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21

Halo, the original. There’s a level called “Assault on the Control Room”. At one point, you have to cross an outdoor area on an ice bridge. From the bridge, you can see the entrance to the control room at the top of this big pyramid in the distance.

Now, apparently you’re supposed to run across this bridge, killing enemies all the while, and make it to the door on the other side. Then, you make your way through various tunnels to the bottom of the area, fight across the open plain to the base of the pyramid, and battle to the top.

But that’s the long way. Me, I would rush onto the bridge, shoot the Elite who was preparing to get into his Banshee (an alien flying machine), swipe the Banshee, and fly directly to the top of the pyramid, skipping dozens of fights and saving probably half an hour of combat. It was months before I realized there was another way to do things.

22

I always thought that the Original Zork was I, II, and III. And that it was called Adventure. However, I’ve never really played on a mainframe.

My dad used to install and set up computers, back when the programs were long strips of paper tape. I’m not talking punch cards, here, I’m talking about PAPER tape with holes punched in it. He’s always amazed at the amount of memory we play with now.

Right now, I have Fallout and Fallout 2 fully installed on my main computer, which means that I don’t even have to have the disk in the drive to play those games.

23

X-Wing. If you rush you lone Y-Wing at an Imperial Stary Destroyer you could use a couple torpedoes to take out its shield. Then a few short ion blasts to disable it then you just sit there fireing till it blows up.

You can also use your ion cannons to disable fighters which stops their spawning process and allows you to deal with one wave at a time.

Also the final battle was much easier if you ignored the TIE advance and that death trench and just blasted full throttle straight towards the place where you fire your torpedo into the Death Star but staying high enough that the turbolasers can’t get you. And only diving down when you’re right over the target, hitting it and pulling up right away. Made that mission way too easy.

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Adventure (AKA advent or adv, due to file-naming constraints, AKA vad, due to administrators who would delete anything they recognized as a game) was a completely different game than any Zork game (though much the same style, and the inspiration for them). Then there was the original Zork, with no number. Then Zork was (more or less) split into Zork I and Zork II, and then came the other Zorks. I say “more or less” because the puzzles weren’t all arranged the same way, and a few of them (including the portrait of Pierpont) have different solutions (at least, the Zork II solution for the portrait doesn’t work in Zork).

Since so many folks have mentioned “leave one alive so they don’t respawn” tricks, that also works in the original Legend of Zelda. Even better, the game didn’t keep track of which enemies were dead in a particular area, just how many, and re-populated them in a fixed order. Usually, it would put in the easiest monsters first. So, for instance, in an area with blue centaurs (the hardest monsters in the overworld, that shoot very damaging swords at you and take a lot to kill) and those flying buzzing flower thingies (a nuissance to kill, but they move randomly and are easy to avoid), if you killed all the monsters but one (no matter what that one monster was), left, and re-entered that area, all that would be there would be one buzzing flower.

A similar trick worked in the dungeons. Often, you’d get a room full of orange wizards and blue wizards. The orange wizards are much easier than the blue ones to kill. So you could go into a room, quickly kill one or more orange wizards, leave, and re-enter, and some of the blue wizards would be replaced with orange ones. Eventually, you’d be stuck with one or two blue wizards that wouldn’t convert to orange ones, but that’s a lot easier to deal with than six of them.

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So did I (at the ripe old age of 10, no less). (Say, does the Chameleon even exist in the “canonical” Battletech universe?)

Furthermore, I had almost limitless money in the game, or at least far more than I could ever spend. (And believe you me, I tried.)

The trick to this was that while the stock market in the game was programmed to fluctuate a bit, the overall trend was that each of the three stocks would increase in value over time. So I invested a bit of money in each, found a nice quiet corner (where the random(?) enemy encounters wouldn’t occur), faced a wall, taped down the “walk” key, and went to bed. The next morning I had maybe a million or so credits. :slight_smile:

26

Carmageddon - late in the game, you squared off against this super-duper Police Armored RV-looking thing, which was of course impossible to defeat. Excep that I found upon which rooftop they stored it befofre activating it, which just so happened to be by a powerup that gave you “Neptune Gravity.” Get the powerup, go up to the rooftop and push it off - the gravity would destroy it as soon as it went over, and you could play the rest of the game using that vehicle.

Twisted Metal - in the Paris level, there was a teleporter that would take you to an opening a few stories above the street. If you stayed up there, you could see your enemies approaching the teleporter on the street below, then wait for them to appear next to you and blow them away. It required patience - one missle wouldn’t do it, but would be enough to knock them back down to the street, so they couldn’t even fight back.

Duke Nukem - final boss: two words: Circle Strafe.

27

Hah! I did the same thing. When I first played Halo, I was being introduced to it at a coworker’s house and we were playing Co-Op. I said we should try to grab the Banshees, and he said there was no way, that maaayyybe we could get the nearest one, but not both. After a couple tries, it turned out I was right. We cleared out the whole level anyway just for fun, but it was fun stealing all the airpower ourselves. :smiley:

I’m not sure if it’s the same design, but there was a Chameleon in Battletech. It didn’t have functional stealth abilities (beyond the game’s basic ECM rules) unless you were playing with “Level 3” rules, which basically existed as a formal recognition of house rules, player-made content, and for public beta-testing of new game ideas to balance them out before adding them to “Level 2” (read: official tournament) rules.

Man, I have a bunch I could point out, but where to begin…

Final Fantasy 6: Probably intended as an ingame secret, but Gogo’s (the mimic) command-card could be edited to include any set of commands on his status screen! Having a guy who could simply directly choose to use tools, blitz, or sword tech any turn instead of hoping he mimic’ed succesfully was really handy against Kefka (the end boss is most vulnerable against brute physical attacks, IIRC).

Shadowrun (SNES): After you beat the Jester Spirit, you can return to the Dark Blade mansion and confront the Vampire for again for a quick 4,000 nuyen. You can keep going to the ship, through to the Jester’s domain, and exit through the door in his layer to reset the vampire. It’s slow, but once you’ve hacked all the Matrix areas, and dominated the arena, it’s far and away the fastest way to raise money.

Myst: It’s possible to do the Marker-Switch game and deliver the White page to Atrus without ever visiting any age. Afterwards you can explore them at your own leisure, of course. I figured this out AFTER beating the game, but still, I thought that was pretty cool.

TIE Fighter: On one mission, you’re supposed to use your TIE (Fighter or Interceptor, I forget) to escort a set of TIE Bombers to eliminate a rogue Star Destroyer. My Bombers got wiped, but the Star Destroyer isn’t able to flee the battle, so I kept making passes at max speed, at weird angles, sloooooooooooooooooooowly chipping away at the rest of its shields and armor, and scored a Star Destroyer kill! No warheads, no wingmates, I picked off the enemy fighters and spent a good half-hour or more nibbling it to death! God I loved that game. :smiley:

28

Sure does! Reminds me of the time I discovered in the original Command and Conquer that the AI doesn’t consider walls to be a threat. So I would just build a wall over to their base, surround it, and trap them inside. Then I would attack them whenever I was good and ready.

29

GTA: Vice City: In your NE safehouse by the mall. You can stand in that patio area upstairs. You can shoot out but the cops can only shoot in if you are standing right next to the rail. Sit back a bit and you might as well be at a shooting range.

Mario 64: Not sure if this was intended or not, but the swim meter was the same as the health meter. So if you were low on health, jump in the water, surface, full health!

30

In (I think) Super Mario World (SNES), there’s a castle maze that involves lots of doors that take you back to places you’ve been before, and one (hard to find) door that actually takes you to the end. I never found that door, but I did discover that one of the doors that doesn’t take you there takes you to a door just to the left of a wall. And if you go through that door standing half-on half-off on the right side, you end up partly embedded in that wall. At that point, the game’s collision detection slides you to the right, which happens to be the end-guy’s chamber.

In FF3/6, you could build up several members of your party to arbitrary levels on the river run by setting some to attack and one guy to heal everyone, and then just pressing “A” over and over again (or taping it down), which would take you around in a loop that fought the same battles over and over again.

31

Drakan - demo version

This was a partial level that was actually a beta version. When you got to one point, a preview cutscene played and the demo ended. However, some people found out there were some clipping errors. This meant that with a little finagling you could get into the walls and bypass the cutscene trigger to see the remainder of the level that was included.

Commander Keen - Marooned on Mars

In one of the levels, there are a number of rooms in a row with nasties and a treasure worth points. You kill each nasty with your ray gun and get the treasure. This gives you enough points for 2 additional lives with some points left over.

In the last room, instead of avoiding the robot and exiting and completing the level, let the robot kill you. This way you can re-enter the level. The nasties and treasures are regenerated and you can get more points and lives. You can repeat this until you use up your ray gun charges.

But there’s also a way to get as many ray gun charges as you want.

In another level, you get 3 ray gun charges. But there are two ways out of the level. One is a teleporter, which gets you back to the surface without completing the level. Re-enter the level as often as you want to continue getting ray gun charges.

By combining these, you can get as many points and lives as you want. Of course, you have to work at it.

32

There’s even a place earlier than that, also on ‘Assault on the Control Room.’

Right after you get outdoors on ground level for the first time, you get a Warthog… after fighting (or running from) an enemy tank, you find the Scorpion tank.

