2337 replies to this topic

[Shane]

[Eddy]

Dat glitch tho, best of it's kind.

[KingPridenia]

I had something like that happen where I was using cheats with Ages and ended up getting to the screen you have the cutscene where all the Tokay steal your items. Link jumped up and despite me cheating to get the Mermaid Suit or whatever it's called early, I simply drowned to death. I always hated how you could get all of the secondary items (the ones like the different keys to enter dungeons, Maku Seed, etc), but could not use cheats to get items directly. Not to mention my extreme stupidity in thinking you had to stun a Wallmaster and use it to weigh down a switch in level 3 of Seasons, not realizing I could push pots for over a month. I'm not making that up. My stupidity as a 12 year old knew no bounds.

 

Another thing weird; why do a lot of older video games offer invincibility codes, yet you still die if the attack is strong enough to OHKO you? For instance, play Zelda 2 with the infinite life code and get to Gooma with Life at level 1. He will kill you instantly if you take damage from him (he does 7 bars of damage at that point). Yet I think in the original Zelda, the infinite life cheat kept you alive, even from attacks that would have finished Link off. Then again, a lot of "infinite life" cheats are BS anyway, since there is almost always a few ways to get around it.

[HavoX]

I had something like that happen where I was using cheats with Ages and ended up getting to the screen you have the cutscene where all the Tokay steal your items. Link jumped up and despite me cheating to get the Mermaid Suit or whatever it's called early, I simply drowned to death. I always hated how you could get all of the secondary items (the ones like the different keys to enter dungeons, Maku Seed, etc), but could not use cheats to get items directly. Not to mention my extreme stupidity in thinking you had to stun a Wallmaster and use it to weigh down a switch in level 3 of Seasons, not realizing I could push pots for over a month. I'm not making that up. My stupidity as a 12 year old knew no bounds.

 

Another thing weird; why do a lot of older video games offer invincibility codes, yet you still die if the attack is strong enough to OHKO you? For instance, play Zelda 2 with the infinite life code and get to Gooma with Life at level 1. He will kill you instantly if you take damage from him (he does 7 bars of damage at that point). Yet I think in the original Zelda, the infinite life cheat kept you alive, even from attacks that would have finished Link off. Then again, a lot of "infinite life" cheats are BS anyway, since there is almost always a few ways to get around it.

 

Kinda reminds me how in Doom/Doom II, God Mode does NOT protect the player from being telefragged.

 

I'm pretty sure this also happens in other FPSs; not sure though.

[KingPridenia]

Kinda reminds me how in Doom/Doom II, God Mode does NOT protect the player from being telefragged.

 

I'm pretty sure this also happens in other FPSs; not sure though.

 

Also, from what I read, God Mode doesn't protect you from attacks that do over 1000 HP worth of damage. If memory serves, telefragging does 10,000 damage, so it pretty much laughs at that. A lot of the awful WADs on a series called "Crappy Doom WADs" have enemies that do over 1000 damage in a single attack, completely bypassing God Mode. Also in Hexen: Beyond Heretic, God Mode doesn't save you from being killed by a stake that rises out of the ground or fall damage. Hexen is built with the Doom engine, so it's very similar.

[Saffith]

Another thing weird; why do a lot of older video games offer invincibility codes, yet you still die if the attack is strong enough to OHKO you?

If it's a built-in cheat code, the game just doesn't check for the cheat code in every place. I expect it's more common in older games because the systems were slower, so they didn't want to do a lot of unnecessary condition checks or subroutine calls. And if the codes were created for debugging, they probably only cared that they worked well enough for that, and maybe even wanted the player to be able to die in some cases.

A Game Genie code or such will only change the data in a single memory location, but there may be two or more needed for full invincibility. I don't know about AoL, but in LoZ, Link's health is stored as two separate numbers. One byte is how much of the current heart is remaining, and another half byte tracks how many full hearts remain after that. If Zelda II works the same way, it probably checks for full bars of damage separately from damage under a bar, and the code only affects the latter.

