If you like scaring off potential lovers by turning your bed into a sea full of stuffed animals, then have I got the list for you. Video game land is filled to the brim with critters ripe for shrinking down into huggable plushie form, so I’ve collected a list of the very best so you can remind your crush that you’re also a gamer /thank you very much/ as they slowly back out the door.

From Mud Crabs to Piranha Plants, here are the ten most unusual, yet massively desirable video game plushies you can buy right now.

This handsome beast has been “scientifically engineered for maximum huggability and affection.” He also talks.

Lovingly: take my money.

You can .

Just look at that round squishable face! Those beady little eyes! Those pathetic little wings! Who wouldn’t want this spherical yellow chubster taking up all the room in their bed? Your partner can sleep on the floor.

You can .

Not only is this friendly monster adorably fuzzy, he also acts as a handy storage device. His gaping maw opens up at a terrifying angle, gifting you with plenty of storage space for your beard clippings.

You can .

Those cold, dead eyes have seen a lot of unspeakable things. This Silent Hill series memento totally won’t murder you in your sleep…

You can .

BioWare really know how to make a good plush. They’ve got so many great additions that it’s was too difficult to narrow it down to just the Elcor, so here’s a cuddly Mud Crab that you can prop up on the shelf next to him.

You can .

Nintendo does an incredibly strong line in huggable things, but this toothy little bastard chomped the rest of the competition. Just don’t get your fingers too close to his mouth.

You can .

Always there for you in your darkest hour, the companion cube is a classic that will never let you down… unless you’re near an open flame.

You can .

The chick transforms into an egg. Nothing more needs to be said.

You can .

They missed a trick by not making this out of velcro, but at least you won’t have to worry about being rolled into a ball of miscellaneous household objects any time soon.

You can .

Ok, so the pig’s vacant stare freaks me out even more than meeting the gaze of an Enderman, but this colourful menagerie would be right at home in anyone’s collection.

You can .

Few things are as likely to annihilate your sense of immersion as a big cheesy accent showing up somewhere it isn't welcome. A shrill Californian squawk might serve in the GTA series, but in the grubby, Game of Thrones-alike fantasy genre - not so much... Immersion is a precious thing, difficult to build, yet all too easy to tear down. Thankfully, video games as a medium appear to be getting better and better at this sort of delicate world-building, creating believable, atmospheric environments brimming with vibrant characters and rich traditions.

One sure-fire method of raising any game's level of immersion is to create its very own language. Some are simple, swapping out a letter here or adding an alien slur there, while others boast fully functioning fictional dictionaries. This list takes a good long look at 12 of these fantastical tongues, from the silly to the downright strange. Enjoy.

Boasting more colourful language than an irate sailor, The Legend of Zelda series represents a veritable linguist's playground. That's because the franchise plays host to a good half-dozen different tongues, each of which pertains to a distinct era or species. Hylian represents the dominant lingo, having transitioned from a simple 'logographic' alphabet - wherein a symbol (or 'logo') stands for each word - into several further forms. The series' time-twisting hijinks make any concrete analysis of their relationship difficult, with subsequent entries only serving to deepen the confusion.

For example, both Ocarina and Majora's Mask employ what is known as the 'Old Hylian' lingo, while Wind Waker advances the timeline to include a more 'contemporary' take i.e. 'Modern Hylian'. It's said that native speakers of one cannot understand the other, though both are loosely based around the same real life alphabet - that being the Japanese 'katakana' or 'kana', a 'syllabic' form in which individual characters represent syllables, rather than letters, e.g. 'pa' rather than 'p' and 'a'. So far, so strange, though not nearly as odd as the decision to switch to a Latin basis for Twilight Princess, a game in which Hylian reads more like a fancy English font. Oh, and the characters who actually speak Hylian? None of their witterings can actually be translated. They may very well be speaking gibberish. Confusing, isn’t it?

Ever wanted to know your name in Hylian? Maybe you fancy writing a few foul-mouthed codes to your friends? Check out .

Dovahzul or 'Dragon-speak' is the unofficial name given to the language of the Dragons, comprising a 34-character alphabet, including both syllables and individual letters. As the foremost speakers of the tongue (select humanoids can also utter it), Dragons developed their alphabet through a series of runic markings, scratched directly into the rock with their claws. As such, most 'letters' appear to include some combination of scrapes and dots, the latter of which are formed by the thumb or 'dewclaw' of each beast.

