Recently I had cause to fire up good old Bloodlines, which, if you recall, is a game about which some day I will write a review. And while technically said review is already written, it isn't blog-quality material and so it will have to be revised in light of that.

Anyway, to digress from my point, most games have an internal variable editor called, appropriately, a console. While normally said console is a spooky, tricky maze of non-sequitur commands and dark beige coloration, those who know the console commands can often have a lot of fun with the game. Thankfully, Valve, creators of Half-Life 2 and the Source engine, on which Bloodlines is built, realized the spooky-but-fun factor of the console and built theirs to be, say, user-friendly. It isn't exactly actually user-friendly, but it is a far cry from all previous consoles in that, when one types in a letter, a drop-down listing will open with every command which starts with that letter. As further letters are added, the listing is pared down to include only commands which begin with that string.

While I was playing with Half-Life 2's console, which allows the editing of various physical parameters of the world such as gravity, I discovered, among other commands, that which allows one to edit gravity! Naturally I increased the gravitational constant to be approximately that of a planet thirty times the size of the sun, and watched the fun commence. Sadly (also, awesomely), Gordon Freeman, the main character, failed to be immediately crushed to death. The only practical consequence that I found, while playing around in one early, enclosed area of the game with the gravity set this way was that I couldn't jump at all. Boo.

Then I stepped off of a piece of wood onto the ground approximately one inch below it (as in, the piece of wood was lying flat on the ground), and the falling damage I suffered, due to this one-inch drop and the massive gravity, killed me immediately. It was hilarious.

So I was playing around, a few days ago, with Bloodlines's console, which has the same drop-down listing of commands (seeing as it's the same engine as Half-Life 2). One command was titled, cleverly enough, "money". I, thinking, quite logically in my opinion, that this would impact either the amount of money my character had or the prices of the goods in the game, decided to test my hypothesis. The first value I set the "money" variable to was 1000. My money failed to change; the graphics were horribly altered. There was some kind of unholy graphical abomination as seen here:

However, that icon there in the middle of the bottom of the screen meant that I was near someone that I could talk to (in this case it was Heather, my character's sexy ghoul). Once I started the conversation, I realized just what the graphical anomaly was: Heather's breasts. And, technically, her hair. Thanks to the fact that not only does hair, in this game, often sway realistically with movement, but breasts often do too (and this is, not to submit hyperbole, the finest idea any human has ever devised regarding video games - a jiggle engine), there had to be a set of physical variables to describe, basically, breasts. "Money" just happened to be the variable which controlled the size of said breasts, and, in setting it to 1000 instead of 1, I increased proportionately the size of these jiggling breasts. This is definitely a man's variable.

Playing with it some more, I discovered that if set to 0, women simply fail to have breasts; if set to a negative number, they have concavities in their chests which, at great enough negative magnitudes, cause inverse breasts to come jutting out of their backs. It's kind of creepy. The last thing I did was to go out to Chinatown and set money, once again, to 1000. A hooker just happened to be in sight: