful compared to a great deal of their other work. After playing that, KotOR was a delightful return to form for them.

Icewind was just so utterly lifeless compared to Baldur's Gate: the lack of personality in the player's party took away a major part of what they're good at: KotOR's partymembers are enormously entertaining and a joy to play with.

Well, of course, Harvest Moon has many time based events and days that the player must find on his own, and often the game will not tell you where or when they are; often by the time you discover it, unless you were using a strategy guide, it could be too late. So although it has an event calendar, it has many "non-planned" events it feels no need to tell the player about directly.

I would love to see this done, personally. Not many games take advantage of the fact that you can swap out tilesets and effectively have everything remapped with more pretties. Does anybody know of any VERGE games that take advantage of this even slightly?

With script, you could make every X number of tiles themed, and then programatically sweep the map and decrease or increase every tile's index by the appropriate amount.

You could do it in some sort of timed, sweeping fashion across the current viewport too, and everything would magically transform before your very eyes. That'd be a fun blog topic...

It's too bad there's not a FileRename() command! You could do the old switcharoo with the filenames of the current tileset and another one, then just reload the map. Oh the shens.