In addition, certain combinations of these words are known to elicit powerful magical effects named 'shouts' or 'thu'ums',and are essentially the Dovahzul equivalent of a verbalized spell. Interestingly, Dovah lacks any proper punctuation, though being able to scream peeps off the side of a mountain is likely punctuation enough. If you'd like to know how to 'Thu'um, shake, shake, shake the room' or are simply planning on spicing up your next baby's birth certificate, check out this exhaustive beginner's guide, .

It seems as though Simlish has been around for an absolute age - so much so that you'd expect a good number of people to be speaking it for realsies, ala Klingon or Game of Thrones' Dothraki. Sadly for fans of fictional - and therefore largely useless - lexicons Simlish has never been properly transcribed. That's because it's essentially gibberish, made up on the fly by its suite of voice actors and with a minimum of input from the folks back at Maxis. Despite not operating on any kind of internal logic, certain phrases have been retained over time, though they're largely given meaning through context - i.e. an avatar's current predicament and/or frantic gesturing - rather than some legitimate basis in linguistics.

Interestingly, Simlish was originally going to involve Native American elements, though the studio eventually abandoned that plan in order to shoot for a greater sense of depth - after all, the game could only handle so many words - while constant repetition and simple translations might have ruined that aura. Yet despite its status as a nonsense tongue, fans of the series remain singularly committed to piecing together a working alphabet, using throwaway letters scattered throughout the series as reference. Sadly, all their efforts eventually came to naught when The Sims 4 introduced a whole new alphabet, one that remains riddled with inconsistencies. Curse you, language!

Compared to many of the entries on this list, not much is really known about Panzerese as a language. As the brainchild of one Yukio Futatsugi, project developer and ardent linguist, it contains trace elements of everything from Russian to classical Greek and even Latin, though oddly enough no apparent German (Panzer itself comes from the German word for 'armoured cart' or 'tank', while the game's sequel bares the German number 'Zwei').

For all of the series' popularity, it remains unclear whether Futatsugi developed an entire alphabet for his language, though given the man's fondness for Wings of Honneamise - an anime movie that utilises its own fictional lingo - some sort of basic consistency, perhaps in the form of scrapbook dictionary, is likely.

When developing a fresh new language to appear in your video game - particularly one that you intend to implement sans-subtitles - then it's important to remember to keep things simple. Maybe not captain of the football team simple, but simple nonetheless. Perhaps the fastest path to achieving this end is to employ what’s known as a 'substitution cipher' - a simple 'swap this for this' deal, usually with all of the vowels and consonants kept together, otherwise it all starts to sound like Klingons at an orgy.

Final Fantasy X's Al Bhed dialect is one of the better-known examples of this technique cropping up in gaming, with player character Tidus effectively learning the lingo as the game goes on. The odd thing about Al Bhed as a language - y'know aside from all of native speakers looking like Prodigy members - is that it's letters looks like an overly stylized Latin alphabet, which would be fine and all, if not for the fact that it's a substitution cipher. A ought to look like Y, L like an M etc. Fancy making a head start on this year's tax return, but don't want to give those mean-eyed bean counters an easy ride? Why not write it in Al Bhed?! Go ahead!

...

Where the gibberish of the Sims serves to add a spark of personality to an otherwise vacant cast of characters, the unnamed language of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons has to achieve a much larger feat. That is, to communicate a wide spectrum of emotions, from the highest highs to the lowest lows. And no, drowning one of your ungrateful Sims doesn't count.

The titular siblings embark on quite the adventure, one in which neither English nor relative silence would suffice. The eventual compromise is a gibberish text, inspired by game director Josef Fares' Lebanese heritage, so while the words themselves may be nonsensical, much of the pronunciation is rooted in authentic linguistic roots.

Developed by the awesomely named Wolf Wikeley - a linguistics expert based in Alberta, Canada, just a stone's throw away from BioWare HQ) - Tho Fan represents the language of choice for much of Jade Empire's powerful aristocracy. Originally envisaged as a mere servant's tongue, Wikeley's words were later repurposed, their courteous and deferential tone now standing for the effete mannerisms of the ruling class. Though designed to sound distinctly Far-Eastern - certain pronunciations reflect both Chinese and Japanese speech - Tho Fan remains largely separate from these real world tongues, establishing its unusual cadence through the atypical use of tenses.

