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Gaming Glitches Add Character
jasoncart writes "Glitches in videogames are always a bad thing, right? Wrong, argues columnist Rob Wilson - citing developer oversights in titles like Halo, Pro Evolution Soccer, Vice City and Quake as adding welcome 'character' to our gameplaying experiences." From the article: "Then, in the distance, something astonishing happened. The car I was chasing sunk into the road as if it were careering off a cliff. The car vanished and a welcoming sight flashed up on the screen. 'Mission Passed - $1000'."
Glitches obviously can also be the ruination of a game, but they're not all bad.
In the old Mac game, Avara, you pilot your flat shaded mech around blasting things, and you could launch a tiny helicopter remote to give you a better view. If you time things right, you could jump on top of the remote and ride it into the heavens. Then in Myth: the Fallen Lords, there's the highly controversial practice of Carpet Bombing, or using lighting to hurl molotov cocktails across the map.
I /still/ diagonal run in every FPS I play. I have no idea if it helps or not, but Doom taught me that it was the "right" way to do it, so I always will.
By the way, is this not the fluffiest fluff piece we've ever seen? 3 examples of cheating and he's done?
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The game with the most "giving it charactor" glitches in my opinion was the gold cart version of Zelda 64. That had so many weird things you could do in it, the most famous of which is the Swordless Link trick. Just look up any of these circa 1998 geocities websites that have Zelda glitches, it was full of them.
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
I remember seeing a video of someone beating Super Mario 64 with (I think) 16 stars, when you normally need 70, due to a whole series of glitches. Going through doors you shouldn't be able to go into, reaching the top of the endless stairs. To think, I wasted all that time trying to get on top of that damn snowman...
This sig is only here so people stop skipping the last lines of my posts.
http://speeddemosarchive.com/
Bending the rules is pretty much the entire premise behind speed runs. They are very entertaining as well. The origional inspiration for the site was Quake done Quick, a full play-through of the origional Quake in 19:49, which culminated in a 12:23 run through Quake on Nightmare skill. (not that they aren't trying to improve on that time).
At the speed demos archive, you can watch Super Mario Brothers 3 completed in 11:11,Super Metroid in 36 minutes flat and The Legend of Zelda in 35:50. On the PC Game front there is Half-Life in 45:45, Fallout2 in 17:51 and Jedi Knight in 34:03. I find these very entertaining, and sometimes informative. Check out the Game List and see if any of your old favorites are there!
In a particular dungeon (dont remember the name) in Dark Age of Camelot there was a tiny area of the floor in the lowest level near several dangerous monsters. To escape the trains of critters triggered by our combat, we would run over this one triangle and fall through the planet and get tossed back out of the dungeon without dying. It was like a fast teleport. This wormhole saved us numerous times. Glitch saved our XP.
Those who've played it know of that which I speak of. Skiing was the result a bug in their physics engine that turned into such a popular feature, they've gone out of their way to put it into the sequels.
Too bad none of the sequels live up to the original.
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Exploits are bad. Being able to get glitches to work consistently in your favour is exploiting.
However, glitches can offer some of the best moments in a game. Whenever a big glitch happens, whether it results in Game Over or lets you skip a level, you remember it. They give you a story if it's the type of glitch that can't be recreated by others.
For example, on in GTA: San Andreas, we finished some tricky level with lots of shooting and just had to drive a safe truck with a bunch of drugs or money in it (I forget which) back to our territory. Well, this safe truck is unstable and someone starts shooting at us and we didn't want to lose. We tried to turn, but the truck rolled over and starting sliding on it's side.
But it didn't catch on fire, it just kept sliding across the road, frictionless, for about a minute, and then all of a sudden, it turned back upright and we drove it to the goal. It was hilarious at the time, and no one could stop laughing at this crazy truck disobeying physics while cops are swarming it and mission completion was on the line.
Also, once on NHLPA '93, I remember shooting a puck, and it landed on the crossbar at the top of the goal, and got stuck there and started spinning for about 15 seconds. The goalie kind of backs away from it, and then the puck drops and rolls into the net.
As long as they aren't consistant, glitches are good.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
I do remember one very frustrating glitch in Street Fighter 2. I grew up in the arcades and I remember playing at a Putt-Putt not far from my grandparents house. I was 12, playing against this guy on one of the big screen versions so everyone could watch the action without huddling around the regular monitor and he got me with that Guile handcuff-freeze thing. I never saw it again and never figured out what caused it until we finally got the internet and I was able to look up the move. It was a glitch and not a real move at all.
You could also do the following on the Street Fighter 2 machine during the demo to see how many credits where used for each character (see who was being played the most): "On the player 2 side press Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, MP, LP" which always got an "ohh" out of my friends since you could make the machine do something without actually putting money in.
Finally, when Mortal Kombat II came out, my love for glitches came out. Since Midway decided to release rom upgrades to the game you could always hunt down the specific version of the game you wanted. My favorite was the V2 (I think) that allowed you to do multiple babalities over and over. It sounded so sweet on those arcade speakers with explosions over and over. I would finish it off with a friendship on top of the babality. Super sweet.
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