Snow Crash -
July 12, 2001 - Chris Jones
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed
within this column are those of the participants and the
moderator, and do not necessarily reflect those of the
GIA. There is coarse language and potentially offensive
material afoot.
Remember, it's not a bug, it's a feature.
Don't say we didn't warn you.
Scuttlebutt has it that Famitsu has given FFX a pretty impressive 39/40 score. Sounds good to me... I just wish Square'd hurry up and translate the damn thing a little faster. I mean, let's be honest: would you rather have gotten FFX before Japan did, or The Spirits Within?
Thought so.
Onward.
| More treasure than you could shake a stick at |
| My sister...my damned lucky sister. She got the bug to end all bugs when she
was playing FF3 (or FF6) a few years back. Even now I don't understand how it
happened. Picture this:
She went into the World of Ruin's Thamasa with Cyan in the lead, walked north
to just left of the town square, read something on her menu, then walked
left. But when she walked left, the screen didn't follow, and the game froze
with the music still playing.
Here's where it gets wierd.
She nervously reset the game to check her file, and see if anything had
disappeared. She instead discovered 14 of each of the best weapons in the
game, and (this part still blows my mind) FIFTY-FOUR ECOMONIZERS. And she
hadn't even gone to the Coliseum once.
So for little to no effort, and while retaining her Jewel Box, she was
trouncing every enemy she met with a team of characters whose spells cost one
mere MP.
Lucky, lucky......lucky.
SonicPanda
|
True confession time here:
I never got an Economizer in FF6. Never got a Jewel Box, and never even realized what Life 3 did until well after the game was released, although I did get all the characters without a strategy guide.
Still, I never did manage to construct some of these insanely powerful parties people keep talking about, so I can't get quite as envious when it comes to treasure troves of Economizers and the like. But that's still pretty damn cool... did she at least let you copy that save file?
| Up, up, and away! |
| Hey there, Chris. First time caller, long time listener.
My personal pick for the most amusing bug ever would probably be one of the
oh-so-many little imperfections marring the otherwise excellent Star Ocean
2. Picture the scene with me, if you will...
It's one of those boss battles you're not SUPPOSED to win...but you don't
know that. Spells from your party members are flying all over the place and
you're driving Claude like a stolen car trying to get him to do some damage
to the monster threatening your health. You hit the button for his Head
Splitter killer move, causing Claude to leap high into the air... ...
And just keep on going.
The rest of your party is dead on the ground, the boss is sitting and
reading a magazine, and the battle field is a postage stamp sized square in
the bottom of your screen, but Claude is still headed for the outer
atmosphere. I sat and left the game running for three hours before turning
it off, and he never...as far as I could tell...so much as started to drop.
Claude Kenni leaping into a flight...from which he will never return. You
have entered... the Bug Zone.
Gordy W
|
Standard bug in a lot of games, I think - the reentry condition never comes up because it's dependant on a set number of moves by other characters going by, but that can't happen because all your guys are dead, and the boss can't move until your side makes a move. I've seen it happen in homebrew RPGs before, but it always sucks when it happens at a boss battle. Bummer, dude.
| Double duty |
| Here's an obscure one for you. I found an interesting
bug in Ultima: Exodus on the NES. Exodus was a port of
Ultima III, and it was really, really bad. I could go
on a whole separate rant about that, but I'll get
straight to the point.
One of your menu options allowed you to attack
townsfolk, though there was never any reason to. Doing
so caused the town to empty itself of citizens, and
provoked a whole bunch of ultra-hard red armored
guards to appear out of nowhere and run you down. Just
for the heck of it, I attacked someone and let the
guards come for me. Really quick before they could
start a fight, i opened the menu and tried talking to
them. Y'know, maybe I could negotiate my way out of
the situation. Instead, I got dialogue from one of the
regular townsfolk. Apparently, the citizens themselves
transformed themselves into the red armored death
guards. I actually saved my butt by finding the guard
who moonlighted as innkeeper, saving my game in the
middle of town, and reseting; the townsfolk were all
back to normal when I restarted.
This is also how I crashed my first game. I tried this
trick in a shrine that had only one old man living
there. The red guards appeared as normal, I tried
starting a conversation, and the game froze.
Apparently, it tried loading the dialogue on someone
who didn't even exist. Go figure.
-Officer Jack
|
Ever wonder what NPCs do in their off hours? Well, now you know.
Not much more to say. Interesting, tho.
| Cecil just keeps going and going... |
| Heya Chris,
My favorite bug of recent memory is having Cecil's dead body incessantly
casting scan in FFIV. While playing through the final dungeon in FFC's
remake, I was messing around against a Tricker (the imps who scan
themselves), and had Rydia cast stop so Edge could try and steal.
After a few rounds of Rydia casting stop and Rosa casting charm, Cecil
began casting scan all by himself. He didn't use any MP, he didn't even
use up his turn, and no information came up despite the scan animation
(the targeting) having played. This started to get irritating, so I
killed Cecil... and his dead body kept casting scan anyway. The little
blue circles would just appear around his corpse. Meanwhile, the Tricker
didn't do anything.
I would've included screenshots or found out excatly why this happens, but
Square isn't paying me to bug test. I wonder if they paid anyone,
considering that trying to play either disc of FFC constantly prompts my
system to display "Please insert a PlayStation format disc." Maybe I got
the Dreamcast version by mistake *cough*.
-Ed M.
P.S. Does anyone out there know if you can steal Alerts from anything in
FFIV? My kingdom for a decent steal list...
|
Sounds like the Trickster's actions just got attributed to Cecil, rather than the Trickster by mistake. Meantime, it is odd that people are seeing so many bugs in FFC, because I took all five of my final characters all the way up to level 99 on the original cart (before I lost my save file... dammit!) and can't remember seeing any real serious bugs. And if anybody has such a list, send it on in, and I'll forward it to Ed.
| Rage against the Square |
| I actually returned my cart to Toys R Us after the Relm Sketch bug
in FF6. I thought only mine was defective. Oh! And I did write Square
about all the visual glitches in Secret of Mana, but they told me they
also were present in every game.
Danny, who has the largest collection of replies fromo Square to my
constant whining about their buggy games. :)
|
Everybody knows about the sketch bug (well, I didn't until '96 or so) but this is the first guy I've heard of who complained about it, although I'm surprised Toys R Us took it back. And aside form general slowdown, the only bug I ever saw in SoM was a quick fluke that let me get two weapons orbs after rescuing Santa Claus... would you have sent in a letter of complaint about that too?
| The singing mute |
| Greetings, Chris,
When I think of buggy games I can't help but think of the deplorable way they maligned an otherwise incredible title, Gensou Suikoden II.
First off we have the music for the big tactics-style battles that has a way of stopping part way through, or just never starting in the first place. That's always lovely.
Then there's the countless misspelling throughout the game, as well as the two or three townsfolk who say things like "!%;$
I think my "favorite" Suikoden II glitch is with the singer character. In the original Japanese title she actually sang songs for you. For some reason, despite the general Asian flavor of the Suikoden games, Konami decided to remove these songs, presumably to be replaced with something else. But instead of actually replacing them, they just cut them out. So when she joins you she just stands there for, like, a minute and a half doing nothing. Pathetic.
El Cactuar
|
Hell, I thought it was just minimalist theater, at the time....
| This creeped me out |
| I got my N64 at launch while I sub-letting a garden apartment in NYC. The only furniture the owner had was a king-size waterbed, a red velvet couch and an ENORMOUS projection tv. I thought playing Mario 64 on it was pretty neat, but the neighborhood cats were utterly infatuated. They would slink in through the window bars and sit in front of the tv, mesmerized by a 2.5 ft. tall Mario. They would sit there and watch as long as anyone was playing. As soon as you turned off the game, they would leave. (Ooooh, eerie...)
-big squirrel
|
Wasn't there an issue of Sandman about this? I dunno, yet another reason not to trust cats; I can understand them staring at a large, edible-looking rodent like Sonic, but a fat Italian-stereotype plumber? That's just wrong.
| Scotty! I need more power! |
| My friend and I used to play an old version of NHL Hockey on the Genesis incessantly. When you would receive a penalty, that would often result in a trip to the penalty box. But, rather than simply place the offending player in the box, it would pull you towards towards the box, while still allowing you to control the player. So, you could resist the seemingly inevitable punishment by simply skating in the other direction. The Tractor Beam of Justice was a little stronger that your player though, so it would eventually imprison you- unless you got some help. If you were playing with someone else, they could block for you, essentially giving you the power to resist the box's pull. I liked that... with a little help from your friends, you could truly be above the law. The best bugs are always somehow ironic or, as in this case, illuminating.
Josh Dammeier
|
If only real life worked like that... or something.
Hey, what do you want from me? These letters are interesting to read, but damned if I can think of much substantial to say about them.
| Bizarro Mario (but not Wario) |
| Dear Chris,
My bug story comes from my childhood, when I lived in an urban jungle and compensated for the lack of actual woodlands and pastures to explore by playing tons of Mario Brothers with my friends. Okay, so I lived in the suburbs and there were woods to explore, but I wasn't subsiding on Doritos and Lucky Charms just to burn off my hard-earned layer of fat running around the woods like some kind of hippie.
Anyway, one night me and a friend popped in Mario Brothers 2, and the opening screen looked more like a collage of level tiles and and bad guys than the actual opening screen. We decided to play through the game like that for the sake of challenge, and it was actually pretty amusing. The bad guys looked like either solid blocks or mobile level tiles, and determining if something was an actual platform or just a distorted background element was practically impossible. Unfortunately, the game never worked properly again, which wasn't nearly as funny, since I had to buy another one for the full price. Whether the game was broken for good as soon as we put it in or got messed up because we played it like that for hours, I'll never know. To this day I still have my bizarro Mario 2 in the attic somewhere.
Glad to have wasted your time with my pointless tail.