Boasting an extensive 2,500 word vocabulary, Tho Fan represents one of the more fleshed out examples on this list, with Wikeley's good work later rewarded with the opportunity to design four more languages in Dragon Age: Origins. Sadly, it appears that no Tho Fan alphabet or translation guide has ever been released.

Technically speaking, Nier's Ancient Language doesn't really deserve a place on this list. That's because it's been borrowed (largely), from a little known language created way back in the 16th Century. Known as the 'Celestial' or 'Angelic' alphabet, this unusual lexis was put together by one Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. It's intended use: to communicate with the angels. Yes, that's right, angels. I guess old Heinrich really needed to get 'a grippa'… right… guys?

A mishmash of Hebrew and Greek influences, Celestial text appears throughout the world of Nier, oftentimes in conjunction with the use of magic. However, the tongue is never actually spoken, or at least not as it 'ought' to be. The game's soundtrack, for example, includes many alien languages, though none with any discernible linguistic logic. Simply speaking, they're all babble, put together at the request of the game's developer by vocalist Rebecca Evans. Here, .

Fancy formulating a few Nintendo-approved slurs? Maybe your current will and testament is a little too easy to alter? Whatever the case, be sure to check out this .

Pronounced 'dunny', this complex language belongs to a people of the same name, a race of powerful wordsmiths able to imagine new lands into being. They represent a distant cousin of humanity, and are capable of living upwards of 300 years each. Their language appears everywhere throughout the world of Myst, forming the foundation of many of the game's puzzles. The D'ni alphabet is composed of 35 phonetic sounds, each of which is represented by a unique fictional letter and box-shaped numeral.

Need to know your name in D'ni? Too bad it's a prickly little language, but you can still translate the odd word or two thanks to .

Designed by Team Ico member Kei Kuwabara, Yorda's language utilises 26 runic symbols, each with a corresponding letter in the Western Latin alphabet. Each symbol takes the form of a simplistic doodle, representing a creature, feature or action that starts with the same letter in English. For example, the symbol for 'A' bears the picture of an ant, while 'H' displays a stick figure in hiding. In the case of the letter 'I', the rule is bent in a phonetic direction, including as it does the picture of an eye.

Translating Yorda's tongue requires the player to marry each symbol to the corresponding English letter, before flipping that around to translate again into Japanese Romaji (a simpler, Latinized version of the Japanese alphabet). Simple, right?

Though the Covenant faction is made up of several different species, the Sangheilis' status as its warrior elite - mankind's word for the genus - has ensured that their language achieved dominant status. Those races that display difficulty in speaking the tongue are fitted with personal translation devices. The language appears to place proper nouns - representing the subject of a pronouncement - at the start of each sentence, so "How's it hanging Chief?" becomes "Chief, how's it hanging?" and so on. The Sangheili appear equally capable of transcribing their tongue in both Forerunner text and the more angular, Covenant scripts.

You remember the bits at the end of Police Squad where everyone would freeze frame except for one guy? That's exactly what the passenger in the back there must feel like in the HD port of Crazy Taxi. With all the conversion staff's names making the credits roll way longer, the old 'beckoning to the camera' shot stays on the screen way too long. A passenger hops in, then starts tapping Gina on the shoulder asking why they're not going anywhere. Eventually, she drives off. Into a wall.

Clearly, we were never supposed to see that bit. The original credits sequence was a finite length, so all the 'strings' were hidden behind the scenes. But it got me wondering: What else can we all see in games that we were never supposed to? This is my pick of the forbidden fruit...

Note: A previous version of this feature was posted in April, 2014 but has since been updated.

The developers of Skyrim made a secret room full of awesome. Sadly for console gamers, this room is only accessible in the PC version of the game. And that is a pity because it's got everything in it. All the weapons and enchanted versions of them. And all the armour too. In fact, one box in the room contains so many items, you need a massively high-spec PC just to open it. The list alone will crash lesser machines. That's some serious loot.

How to get it: You need to open up the 'console' prompt by pressing ~. Type in "coc qasmoke" (without the quote marks) and you're in! You're now stuck there forever unless you also use the console to teleport to a different location because there's no exit door. So type "coc rivertown", for example, and you'll arrive at Rivertown, over-encumbered with all your new loot. Yes I appreciate that was Oblivion's wording. I used to be an adventurer too, you know. Before I took... (*gunshot*)

Restricted-area demos of unfinished games are always goldmines for anyone seeking extra tidbits of information that hasn't officially been revealed. There was a trick in the original Saints Row demo that allowed you to use a car to get past the demo's boundary… and you know what? The Final Fantasy XV demo suffers from the exact same problem!

