Minecraft wiki entry for List_of_broken_features, associated text: When Ghasts were first added, they would expand slightly before shooting a fireball, similarly to a creeper about to explode. This created the effect of the ghast "charging" a fireball, rather than just opening its mouth and firing it. However, the effect was not properly networked from the server to the client, causing it to not work in multiplayer. As a result, when singleplayer was changed to use an internal server, the effect broke there too. The expand code was removed entirely in 1.8.