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> Considering that this cheat is very obscure, it is unlikely something that was discovered by chance. > However, if the cheat was widely known shortly after t
by moring 4y ago
> Considering that this cheat is very obscure, it is unlikely something that was discovered by chance.
> However, if the cheat was widely known shortly after the game’s release, then it is very very likely that it was a planned cheat by someone at Namco
The article even mentions that a developer might have seen the bug through code analysis, but then reverts to "random chance or intention". Neither is completely impossible, but intentionally planting a backdoor by building what is close to a buffer overflow, without causing the game to crash? That's highly unlikely, IMHO.
I'm not even yet convinced of the "highscore theory". My best guess: The developer spotted the bug while proofreading the code, found it to be non-fatal but a bug nonetheless, and then a decision was made (by devs or management) to leave it in there because it's hard to trigger and non-fatal and the deadline was close. The highscore thing may have come as an afterthought, assuming it is even true.
- croes 4y agoThe high score theory is quite unlikely, considering that arcade games are quite public. So anyone watching the player would wonder why he doesn't shoot the last two enemies but just dodges them for 10 minutes.
- pigsty 4y agoBut an adult wouldn’t stand and watch his screen for 10 minutes either and put the pieces together. A kid might. They might also think he’s dumb and just goofing off. Kids also might find it themselves because they’ll do weird stuff in games, imagining situations in the game world, like sparing a character and giving them a chance at redemption or something. A lot of speedrunning tricks are found by kids with a lot of time to just goof off and do seemingly pointless stuff in games.
- croes 4y agoI think it was a design flaw that a programmer used as cheat but it wasn't put there as a cheat in the first place.
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago> A lot of speedrunning tricks are found by kids with a lot of time to just goof off and do seemingly pointless stuff in games. Most of those seemingly pointless stuff is done very intentionally.. one of the oldest tricks is to go "too fast" through a thin "wall", so you skip over it... and trying to squeeze between two polygons. The rest is mostly seeing weird bugs and trying to recreate them in a way that helps the played... with the spread of streaming (by getting noticed and can be recrated after), this has gotten easier in years (and it's not just "i have no idea what I did, but i swear I went over that wall, and I didn't have a camera to take a literal screen shot").