Vice city has a cheat code that makes cars fly. Although it’s more like leapfrog because you need to accelerate in order for the game to push you up to fly.

So when I was a kid I used to get the tank and turn the gun around and shoot it and use it as a propeller for infinite flying.

I’ve always really loved mechanics that encourage players to manage risk, especially where it relates to HP systems.

One that I enjoyed, in Cosmic Star Heroine; when your characters’ HP reaches 0, they remain on their feet for their next turn. If their HP is healed to a positive number that turn, they can continue, but their healing is halved to make that difficult. On the other hand, while in negative HP, they can also perform an attack that deals double damage - after which they’ll be KO’d.

Fatal Frame has an item that will automatically revive and full-heal you one time when you would otherwise die. However, you can only hold one of these at a time. So, if you’re playing with heavy use of healing items, burning through all your film (ammo), you might find a second one, which will make you wish you’d leaned on the first one a bit more by not bothering to heal quite so often.

Another random example: You’re in a JRPG, and going against a boss enemy that has a brutal spell that reduces people’s HP by 3/4ths. However, they have pretty limited options for actually finishing you off. At some point, players will realize their advantage, and stop spending so much time healing people to full. A similar example is a boss in Final Fantasy X. It habitually casts Zombie on your party members, meaning healing spells will damage them, and revival spells will kill them. She then frequently casts “Revive-All” on your party. If everyone’s a zombie, that means you die in one turn. However, if you stop healing, and let party members die to basic attacks, she may accidentally bring them back to life for you - and no longer zombified.

Driftland: The Magic Revival is pretty unique with the tiny shattered islands you have to connect to be part of your empire.

It’s not unknown, but I think it’s an underrated mechanic: in God Hand, the better you do, the more the difficulty increases. If it gets too much and you want to lower it back down, you can grovel and beg enemies to go easier on you.

I wish more developers tied difficulty change to in-game actions like that.

Niche mechanics are my jam. My favorites usually revolve around unique economies or structures that create their own depth of play.

I love genre benders and sandboxy stuff. I’d like to see something like Chaos Seed (SNES) built on or re-imagined, dwarf fortress is great for tinker-ability, and I always liked how Nethack has some deeply designed interactions even if they can seem superficial or esoteric. FFXII with the gambit and realtime-ish combat systems was always a standout too.

I think every game in saints row series had the same “masshole” cheat. It’s fun.

I wish for another football game with the gameplay of 2K5 and I wish other games tried a system like Magicka 2.