How to get it: Simply jump into the path of a car as it drives through the demo's perimeter barrier. Do it correctly, and you can get out of the intended area and into the (unfinished and incomplete) world beyond. And there, you'll be able to get up close to the dinosaurs you could previously only see in the distance, and even find a massive titan (pictured), among other things you weren't supposed to see just yet.

Apparently, there are several pies hidden throughout Dragon Age: Inquisition. Whether you're supposed to find them or not is debatable. The developers responsible have said they didn't expect anyone to find them quite so soon. Graham Kelly, environment artist at BioWare Edmonton, said on YouTube: "It is.... The Lord of the Pies. I may or may not have hidden some of his smaller flock around the rest of Skyhold."

How to get there: Sometimes the scenery doesn't load correctly in Skyhold, allowing you to step through a door and fall through the stonework, where you end up in a glitchy area underneath the castle. There, you can see the Lord of the Pies, biggest of all the hidden pies in the game. Yes, really. Look, it's wearing a top hat. It vanishes when you get too close. It's got its own music, too, which does suggest you're meant to find it… but there's no way to get there 'officially'. It isn't meant to be seen... although I think the team hoped it would be.

There are loads of extra areas dotted around Destiny. They're not supposed to be accessible, but if you know where to go and what to do, you can glitch through walls and into new areas. Many are simply empty, full of half-finished scenery. But some areas are actually functional. There are enemies, collectibles (dead ghosts you can actually revive) and even never-before-seen foes like this Ultra Captain.

How to get it: While it's a glitchy process, you can follow videos like if you want to get there for yourself, but keep in mind that tricking your way into non-official content runs the (small) risk of Bungie thinking you're a hacker and blocking your account. It's entirely likely this is actually content that was held back for release as part of a future DLC package, so you'll surely be able to play it 'properly' soon. Still, look at that Ultra Captain. Oooo.

This is brilliant. Gothic 2, like pretty much every RPG, gives the impression of a greater world beyond the boundaries of the game through its lore and conversational references. But then, should you manage to somehow get outside of the wall that surrounds the playable area, it's all revealed as being a sham by this single notice. By a 'mighty alien dwarf', which likely refers to a development team member of relatively minor physical stature.

How to get there: Follow the long river down from the old ruins and the stone dragon until it ends at a wall. This wall can be climbed (with practice and regular saving). Once you're over, there's not much to see or do, although there is a cave full of ostensibly dead NPCs. They're actually living NPCs who have travelled from the Valley of Mines to the Khorinis. During the transition, the game's programming 'kills' the first instance and sends it to the cave, before creating a new instance of the NPC that continues to live. You can loot the old versions' corpses. Waste not, want not.

A secret, looped version of the totally normal water level 2-2 is not very exciting. UNTIL you give it a name like 'World -1', which gives it such amazing mystique, it will go down in legend as one of the greatest secrets ever seen in a video game. Maybe that works for everything? Maybe I should call myself 'Minus Justin Towell'... There, my charisma and legendary stats have just skyrocketed. Incredible.

How to get it: Jump backwards through the wall (yes, it is possible) at the end of World 1-2 and enter the first pipe. Having circumvented the regular Warp Zone message, you are sent to the wrong level. Minus World, baby!

This strange area is full of what looks like a playschool's recreational apparatus. Coloured blocks with numbers on them, walls at various angles... it's all just part of the developers' creation process, allowing them to test out new moves for Sonic and set his jump height and acceleration instead of loading a whole level every time. Trouble is, they didn't take it out.

How to get it: There is a convoluted method of jumps too complex to list here, but the simplest way is to play the PS3/360 HD port and pick up a Chao Garden Key while playing as Eggman in his final stage. At the end of the level, you'll find yourself here. Simple!

Sonic isn't the only platform character to have a test level left in his game. Mario 64 and Mario Sunshine both have them too. This one is the second of two in the DS version of Mario 64, allowing you to test out your jumping, character hats and everything else. But all it does is make me realise how flaky DS' polygonal 3D is. Crikey, that's primitive. Hooray for 3DS, eh?

