Not sure if bug or feature
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So I'm playing this game on my phone, the kind where the guy keeps running in one direction and you have to tap him to make him jump but also tap elsewhere to clear obstacles, kill baddies, setup platforms, etc.
It's not actually a bad casual game, but it does have an interesting characteristic.
If I push the "back" button on my phone, the scrolling stops, the guy freezes (mid-jump if need be) and a rather unobtrusive menu strip comes up with options for resuming or quitting. Standard stuff.
But the baddies on screen keep coming at you! And you can still tap them, along with everything else on screen that is not occluded by the thin menu strip.
In fact, if not for the frozen guy and the non-scrolling screen it's like the game isn't paused at all!
So while I can't truly pause the game if I want (the guy still dies if hit by a baddie), I can use my time-freezing powers to dodge some particular difficult enemies or have some more time to prepare the route. I just have to be careful not to touch the confirmationless 'quit' option.
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Reminds me of the old "cheater" controllers for the original NES that would exploit the pause feature by repeatedly toggling the (start?) button. Of course, with the NES, you didn't get to blast bad guys in pause mode, the effect was to slow down the action enough to mentally process what was going on.
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@Zecc said:
confirmationless 'quit' option.
TF2 has no confirmation when you click the Disconnect button in non-co-op mode. To make things worse, rearranging your backpack between respawns gives you a Back button located in exactly the same location, and you have to hit it twice to get back to the ingame menu. Hit it three times by mistake and the game freezes for a minute or two while it disconnects from the server and unloads a bunch of memory. Fun. That also means you have to wait while it reloads many hundreds of files if you want to reconnect. Co-op mode helpfully gives you a "Are you sure you want to exit? Doing so will disconnect you from the server!" message.
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In the overhead scenes in Blaster Master for the Nintendo Entertainment System, if the level number was even, damage effects continued when the game was paused. You could throw a grenade, and pause the game to kill a boss rather quickly (or yourself, if you happened to be taking damage). It always seemed like more of a bug than a cheat, but I could never explain why it didn't work on odd levels.
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RAM was pretty light on the NES, maybe they were abusing a register to store two unrelated things? One a bit, one a int8. The int8 overwrites the bit, and whether it's even or not decides whether the bit is correct or not. Presumably it came up in testing too late to fix-- or even after the cartridge master went to manufacturing.
Just a guess.
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@joe.edwards said:
In the overhead scenes in Blaster Master for the Nintendo Entertainment System, if the level number was even, damage effects continued when the game was paused. You could throw a grenade, and pause the game to kill a boss rather quickly (or yourself, if you happened to be taking damage). It always seemed like more of a bug than a cheat, but I could never explain why it didn't work on odd levels.
I think it was the first Mega Man for the NES that had a similar bug. Some weapons could damage an enemy and then keep going to hit other enemies behind it. The timer that prevented the same enemy from getting damaged with every clock tick wasn't stopped by pausing the game, though. If you get a shot over an enemy, then keep mashing the pause button, you could keep damaging the enemy without anything else happening. It was especially helpful against a couple bosses.
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@RichP said:
like you could actually play an NES game that way, everyone i knew tried the feature once then turned it back off; also it only worked with a specific style of pause and every game handled pause differently.Reminds me of the old "cheater" controllers for the original NES that would exploit the pause feature by repeatedly toggling the (start?) button. Of course, with the NES, you didn't get to blast bad guys in pause mode, the effect was to slow down the action enough to mentally process what was going on.
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Indeed, it would be completely useless in a Zelda game (agonizingly slow item menu opening/closing) and I remember seeing it once during Street Fighter II, where it was extremely annoying (Fight!Fight!Fight!Fight!Fight!Fight!Fight!)
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Anyone remember the old "sonic tank" exploit from Dune 2? Where the range of the sonic tank's gun was not fixed, only the time-to-live of the projectiles was? And you could set the game to run at a slower or faster rate, while the programmers apparently forgot to include the time scale in the calculations for those projectiles. So you could either make the sonic tanks a lot more deadly (preferrably if you were playing the side which owns them) by setting the game to run at the fastest speed, thus giving them a greatly increased range or gimp them (if you were playing against them) by setting the game to the lowest speed...
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Re: Curious facts about pause menus
TLoZ: Majora's Mask has a glitch where opening (and closing) the start menu advances the in-game clock a little without advancing the game. So if you pause and unpause the game continuously for about 5 hours you can go through a full day-night cycle and go back to the previous day.
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@Ben L. said:
@Zecc said:
TF2 has no confirmation when you click the Disconnect button in non-co-op mode. To make things worse, rearranging your backpack between respawns gives you a Back button located in exactly the same location, and you have to hit it twice to get back to the ingame menu. Hit it three times by mistake and the game freezes for a minute or two while it disconnects from the server and unloads a bunch of memory. Fun. That also means you have to wait while it reloads many hundreds of files if you want to reconnect. Co-op mode helpfully gives you a "Are you sure you want to exit? Doing so will disconnect you from the server!" message.confirmationless 'quit' option.
I did that just the other day on a full TF2 server (my own, actually). And since we don't use reserved slots, another user connected during that time frame and I had to wait another 15 minutes to reconnect.
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While we're on the subject of TF2 UI WTF HDSVADL, pressing M will open up the loadout menu. If you accidently open this menu, you can get out of it by pressing escape. Pressing , (next to M) opens up the class change menu. Pressing escape here will open up the pause menu atop the class change menu, and the only way to get out of the class change menu via keyboard is pressing 0.
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Re: annoying Valve shit
Yes, Valve makes bad interfaces and bad software in general.
If only the gameplay wasn't so good.
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Kinda offtopic anecdote, but since I don't have a Twitter account I guess I'll have to post it here:
A few days ago I was trying one of those fancy automatic item trading sites (dispenser.tf). After trading in a few items, I thought "hey I can just disable Steam Guard and not have to deal with those email codes, I keep my password secure anyways (and my account isn't worth much)". 2 minutes later I learned that you can't trade with Steam Guard disabled. 30 seconds later I learned that you have to wait 15 days after reenabling Steam Guard. Yes, thanks for telling me this before I disable it assholes.
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@Dragnslcr said:
I think it was the first Mega Man for the NES that had a similar bug. Some weapons could damage an enemy and then keep going to hit other enemies behind it. The timer that prevented the same enemy from getting damaged with every clock tick wasn't stopped by pausing the game, though. If you get a shot over an enemy, then keep mashing the pause button, you could keep damaging the enemy without anything else happening. It was especially helpful against a couple bosses
Elec Man's weapon did this. You could rapidly hit pause as it was striking an enemy and it would repeatedly hit them with each "tick" as it went through them. You could kill the final boss in a few seconds by doing it. I also remember the Blaster Master trick with some bosses and the grenade.