[KingPridenia]

When you say debugging Saffith, is that similar to how I would use the level 4 cheat in a custom ZC quest to make sure everything works properly, only I would leave in say a level 1 cheat for players to use if/when they find it? So you're basically saying that the cheats function like that because of how they're programmed? Another oddity I noticed about the original Zelda is that say I start the game with infinite life active, save state and disable the cheat, it still works until I enter a dungeon. Likewise for inside of dungeons; if I entered level 5 with infinite life on then turned it off inside, the game would still function as if I had it on.

 

I also found another thing, possibly related to GB/NES games being limited to 256 values for things. When I played the Gameboy remake of Dragon Warrior 1/2, I noticed if you use the 255 HP cheat and wear any armor that increases your HP as you walk (Magic and Loto's Armor), you will automatically die when you try to walk. I'm taking it that the game overflows your HP to 0, thus you "dying" for no reason. Another thing happened in the NES version of Dragon Warrior 3; I was cheating and using seeds to max out all of my stats. Once I went above 255, it reset down to a very low value. For instance, I think at 254 Strength, I used a Seed of Strength, gaining 3 Strength and I reset down to 1 Strength.

 

Were the limits with hexademical values why a lot of older games made limits on things 255 or 65,535? The character FF would be 255 and FFFF would be 65,535. Example given: in Dragon Warrior 1, the player cannot gain more than 65,535 points of experience or hold more than 65,535 gold. The highest any stat could be was 255, which was how high a Metal Slime's defense was. Likewise, in Lagoon, Nasir's maximum HP and MP hits exactly 255 when he's at level 35, and he has exactly 65,535 points of experience.

[Moonbread]

So hey, when I woke up this morning, Nintendo of America had actually tweeted this video, and it's pretty fantastic.  So fantastic, that Itoi himself said it was fantastic (in Mr. Saturn speech!):

 

 

Mostly posting this for those weirdo Mother lovers like Russ, Aevin, and whoever else (such as myself, of course).  Now I really need to finish up Earthbound.

[Russ]

Mostly posting this for those weirdo Mother lovers like Russ, Aevin, and whoever else (such as myself, of course).  Now I really need to finish up Earthbound.

This... this is quite possibly the best video game-themed animation I've ever seen. Everything about it is simply perfect. Thanks for sharing that.

[Aevin]

Wow ... that was lovely. It captures so many things about Earthbound ... the drama, the humor, the beauty, the friendship ...  I love it.

[Lejes]

That was good.

[HavoX]

Are you kidding? That was AWESOME.

[Eddy]

 

Deacon for best team player.

[Saffith]

When you say debugging Saffith, is that similar to how I would use the level 4 cheat in a custom ZC quest to make sure everything works properly, only I would leave in say a level 1 cheat for players to use if/when they find it?

More like just leaving level 4 enabled with a code you don't expect anyone to guess. Back in the 8-bit days, a lot of developers simply assumed no one would find whatever they left in. And even when debugging features are removed from a game, they're often just disabled and not fully removed (you can see lots of examples at TCRF).
 

I'm taking it that the game overflows your HP to 0, thus you "dying" for no reason.

Yep. 255+1=0 if you've only got one byte to store it in. Developers generally don't try to handle situations that are normally impossible (or are supposed to be), so there are countless errors like that when you change numbers around.
 

Were the limits with hexademical values why a lot of older games made limits on things 255 or 65,535?

Yes. Allowing bigger numbers would mean allocating more storage, as well as running more code to handle the math. On older systems, especially, memory and processing power were extremely limited, so games tended to use as little of each as they could manage.

[Aevin]

Having company over today, which means I have to make pulled pork ... potato salad ... a cake ... I have to clean up house a bit, too.

 

But the most stressful part of all of this will be maintaining the illusion that I'm a normal person and not some sort of emotional wreck. It's a real challenge.