Share your "Outsmarting the Video Game programmer" stories

Cafe Society
1

So, I was playing Atlantis Quest, a bejeweled-type puzzle game. There’s a series of missions where you need to collect pieces of an artifact. Once you have all the pieces, you move to the next stage of the game.

As part of the storyline, one of the last missions in a particular stage normally causes the nearly finished artifact to explode at the mission outset and the “setback” causes you to miss the discovery of Atlantis (basically so they can insert a few more stages into the game).

Well, I actually completed the extraordinarily difficult mission collecting the final pieces of the artifact through a combination of extra-ordinary luck and nimble skill.

… Expecting a warp or some other reward, I instead got the “setback” result just as if I didn’t finish the artifact. What a disappointment! :mad:

2

As a video game programmer, let me just say… BRING IT!!!
But I have a few of these myself, back from my days as a civilian.

(1) In the old PC game Battletech: The Crescent Hawk’s Inception, the game starts with you in a training mission in a powerful mech called a “Chameleon”. This teaches you controls and so forth. While you’re in the training arena, your happy base is suddenly attacked, and an overwhelmingly powerful force of bad mechs descends on you in your chameleon, blows it up, and you are left on foot, to begin the story/quest.

However, the first time I played the game, I saw the powerful force descending upon me, so I just turn and ran. Normally, you can’t escape from the training arena, but when the powerful force descended, they also blew the arena to smithereens, leaving big gaping holes in the walls. Now, those holes were supposed to be set up so that you couldn’t actually quite escape through them, but I didn’t know that, and I just randomly found a way out. So I started the game with a super-powerful mech that was supposed to be available only in training mode, instead of on foot.

(Later on, I came back and tried over and over and over again and finally actually beat the overwhelming force. But it was hard.)
(2) In Golden Axe 2, there’s a very nasty boss fight against a big grim reaper guy. When the fight starts, he has 4 fairly weak shambly straw golem flunkies, so you’re fighting him plus them. When you kill all 4 of them, he summons up 4 nasty skeleton flunkies. They are MUCH tougher. So I eventually learned to leave the last straw golem alive, thus killing him without ever having to face the skeletons.

(3) In Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts, you can rack up infinite score by replaying the final level over and over again without picking up the magic weapon, because only with the magic weapon can you go through the last door and fight the final boss.

3

I didn’t exactly outsmart the programmers, but I’m trying to figure out what I did…

In MGS2, AFAIK, you are required to meet Olga in Snake’s playable part of the game. Well, I played the game, but I never met Olga until she came in at Raiden’s part as the Ninja. I never saw the cutscene for Snake with Olga. I never would have known it was there if I hadn’t read about it in a video game magazine.

The only idea I have is that you are supposed to get a certain gun in the meeting of Olga. However, I was armed with a Gameshark (:P), and already had that gun. But I doubt it would have been programmed that if I already had the gun to skip the cutscene.

4

My favorite recent one is in Zork (yes, Zork). One of the treasures to be collected is a portrait of J. Pierpont Flathead, from the offices of the Bank of Zork. But if you just try to waltz out with it, the bank security systems activate and trap you in the vault, where you have to sacrifice a treasure to get out (and therefore can’t complete the game). I’m still not exactly sure how I’m supposed to collect the portrait, but I discovered that if I inflated the magic boat, put the portrait in it, and deflated the boat, the game (and hence the bank security systems) couldn’t see it, and let me out. Re-inflate the boat, and there the painting is in it. This trick also has more pedestrian uses, since the magic boat can contain a lot of stuff (more than you can carry), and its weight when deflated doesn’t depend on what’s in it. So all you ever actually have to carry with you is the deflated boat, the pump, a light source, and anything pointy you happen to need (which would puncture the boat).

There were also some great exploitable bugs in the classic artillery game, Scorched Earth. For instance, you could drive your tank through a mountain by moving a couple of pixels into the side of the mountain, moving your turret around to clear out some dirt, and moving a couple of pixels more. If you moved one space at a time left and then right, you could levitate straight into the air, and you could drive over the top of the mouse cursor as if it were solid ground (and even cross wide gaps, if you moved the cursor over after every 4 or 5 pixels of driving). Using the mountain-tunneling and levitation tricks together, you could make a pitfall under all of the other tanks, and then collapse the tunnels to kill everyone else without firing a single shot (not even of a “peaceful” weapon like dirt bombs).

In the spirit of the OP, I’ve bucked the intended storyline of games several times. For instance, at the end of one of the Terran missions in Starcraft, your base is overrun by overwhelming forces, and one of the heroes is lost. Well, I eventually managed to fortify my base sufficiently that I could actually withstand that final hoard, without losing a single unit or building. But of course, the hero is still lost.

5

I don’t spend a CENT on video games. :wink:

6

Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy
One of the levels you need to go up a floor. You can’t see it, but you can tell you need to get up there. The only forseeable way to do this is to go in the room with a ramp and up it. In doing so, you have to fight the most badass Sith Jedi I’ve ever seen. Well, after about 20 minutes of it, I was able to jump to the next level. I saved the game, went in the door I was supposed to come out of and whiped that Jedi’s butt. Apparently, he didn’t get triggered to come alive until you went in the room. Too bad I came up behind him and slaid him in one hit :smiley:

7

In the training mode in Deus Ex, they take away the weapons they give you every once in a while. I figured out how to keep them. When you get near the checkpoint, toss your weapons and proceed, and after the guard says he has to take your weapons just pick them back up.
I took them all the way to the stealth training and tried to shoot the guards, but I don’t think it worked. They were immune to my bullets.

8

In the Dawnsville mission of Call of Duty (Paratroopers defending the town from a German counterassault), you’re told to go to various places on the map by your commanding officer, the end result being that you run back and forth across the town square throughout the mission… Your arrival in each place triggers an event to happen (usually Germans showing up to try and kill you).

On one occasion, I decided to see what happened if I just went somewhere other than where I was told to go. I managed to trigger four or five scripted events in the mission at once (apparantly triggering an event also triggers all the previous events that you may have missed). The result? I got rushed by about 50 or 60 German soldiers and two tanks simultaneously.

I put up a good fight for about half a second before I was killed. :smiley:

9

I’m not sure if it was outsmarting the programmer exactly, because it didn’t work out for me too well, but I was still a little proud …

In Scratches, you solve a series of puzzles, many of which provide you with a clue for solving the another puzzle. Sometimes they are a little out of order – your clue might actually come into play two or three puzzles ahead, or you have to leapfrog back with your new information to complete the final stage of a previous puzzle.

So I got to one puzzle where you have to solve a code based on a child’s name which you do not know. Apparently there is another puzzle in the game that reveals the child’s name. However, I got to the code and figured the child’s name would be significant based on the plot of the game, so I did a quick survey of names that would “fit” the overall style and tone of the story, and sure enough, broke the code and solved the puzzle. Mr. Del was extremely impressed. I was extremely smug. “Really, these plots aren’t overly sophisticated, so it was quite obvious that the code was most likely choice for a sentimental story set in England about a dead child.”

Of course, as these things tend to go, because I hadn’t realized there was a name-revealing puzzle, and so never solved it, eventually I got to a point where I couldn’t progress in that darn game because it didn’t unlock in the right order. The game will give you clues if you are stuck on the most recent puzzle, but I had solved the puzzle so no clues were coming. It was maddening. Outsmarted myself, more likely. I am sad to report we finally resorted to a walk-though to find our “missing” clue. It’s not really a good clue if you don’t need it to solve the puzzle, is it?

10

I thought I was the only person in the universe who played that game AND stole the Chamelon from the training grounds…everyone I knew who played the game was really surprised so see me running around with that big badass.

Everquest, there were some areas where the zone lines didnt quite line up and if you knew what you were doing you could slip through and end up in impossible areas to get to. this lead to quite a few very surprised players when they would pop into a zone and I would attack them from behind the zone line. I dont know if that counts but it was funny as hell at the time.

11

Does taking advantage of bad AI count?

In some castle-building game (Stronghold, I think), enemy soldiers are programmed to rush breaches in your walls. I intentially left a hole and then built a very windy labyrinth leading up to it. Posted on top of the walls of the labyrinth were archers and crossbowmen. Between waves of attackers, I would fill the labyrinth with pitfalls and fields of pitch (waiting to be ignited by the archers on the walls). No army ever came close to penetrating that castle.

12

< raises hand > Well, here’s another. I got to where I did that every game.

13

In GTA: San Andreas and Vice City I used a helciopter for pretty much every mission where you had to pick someone up and take them somewhere, or use a getaway car. Some missions required you to use a specific car, but for those that didn’t, I always went and got a helicopter.

14

In “Brain Age” if you write something that is close enough to the right answer it will give you. Apparently quite often just a dot is close enough.

“1 + 2 = .” and then it give you three.

Actually this annoyed me so I always quit when I accidentally did that.

There was also the time I lost my manual back when you needed the manual to prove to the game you actually bought the game. This game asked you to identify various villains. It was quite the puzzle but I rather quickly solved it and was able to continue playing my game.

15

I’m sure it isn’t outsmarting so much as proper usage of features…

My bros, friends and myself (6 in total) have often been playing the same games. We all used to play the original Civ, all of us incompletely different and sometimes surprising ways (surprising given our public personas, like the ultra-pacific, rolls-over agricultural engineer who turns into a rabid bulldog whenever his hands touch a keyboard).

My accountant bro still hasn’t gotten over “my” economy-based technique (I’m an engineer). I’d just ram through to an opponent’s capital and then send my Diplomats of Doom to buy the rest up. Mucho faster and cheaper than anything else!

16

Huh? I’m pretty sure that the portrait is in Zork II, while the rubber raft is in Zork I. I’ll have to play Zork II again to see if there’s another boat in there. I know there’s a balloon in II.

17

Ditto. I loved that game.

I’d also cheat by investing and saving and reloading the game just before each tick of the “clock” that determined how your investments were doing. That’s not really outsmarting the game, though–it’s just cheating. :slight_smile:
Thief: the Dark Project was full of ways to “outsmart” the level designers…mostly because the gameplay was so open-ended.

For example, the Return to the Cathedral mission pretty much depending on you starting the mission, walking up to the Cathedral’s front door and walking in. Once inside, the mission become more linear than normal for a Thief mission and you’d wind up triggering a large series of events in order.

However…you could also wander around outside in the courtyard, where you could collect enough skulls, spinal chords and rocks to make a large enough pile for you to hop the outside wall, bypass the cathedral and enter the level from behind, which saved you a bit of annoyance.

18

In GTA San Andreas I did my stinking best to get the jetpack as early on as possible.
Then came a mission where I would normally have to drive a dirtbike up the side of a mountain, exchange fire with a lot of agents, after which the subject I should be chasing would get into a chopper and fly to the city.
You would then have to take the second chopper, follow him and finally base-jump from the building to catch the guy.

Instead of doing all that I went around the other side of the mountain with my trusty jetpack and just picked the guy off from a short distance.
They never saw me coming and I was long gone before they could do anything. :smiley:
I felt pretty damn smart after that one.

19

The “original” mainframe Zork was Zork I and Zork II combined; I played it that way back on a Vax years ago in college. It was split into Zork I and Zork II when it was released for home computers because the home computers of the time (the “PC” didn’t even exist yet!) couldn’t handle anything the size of the full game.

20

In No One Lives Forever 2, late in the game you have a final showdown against the Mime King. You’re in a room where the Mime King can travel through passeges under the floor you can’t get into, and pops up at random moments to throw things at you. Four of his fairly tough goons are also running around attacking you, and if you kill all four of them, four more spawn almost immediatly. You’ve got to shoot the Mime King quite a few times to kill him, avoid being killed by the infinitely respawning goons, and do all this in a fairly limited time as there’s a clock counting down while you do this. I figured out that the goons only respawn if all four of them are dead. If you use a gas grenade to put one to sleep and kill the other three, they don’t respawn. Then you can hunt the Mime King in peace, so long as you don’t accidentally wake the last sleeping goon.

Along similar lines, there’s a mission in City of Heroes which is regarded as one of the hardest and most annoying missions in the game: the infamous “Stop 30 Fir Bolg” mission. You’re in a large outdoor map, around which are scattered several dozen groups of pumpkin-headed Fir Bolg monsters. There’s a stone portal thingy, and every few minutes one of the groups of monsters will wake up and charge the portal. If 30 of them make it through the portal, the mission is lost and has to be started over from scratch. This continues until every monster on the map is dead or has made it through.

If you go around the map and defeat all the monsters before they’ve made their run at the portal, they just respawn in the same spot. The usual way to do this mission is to stake out a team at the portal and attack the monsters as they charge it. When charging the portal the monsters run quite fast and are nearly immune to any power that would hold, slow, or distract them, so this is quite a difficult mission to do.

My wife discovered that, while defeating a group of Fir Bolg that haven’t made their run yet will cause the entire group to respawn, if you leave a single Fir Bolg in each group alive the ones you’ve defeated don’t respawn. Then when that group wakes up and charges the portal, it’s only a single monster coming in, rather than a dozen or so. This makes the mission much easier. In fact, if done properly, it can make the mission impossible to lose - if fewer than 30 Fir Bolg are left on the map and no more are respawning, you don’t even need to bother attacking the groups of one that charge the portal.