Posted by ronreiter 12 hours ago
(I still need to finish the FoE romhack though)
- in Pokemon gen 1 you can wrap your stats back to zero by buffing them too much
- In FF7 you can overflow the damage calculation to kill Ruby in one hit
- Mario 64 has a mountain of usable glitches; "parallel universes" let you skip collisions at high speeds
- GTA 3/VC/SA have crazy mission/wrong warp corruptions involving parallel game simulations
- NES Mario can be corrupted to execute arbitrary code in TAS
- OOT can be heap-corrupted so badly you can write a loader for an entire DLC via controller ("triforce%", my choice for most insane controller based hack of a game)Pokémon, too!
In the days of DOS, the BIOS would load the first sector of a floppy disk or hard drive into memory and transfer control to it. You could replace that sector, and not a single line of code that you didn't write yourself would be executed after that. THIS is how it should be on a PERSONAL computer. A virus could do the same, of course, and gain full control of the machine, but that is not an argument against giving control to the user. You could blame DOS for not intercepting attempts to rewrite the boot sector and asking the user for consent, but completely preventing something like this in the name of security would be even worse!
Imagine if back then, there was a "secure boot" mechanism so that only a boot sector with Microsoft's cryptographic signature was allowed, and that boot sector code would in turn verify everything loaded afterwards. Linux wouldn't exist. So, neither would Android, but the situation would be much the same as it is now, only with Microsoft Phone OS instead -- and absolutely no concept of how it could be different, of a computing device controlled by its user instead of a giant corporation.
Ideally, ios and Android would be secure enough that no jailbreaks are possible, but open enough to allow the user to replace the OS with one of their choosing.
Having it locked down and then resorting to exploiting loopholes is the worst of both worlds.
If you write a game in a decent language where such a thing won't happen by mistake you can still have it be present on purpose and in some cases that even fits the game's lore.
Random glitches are confusing and bad. Falling off the world in Blue Prince due to collision bugs is annoying for example. However "glitches" which are intended behaviour are fun. I've enjoyed every time I saw somebody get that note and gift from Mrs Babbage because they drafted that particular room in that particular place and it had an effect which in hindsight they now realise was both foreseeable and regrettable...
(I can’t think of one language that defaults to saturating integers)