-Drew
|
Come to think of it, most of the early Mario games would have been made a lot more challenging by the addition of invisible or camouflaged enemies. Strange that the ROM could get corrupted like that... must be a short in the cart somewhere, or maybe it just got dirty. Still, I gotta wonder if that means it has added value as a collector's item, like those upside down airplane stamps.
| Final Fantasy means nothing, I tell you! Nothing! |
| Chris,
The worst bug as in worst/making me scream hoarse was
when Xenogears (played on Bleem!...man, Bleem! blows)
froze right after Disc 1. I was just getting to all
the major plot revelations (first play, remember) and
it froze. Subsequent replays also yielded freezing. Oh
balls. I ended up getting a PSX as a result.
Actually, the worst/zaniest bug was also from
Xenogears on Bleem! (which is a lot like Xenogears on
LSD). One time, when Bart screamed "Jerk!" in one of
the game's spontaneous bursts of voice-acting, the
sample would just keep repeating over and over, and
wouldn't stop. Nothing better than Babel Tower's
solemn music with "Jerk!" being screamed in the
background, I tell you. Especially in the Ramsus fight
there - "My mortal - Jerk - enemy! I must - Jerk -
destroy you at - Jerk - all costs! Jerk!".
As for yesterday's "I hope the movie burns in hell"
post, I honestly am surprised that someone still
thinks that "Final Fantasy" represented something.
Tell me, was Sakaguchi, during the making of the very
first FF game, mean for it to be the voice of a
disgruntled generation? The fact that people think
that Square had some sort of noble, "indie" ideal is
pretty sad...the entire purpose of making video games
is to make money. Thinking otherwise is sort of like
equating Mario with Kurt Cobain - you know, "martyr
for a cause," "voice of a generation," "spokesman for
youth," "uncompromising indie spirit in the face of
capitalism" and so on. Although Mario, having
sacrificed thousands of lives when I played SM
All-Stars and SM World years ago, may be even more fit
for that title than any rock star....
Sephiroth Katana
RPG Classics (http://www.rpgclassics.com)
|
I dunno... getting upset because the game doesn't fit some pre-existing idea of what the series should be seems odd to me too, but people get strangely attached to games. My memories of Final Fantasy are all about great plots, epic quests, cool graphics and long, intense dungeons (in the earlier games) but if someone else only plays for the swords, moogles and chocobos, who can really say that their playing for the wrong reason?
| Lost in space |
| Worst bug? I'll tell you the worst. In Final Fantasy IV, (or really, the
original American version, Final Fantasy II) if you walk through the doors of
the dwarf castle too many times you'll be warped to a town on the opposite
side of the world WITH NO AIRSHIP TO GET BACK. This essentially strands you
there, and ends your game. I'm not making this one up. After this one
happened to me, I was so distraught/angry that I actually called up one of
those Nintendo game counselors (do they still have those anymore?) and asked
him what to do. Our conversation went something like this:
Me: So what can I do to fix this?
Counselor: You should always keep a secondary back-up save, just in case
something like this happens.
Me: But what can I do now?
Counselor: Hmmm.... nothing much. You're screwed.
To make matters worse, as soon as I got off the phone I started cursing
furiously, and I was overheard by both my visiting younger cousins and my
parents, who promptly punished my by banning me from videogames for about two
weeks.
Evil Lights, who still wonders what sadist put that bug in the game
P.S. Here's an idea for a column..... Sakaguchi's always saying that every
Final Fantasy has a theme, but other than FF8, what are the games' themes?
Is there a list somewhere? Anyone know?
|
The one thing I don't get is that it'd only be a game-killer if you saved after you transported, and why would you do a dumbass thing like that? An odd, inexplicable glitch happens to your game, and you feel compelled to overwrite your last good record without a back up copy? I can understand that it's upsetting, but use a little common sense, ok?
Off the top of my head, FF7 was life, FF6 was love, FF5 was freedom, and FF4... dunno. Frankly, I think I'm enjoying the games more as they eschew a specific theme (or at least don't stick to it so closely) and just tell a story about people.
| I hate glitches that make me question my sense of reality... |
| Well, it's not exactly a bug, but in Zelda-Ocarina of Time, you can walk up polygon seams and get up higher than the programmers ever intended(there's a guide at gamefaqs.com by FuzzyLemur that tells you how to do this ). Once up there, you can see that the horizon in the distance is just a cardboard cut-out. Which is a really disturbing existential nightmare sort of thing.
Also, in Pilotwings64, I once got trapped underneath the polygons in the ground. I'm not sure how that happened, but it was very weird.
Glitches in 3D games are the creepiest, I think, because they make you wonder what would happen if there was a glitch in reality. And that's a scary concept.
-Sanagi |
Why did you have to tell me that? Now I'm gonna have nightmares the rest of the month about if those corn fields in the distance are really there, or are just painted on a distant wall somewhere...
Closing Comments:
Free topic day tomorrow. Need I say more?
-Chris Jones, once got the short fireball Mario in SMB1
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