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S2 Ep174: VGBD - Cheats and Exploits
77 Plays4 years ago
Join Dave and Jake as they talk about cheat codes, cheaters, exploits, and "How it Was Meant to be Played" in this episode of Video Game Break Down!
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Thoughts? Comments? Requests for new episodes? Feel free to email them in!
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
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Transcript
Introduction & Light Banter
00:00:52
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake. I'm joined by my co-host is always Dave. How's it going today, Dave? It's going good. I've had a quiet and relaxing and I don't want to say mildly productive, but I did take in the mail today, Saturday. That is pretty good. But to be fair, the mail had snacks and then a t-shirt and mug from the Satanic Temple.
00:01:16
Speaker
Nice. So making good on our, well, yes, our. So now I am taking credit for your actions. Jake bought me the log, guys. Absolutely did that. But a previous endorsement of this organization. Yeah, I would have put it on, too, but I already picked out a shirt that I like. So it's a good shirt. Maybe tomorrow. For the for the awareness of our listeners, this is a Hollow Knight t-shirt.
00:01:45
Speaker
And I'm not gonna be able to describe any more than that. There's nothing inside of it. Just t-shirts sitting in the chair. That'd be a little disconcerting.
00:01:55
Speaker
I would like I would like that to be my ghost form instead of like a white sheet and be floating around as an apparition. I just want it to be like a just kind of like a plain white Haynes tee, you know. Right. It's like just just a hint of pit stain, you know. Yeah, I think that that's been an under realized set up in the sci-fi of Invisible People. And not thinking if they've shown like ghosts with socks. Does it need to be a white fabric?
00:02:26
Speaker
Anyway, how's your Saturday been? How are you? Pretty well so far. Slops in a bit late, which I needed after travel. And it felt pretty good to sleep in, be home.
00:02:39
Speaker
Take a look at what else needs to be done this weekend, but for the most part, take it easy. Nothing like coming home and thinking, what else do I have to do today? Well, it's not all work, but yeah. Well, I heard you got some pizza yesterday when you came back.
00:02:56
Speaker
Yeah, got some jewels for end of the show jewels Which is always an excellent pizza choice one of their Bull in beverages. I don't think they had black cherry, but it was a birch beer, which I'm also a fan of
00:03:11
Speaker
Every time I see, every time I go to like my local giant, I'll pass you like the soda and snacks aisle. And every time I pass by root beer or like some fancy ass looking soda, I'm like, I would get this for Jake if he was going. Yeah, might not be, might not drink alcohol, but at least I can drink fancy soda, you know, craft.
Food Talk & Memories
00:03:33
Speaker
Yeah, craft beverages only. Yeah, I drink mac and cheese. Legitimately though, when I was younger, if you have a more runny cheese sauce, basically you just use more milk when you're making the mac and cheese. Right.
00:03:51
Speaker
I'd essentially strain the noodles as I was eating it. So when I was done with all the noodles, I could just take a sip of my cheese broth. Delightful. As long as you started a sip, I think that's acceptable. Would golf be a good verb here? I'm just imagining it's the soup bowl. Oh, OK. Cheese broth. All right. Now that I've drank all that down, time for some mac and cheese.
00:04:21
Speaker
I like how the gesture of your hands immediately went to like it was a bowl for the entire table that people would take a ladle for and put into smaller bowls for them. This is a family pasta bowl size setup.
00:04:36
Speaker
No, probably not the healthiest option. But you know what? I've had worse. Do they still have... I heard mention of like a peach and mint and balsamic vinaigrette pizza. Ooh, I don't know. I don't think I've heard of that. See, that does sound exciting. Right? Yeah. Somebody in channel mentioned it the other night and I'm like, I need to... I think my closest one is 15, 20 minutes away. So I would have to actually go out and get it, but haven't had it in a bit, maybe.
00:05:04
Speaker
Yeah, I had sriracha chicken and there was like a roast beef one. Solid, good thing. Yeah. Roast beef. Maybe not roast beef, some sort of steak. Meat. Steak. Yeah. Solid steak. Well, I'm sure you probably had some horseradish though. Yeah. There's so many options on there. Oh, you know what it was? It was pulled pork. I was joking with meat, but yeah, we got there.
00:05:35
Speaker
Hormone-free barbecue pulled pork, scallions, red onions, barbecue sauce, and mozzarella. I'm trying to now imagine a pork or a pig without having any hormones whatsoever. Right. It's very sensitive.
