I just watched a video of a Celeste mod titled "Chapter 6 EX-Side", which turns the game into a (short) bullet hell dodging game, which makes me go, "what?". That is one mod I didn't expect to exist.

Similarly, I just recently watched someone play a Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles hack called "SNOLF 3", which replaces your usual movement with golf-like movement.

So, what do you think of this sort of mod, and are there any other mods you've seen (or better, played) that are so bizarre that it's surprising they even *exist*?

So many skyrim mods there, like the one changing dragons into Thomas the tank engine

One memorable mod from Oblivion. The one that add a motorcycle (ducati perhaps) into it and it actually works just like motorcycle in other games

Any others?

Hearts of Iron IV, a hardcore grand strategy wargame, has an alternate history mod replacing European WW2 with Equestria from My Little Pony series.

Skyrim has a mod which re-skins all dragons as WWF pro-wrestler Macho Man Randy Savage (complete with voice clips):
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/5518/

Baldur's Gate 2 has a mod which adds all the NPCs into a celebrity game show, "The Cloakwood Squares" (in the same style as the TV game show "Hollywood Squares"):
https://sorcerers.net/Games/BG2/index_mods_misc2.php
(Note: doesn't work on the Enhanced Editions)

I'll just say there are mods out there from Starbound that let you [REDACTED].

And leave it at that; while reminding viewers that Starbound is a sidescrolling Terraria like game.

There are mods that change the genre of Keen Galaxy games. Puzzle mostly, but I believe there's a shmup too.

Doom and Sonic Robo Blast 2 have their share of that too, like Hellshots Golf and that circuit ZDoom mod.

Doom has a lot of oddball plot mods like Mandrill Ass Project, and that one where you abort a fetus.

Joke quest for Zelda Classic can be quite weird, but someone made a Tim Allen special edition of one of their quest which replaces tiles with Tim Allen's face and dialog with Home Improvement quotes.

There's an online module for Neverwinter Nights that is just blowing up goblins with fiery death balls.

And who could forget the boombox weapon mod for Doom which plays Never Gonna Give You Up. Or the "liberal" "monster" that just tells you that you have to be tolerant of demons too. I mean their mothers never loved them, and the other demons used to pick on them in demon school.

Reminds me of this Wolfenstein 3d mod that's called Dialogue 3-d where, whenever you shoot an enemy, the game asks you a moral question about whether it's OK to do so (and the action doesn't stop in the meantime).

https://nasser.itch.io/dialogue-3-d

It's not zany like turning dragons into Randy Savage (now I'll periodically think of retconning dragons into WWF "kayfabe", and vice versa. Vampire the Masquerade, but with Hulkamania instead of vampirism...), but at the time I played Counterstrike 1.?6? I was surprised that Counterstrike jumpmaps existed, which turn the game into a very precise type of platforming (sometimes cooperative) game. Those maps stood out from the default types like "defusal" or "hostage rescue". There was also a "grappling hook" mod which player-hosted servers could enable to let you travel around the map like Spiderman.

They aren't necessarily what I think of as "mods", but GameGenie and GameShark for console games and "trainers" for PC games were another surprising discovery, which could unlock cheats and other content there weren't even normal "cheat codes" for. The Land Before Microtransactions.

I also remember Game Genie. I remember playing through Dragon Warrior 4 with a game genie code that gives the party infinite HP and MP, only to get softlocked during an unwinnable fight that you're meant to lose.

In that instance, I did realize that I could still game over by having Nara (Meena in modern translations) use the Silver Tarot cards, so I tried it; unfortunately, it killed her and spared Mara (Maya), so that didn't help.

More recently, I did make a Morrowind mod that made all the races non-playable; surprisingly, it's still possible to get past character creation (the character will be a Dark Elf). That surprised me because, in Arena, if there's nothing left for sale in a Mage's Guild, trying to shop more can crash the game.

Off topic to the thread but looking into it today I wasn't aware of Nintendo's 1990s lawsuits with Galoob at the time, as a kid "huehuehue coolgames, Genie goes WOOOOSH", etc. Nintendo tried to say in court that using Game Genie was "creating derivative works of their games," so Galoob wasn't allowed to sell them for a year.

"In December 1991, a hearing was held to determine how much of the $15 million bond would be awarded to Galoob to compensate for losses during the approximately one-year period they were prohibited from selling the Game Genie. The court found that, because Galoob's losses actually exceeded $15 million, Galoob was entitled to the entire amount, plus legal fees. Nintendo appealed this decision to the Ninth Circuit, but lost again."

I'm glad they lost that one. Now that the DMCA exists though, they can probably call such devices "tools for violating intellectual property restrictions" or something more lawyerly and nebulous to disregard customers' fair use and effectively remove the projects from any legitimate markets while draining their funds with court costs.

Until now I hadn't thought of Galoob or the assorted GameGenie-too's as a victory against this certain flavor of DRM and litigiousness, at least within those console-gens (from approximately NES to Xbox/PS2 era).