Just beyond that, and before you reach the next tank/Banshee/hunters battle, if you position yourself properly on a slight slope, you can see the overhead platforms and target one with the tank turret.

If you shoot a shell juusssst right, you can knock a Banshee off that platform and down to ground level — then hop in. You can even take that Banshee underground, to that large chasm room, and out the other side. :smiley:

33

In Arkanoid “Doh it again” for SNES, (A Breakout type game) the last level pits you against Doh himself. (An Easter Island Statue type figure) One of Doh’s tactics is to turn the playing field upside-down. He would do this by extending his arms and grabing on to the border of the field and rotating it. A consequence of this would be that your character (The Vaus Ship) would have his controls reversed for the duration.

When Doh would rotate the field and my controls, I simply rotated my controller. This way, a double switch was made, and I didn’t have to hesistate on which direction to move. Hesitation in Arkanoid will kill you faster than anything else.

34

Nope, 3 (NES).

35

How about Half Life in 48 minutes.

36

Two words: Kobayashi Maru

37

On a related note, there’s a Star Trek novel where you get to hear about how Kirk, Spock, Chekov, Sulu, and Scotty did on their Kobayashi Maru tests, which makes for some good reading. Kirk’s solution to the problem was hillarious, to say the least. :smiley:

38

Myth II, Soulblighter

On the first level, your party’s job is to purge a village of zombies — or “Thrall”, I think they’re called — who are making quick work of the hapless villagers as you arrive on the scene. If you proceed into the village you might have your hands full, with Thrall coming at you from all directions. It can be very difficult to kill them off fast enough, without losses, especially in the harder difficulty settings.

Fortunately, it isn’t your job to save any of the villagers. You can leave them to themselves. To win the level you just have to kill all the Thrall.

Anyway, there’s a weasel solution to the level. Along the southern edge of the map, running west to east, is a narrow river with steep banks. The village lies to the north. For much of that river’s eastern length, no one, including the Thrall, can cross it. So what I do is move my party to the south bank of the river, clustered together in a place that can’t be reached by a direct crossing from the north. (A place near the guy who’s fishing, if you’ve seen him.) Then, I have one of my warriors go wandering all around the village, teasing out Thrall. In the higher difficulty levels, there will eventually be hundreds of them.

After my warrior has attracted all the Thrall, I either (1) stop him and sacrifice him to the hordes, or (2) scurry him over to the south bank of the river, to join the rest of the party. Then, I wait.

The Thrall know where my party is, so they descend on my position. However, they’re too dumb to go to a point in the river that they can cross, to reach the south bank, and so to reach me. Instead, they all arrive at a point on the north bank across from my party, and bumble around helplessly. Eventually the entire horde is gathered together in a huge mass, right across from my archers.

Then I let my archers start firing.

It can take a while to kill all those Thrall, but eventually the job gets done. A few fire-arrows help speed things along, especially with the Thrall all maneuvering to be in the same place. And in the end, not a single good guy needs to risk any danger — aside from the “bait” warrior of course.

The Prisoner (on the Apple II, circa 1980).

The game is ultimately won by entering Number Two’s house and getting him (or it?) to put a “[=]” on the screen. This is the “plug” that you’re supposed to “pull”, and thus defeat the machine. (I hope that doesn’t count as a game spoiler, at this late date. Some of you might still have been working on it.)

When you move the input cursor over these three characters, the game accepts them as an input string, and recognizes this event as a win. That input behavior was actually a general feature of the Apple II: moving the cursor rightward over on-screen characters was equivalent to typing them, assuming anyway that you were calling the built-in functions in firmware. Which, the authors were.

As it turned out, you could cheat, at least in theory, by inputting “[=]” as soon as you arrived on the Island, made your way to Number Two’s, and answered one of his questions. However, the Apple II and II Plus had no way of producing “[” characters from the keyboard, even though they could display them. Hence the normal course of the game was to solve all the many other puzzles first, before you could get to the final showdown at Number Two’s. You had to do a lot of work to get that little “[=]” on the screen, just so that you could copy it.

But then, the Apple //e and //c came out, with full ASCII keyboards. On these machines it was then possible to enter “[=]” right away, win the game, and bypass all the puzzles entirely. Not a very satisfying win, but a win nonetheless.

Obviously the authors hadn’t anticipated the amazing advancements in keyboard technology that were coming down the pike. (And more importantly, they forgot to write a rule requiring the player to solve the rest of the game first, before final victory was even a possibility.)

39

Ah, Japanese-style fortification! Bravo! :smiley:

40

I see your Half-Life and raise you Morrowind in 7 1/2 minutes.