How to get it: On the PAL version, use an Action Replay to input this code, then hold Select while you load an existing save file:
94000130 fffb0000
02097360 00000000
d2000000 00000000

Pre-release versions and developer/journalist hearsay suggested there was another multiplayer level hidden away in Goldeneye on N64. It was then totally denied by Rare, but that didn't stop people trying to find it. Eventually, they did--and it only took six years! Well done, all concerned. But Oddjob is still banned. Shame the level is barely textured, hardly playable and essentially broken. See and hear it in 'action' .

How to get it: You'll need an Action Replay cartridge and the following code:
8005883E FFFF 8005883F FFFF 80058840 FFFF 800588A5 FFFF
800588A7 FFFF 800588AA FFFF 800588AC FFFF 800588AF FFFF
800588B1 FFFF 800588B4 FFFF 800588B6 FFFF 800588B9 FFFF
800588BB FFFF

Before you get all excited, this has long-since been patched out of GTA Online. But, for a time, gamers could revisit the snowy landscape of North Yankton in online multiplayer simply by tricking the game into keeping the area loaded from the prologue mission. It appeared in the sky in the south-east corner of the map, but was totally accessible with a helicopter.

How to get it: As I say, you can't get to it any more. Meh. But explains the sequence of trickery that was required, which is still well worth a look. If only to see (ahem) the world's biggest beaver.

A city filled with the wrong graphics, the wrong collision detection, glitchy (surprise) visual stability and floor that often isn't the floor, actually acting like water instead. Obviously it's completely broken and was never intended to be a place you could visit during normal play. But you can!

How to get it: The trick is to get out of the Safari zone while its step limiter is working. Get into the Safari zone, try to leave but then say you want to stay. Then save your game, reload it, exit the zone, tell the guy at the desk you don't want to play, then head to Cinnabar Island (or some others) and surf until your steps are up. Boom! Glitch City.

Maybe at this point, we should be more surprised to see 3D games that don't have a test room ostensibly hidden away yet easily activated with an Action Replay/Gameshark. But still, it's amazing to see familiar Kiddy Link running around colourful boxes like a kid who's gone on holiday but wants to spend the entire time climbing around in the play area. "Come on, Link, we're going to the beach! You love the beach! Oh fine, stay here then, ya little sod..."

How to get it: Fart on a donkey, whistle Saria's Song while staring into the center of a waning moon and then hold Z while the game loads. Nah, I'm just kidding. Get an Action Replay and input the code ZY1N-AGX5-MMCY0 94HP-XPKH-WQXF7 3Z3C-ZZVX-C21YN 1X90-8QQU-REZG3. Though that is just one test level. There are loads more .

OK, so it doesn't have any textures aside from the racers and it may be whiter than a polar bear who hasn't seen the sun all winter, but that is the Mario Circuit from Double Dash on Gamecube. It's just one of several unfinished tracks hidden away in Mario Kart DS' code. But you can actually drive on it, which is pretty awesome.

How to get it: You guessed it! Action Replay time. Use the code 023cdcd8 00000002 020484a0 d0002a00 020484a4 e0052321 and there it is.

I just *had* to end the article with this one, even though we've had an entry from Mario Kart already. There is no way anyone anywhere would see this by chance. Those numbers and letters up there are used as memory filler (all memory needs to hold data of some sort), but if you squint a bit, you can see that they act as ASCII art and show the Super Mario Bros sprite version of Mario.

How to get it: Um... you just have to look at the picture above. I'm not sure you needed this section on this slide, to be honest. But you're very welcome all the same.

Yeah, that weird white-eyed child is a deleted boss from Mother 3. The developers removed it probably because it shouldn't be viewed by anybody, ever. Having trouble sleeping? Looking at that thing will not help. Having trouble staying awake? Problem solved! Ye gads...

And if you're looking for more, check out .

You remember the bits at the end of Police Squad where everyone would freeze frame except for one guy? That's exactly what the passenger in the back there must feel like in the HD port of Crazy Taxi. With all the conversion staff's names making the credits roll way longer, the old 'beckoning to the camera' shot stays on the screen way too long. A passenger hops in, then starts tapping Gina on the shoulder asking why they're not going anywhere. Eventually, she drives off. Into a wall.

Clearly, we were never supposed to see that bit. The original credits sequence was a finite length, so all the 'strings' were hidden behind the scenes. But it got me wondering: What else can we all see in games that we were never supposed to? This is my pick of the forbidden fruit...

Note: A previous version of this feature was posted in April, 2014 but has since been updated.

