One neat aspect of video game level design is that it's possible to create game levels that break the laws of reality. Consider the endless staircase of Super Mario 64, for example. At the top of the castle there's a staircase that leads to the final showdown with Bowser, but attempt to run up those stairs before collecting the required number of stars and the stairs just don't end. Mario can run forever and ever up those stairs without ever reaching the top, as the stairs just go on and on. Stop and turn around, however, and see that Mario has only climbed a few steps and the floor is just a short hop away. Players are discussing their favorite mind-bending levels over at the rllmukforum, covering everything from the Atari 2600 title Adventure all the way up to last year's Psychonauts.
I just remembered a multiplayer map from Probe's Forsaken for the PlayStation. One part of the map is a large room, accessible from one tunnel on the floor, with a large sphere freely floating in the middle. The bewildering part is that the sphere has a hole in it which contains a junction and routes to the rest of the map. There's no teleporting or anything going on as far as I can tell, and to this day I can't figure out how they pulled it off.
In an age where games are prizing realism it's nice to take a step back and remember some intriguing level designs. I've always been partial to the repeating portions of World 4-4 and 8-4 in the original Super Mario Bros. and the way that the end of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask plays with a player's expectations in terms of location and space. After all, since we can't break these rules in reality, why shouldn't we break them in video games?
