Always surprised by how well effects like this work. Wouldn't expect the wind shader to look as good as it does, for instance. Games (especially older games...) are full of so many elegant hacks!

One that I think about a lot is how in order to animate a 'rain' effect, you can actually just spawn randomly positioned 'impacts' on the ground and randomly positioned raindrops that disappear 'behind' the ground. You would think you might need to resolve each raindrop's collision and animate an 'impact' at the right point but it turns out our brain is pretty good at being fooled.