The developers of Skyrim made a secret room full of awesome. Sadly for console gamers, this room is only accessible in the PC version of the game. And that is a pity because it's got everything in it. All the weapons and enchanted versions of them. And all the armour too. In fact, one box in the room contains so many items, you need a massively high-spec PC just to open it. The list alone will crash lesser machines. That's some serious loot.

How to get it: You need to open up the 'console' prompt by pressing ~. Type in "coc qasmoke" (without the quote marks) and you're in! You're now stuck there forever unless you also use the console to teleport to a different location because there's no exit door. So type "coc rivertown", for example, and you'll arrive at Rivertown, over-encumbered with all your new loot. Yes I appreciate that was Oblivion's wording. I used to be an adventurer too, you know. Before I took... (*gunshot*)

Restricted-area demos of unfinished games are always goldmines for anyone seeking extra tidbits of information that hasn't officially been revealed. There was a trick in the original Saints Row demo that allowed you to use a car to get past the demo's boundary… and you know what? The Final Fantasy XV demo suffers from the exact same problem!

How to get it: Simply jump into the path of a car as it drives through the demo's perimeter barrier. Do it correctly, and you can get out of the intended area and into the (unfinished and incomplete) world beyond. And there, you'll be able to get up close to the dinosaurs you could previously only see in the distance, and even find a massive titan (pictured), among other things you weren't supposed to see just yet.

Apparently, there are several pies hidden throughout Dragon Age: Inquisition. Whether you're supposed to find them or not is debatable. The developers responsible have said they didn't expect anyone to find them quite so soon. Graham Kelly, environment artist at BioWare Edmonton, said on YouTube: "It is.... The Lord of the Pies. I may or may not have hidden some of his smaller flock around the rest of Skyhold."

How to get there: Sometimes the scenery doesn't load correctly in Skyhold, allowing you to step through a door and fall through the stonework, where you end up in a glitchy area underneath the castle. There, you can see the Lord of the Pies, biggest of all the hidden pies in the game. Yes, really. Look, it's wearing a top hat. It vanishes when you get too close. It's got its own music, too, which does suggest you're meant to find it… but there's no way to get there 'officially'. It isn't meant to be seen... although I think the team hoped it would be.

There are loads of extra areas dotted around Destiny. They're not supposed to be accessible, but if you know where to go and what to do, you can glitch through walls and into new areas. Many are simply empty, full of half-finished scenery. But some areas are actually functional. There are enemies, collectibles (dead ghosts you can actually revive) and even never-before-seen foes like this Ultra Captain.

How to get it: While it's a glitchy process, you can follow videos like if you want to get there for yourself, but keep in mind that tricking your way into non-official content runs the (small) risk of Bungie thinking you're a hacker and blocking your account. It's entirely likely this is actually content that was held back for release as part of a future DLC package, so you'll surely be able to play it 'properly' soon. Still, look at that Ultra Captain. Oooo.

This is brilliant. Gothic 2, like pretty much every RPG, gives the impression of a greater world beyond the boundaries of the game through its lore and conversational references. But then, should you manage to somehow get outside of the wall that surrounds the playable area, it's all revealed as being a sham by this single notice. By a 'mighty alien dwarf', which likely refers to a development team member of relatively minor physical stature.

How to get there: Follow the long river down from the old ruins and the stone dragon until it ends at a wall. This wall can be climbed (with practice and regular saving). Once you're over, there's not much to see or do, although there is a cave full of ostensibly dead NPCs. They're actually living NPCs who have travelled from the Valley of Mines to the Khorinis. During the transition, the game's programming 'kills' the first instance and sends it to the cave, before creating a new instance of the NPC that continues to live. You can loot the old versions' corpses. Waste not, want not.

A secret, looped version of the totally normal water level 2-2 is not very exciting. UNTIL you give it a name like 'World -1', which gives it such amazing mystique, it will go down in legend as one of the greatest secrets ever seen in a video game. Maybe that works for everything? Maybe I should call myself 'Minus Justin Towell'... There, my charisma and legendary stats have just skyrocketed. Incredible.

How to get it: Jump backwards through the wall (yes, it is possible) at the end of World 1-2 and enter the first pipe. Having circumvented the regular Warp Zone message, you are sent to the wrong level. Minus World, baby!

This strange area is full of what looks like a playschool's recreational apparatus. Coloured blocks with numbers on them, walls at various angles... it's all just part of the developers' creation process, allowing them to test out new moves for Sonic and set his jump height and acceleration instead of loading a whole level every time. Trouble is, they didn't take it out.

How to get it: There is a convoluted method of jumps too complex to list here, but the simplest way is to play the PS3/360 HD port and pick up a Chao Garden Key while playing as Eggman in his final stage. At the end of the level, you'll find yourself here. Simple!

Sonic isn't the only platform character to have a test level left in his game. Mario 64 and Mario Sunshine both have them too. This one is the second of two in the DS version of Mario 64, allowing you to test out your jumping, character hats and everything else. But all it does is make me realise how flaky DS' polygonal 3D is. Crikey, that's primitive. Hooray for 3DS, eh?

How to get it: On the PAL version, use an Action Replay to input this code, then hold Select while you load an existing save file:
94000130 fffb0000
02097360 00000000
d2000000 00000000

Pre-release versions and developer/journalist hearsay suggested there was another multiplayer level hidden away in Goldeneye on N64. It was then totally denied by Rare, but that didn't stop people trying to find it. Eventually, they did--and it only took six years! Well done, all concerned. But Oddjob is still banned. Shame the level is barely textured, hardly playable and essentially broken. See and hear it in 'action' .

How to get it: You'll need an Action Replay cartridge and the following code:
8005883E FFFF 8005883F FFFF 80058840 FFFF 800588A5 FFFF
800588A7 FFFF 800588AA FFFF 800588AC FFFF 800588AF FFFF
800588B1 FFFF 800588B4 FFFF 800588B6 FFFF 800588B9 FFFF
800588BB FFFF

Before you get all excited, this has long-since been patched out of GTA Online. But, for a time, gamers could revisit the snowy landscape of North Yankton in online multiplayer simply by tricking the game into keeping the area loaded from the prologue mission. It appeared in the sky in the south-east corner of the map, but was totally accessible with a helicopter.

How to get it: As I say, you can't get to it any more. Meh. But explains the sequence of trickery that was required, which is still well worth a look. If only to see (ahem) the world's biggest beaver.

A city filled with the wrong graphics, the wrong collision detection, glitchy (surprise) visual stability and floor that often isn't the floor, actually acting like water instead. Obviously it's completely broken and was never intended to be a place you could visit during normal play. But you can!

How to get it: The trick is to get out of the Safari zone while its step limiter is working. Get into the Safari zone, try to leave but then say you want to stay. Then save your game, reload it, exit the zone, tell the guy at the desk you don't want to play, then head to Cinnabar Island (or some others) and surf until your steps are up. Boom! Glitch City.

Maybe at this point, we should be more surprised to see 3D games that don't have a test room ostensibly hidden away yet easily activated with an Action Replay/Gameshark. But still, it's amazing to see familiar Kiddy Link running around colourful boxes like a kid who's gone on holiday but wants to spend the entire time climbing around in the play area. "Come on, Link, we're going to the beach! You love the beach! Oh fine, stay here then, ya little sod..."

How to get it: Fart on a donkey, whistle Saria's Song while staring into the center of a waning moon and then hold Z while the game loads. Nah, I'm just kidding. Get an Action Replay and input the code ZY1N-AGX5-MMCY0 94HP-XPKH-WQXF7 3Z3C-ZZVX-C21YN 1X90-8QQU-REZG3. Though that is just one test level. There are loads more .

OK, so it doesn't have any textures aside from the racers and it may be whiter than a polar bear who hasn't seen the sun all winter, but that is the Mario Circuit from Double Dash on Gamecube. It's just one of several unfinished tracks hidden away in Mario Kart DS' code. But you can actually drive on it, which is pretty awesome.

How to get it: You guessed it! Action Replay time. Use the code 023cdcd8 00000002 020484a0 d0002a00 020484a4 e0052321 and there it is.

I just *had* to end the article with this one, even though we've had an entry from Mario Kart already. There is no way anyone anywhere would see this by chance. Those numbers and letters up there are used as memory filler (all memory needs to hold data of some sort), but if you squint a bit, you can see that they act as ASCII art and show the Super Mario Bros sprite version of Mario.

How to get it: Um... you just have to look at the picture above. I'm not sure you needed this section on this slide, to be honest. But you're very welcome all the same.

Yeah, that weird white-eyed child is a deleted boss from Mother 3. The developers removed it probably because it shouldn't be viewed by anybody, ever. Having trouble sleeping? Looking at that thing will not help. Having trouble staying awake? Problem solved! Ye gads...

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