00:05:54
Speaker
I don't know what the default is for an animal with no hormones because they're coming today for hormone therapy. Yes, I have none. How do I get some of those? Yeah, but yeah, it was definitely good. Go back. It's not local food, but we do have nice places to eat around us, especially compared to where I've lived in the past, where it's much more straightforward.
00:06:22
Speaker
Yeah, it's nice to have options for sure.
Smoothies vs. Milkshakes
00:06:26
Speaker
I'll need to pick something to do later today because I either need to do a grocery run, uh, so I can make more stuff for leftovers because leftovers I have currently are, I wouldn't serve them to people if they came over. Right. Um, or I could still be like, it's a weekend and I could order something. Mm-hmm.
00:06:49
Speaker
probably order something. I think we're filling smoothies later this afternoon. So are we doing smoothies? Yeah. I'll stop by a grab a smoothie, but no, um, that sounds nice. Smoothies are always, I never want them as a meal, but as soon as I have one, I'm like, this is delightful.
00:07:06
Speaker
Mm hmm. And it's also like, well, it's different than a milkshake. A milkshake basically has enough caloric intake that it's a meal on its own. But a smoothie can kind of be like, you know, this is like a good half. I don't know if a soup and smoothie would be good. I don't know what the perfect combination would be, but. Well, I'm not saying volume wise, I'm saying like it's two essentially liquids at that point. Yeah, probably like a sandwich. And it's like, do you like a half sandwich in a smoothie?
00:07:36
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, I think that would be fair. Jake now will invent the first Panera. Yeah.
00:07:45
Speaker
You know, we can have salad there, too. Just saying maybe more baked goods. Yeah. Yeah. But I think that if I were to attempt that to open up another chain of potentially successful restaurant restaurants called Panera, they would ban me from all existing Panera restaurants. Another thing you could be banned for is exploiting and multiplayer games, which is not our topic, but it's close.
00:08:17
Speaker
For the audience reference, as soon as I saw Jake's facial expression change with a single degree of minutia, I started whispering over video just like segway. It's a segway. It's a segway.
Panera Dreams & Game Cheats
00:08:31
Speaker
And the intonation built as well.
00:08:33
Speaker
I do feel like I start talking very slowly and deliberately when we're going for a segue. Well, you'll also do the hook of like, and another thing. If I was one more thing. Yeah, cheats and exploits. Is there a difference? Let's start there. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I agree with that. There's a categorical difference. How would you define a cheat?
00:09:00
Speaker
So a cheat, back in the olden days, cheat codes were meant to be things that were specifically codes made for the game. You could input for some type of special effect in cosmetics, something silly, or like a power up.
00:09:15
Speaker
maybe it would be extra lives, you couldn't die, and limited ammo, depending what it is. Whereas an exploit, I would say, is stuff that the game was not specifically designed for, but it is in the game and you can take advantage of that for some benefit. Exactly. And cheats kind of have... I mean, I think cheats exist less now. Some games have console codes or things like that, I guess.
00:09:41
Speaker
To their origin, a lot of games included cheat codes as part of something that they could actually market to people. I think people underestimate how money-hungry and grubby old video game companies were.
00:09:58
Speaker
and like the platforms like literally arcades just eat money but also like cheat codes you'd have to call in on like uh a hotline right a one dollar per minute hotline or something where they'd be like oh where are you stuck how are you feeling and then you know whatever this is different from the hotlines i've called but some of some of the verbiage overlaps which concerns me right how are you feeling where are you
00:10:26
Speaker
But, you know, exist to keep you on the line for a little bit and then give you either a hint, which we're not covering so much in this episode, or a cheat code. Be like, oh, you can skip to this level with this code. Yeah. I wasn't thinking about it back from like the money sense, but I mean, I guess that would be the only motivation. Yeah. This is before rapidly available codes on the internet and things like that.
00:10:53
Speaker
before we had game facts or cheat code central or any of those other oldies. Well, even around the time, they would still sell video game strategy guides, right? Right, yeah. So from a collector's standpoint, you get to say, oh, I have more information and lore about the game. They'll have other fun pieces of information. You get to see some of the maps, some of the
00:11:13
Speaker
concept art and other things. But they would also have a, hey, you can also just refer to this at any point if you're stuck. Right. Whereas I, they might still have them for some games. But if they do, it's been a minute. Because I only remember back from the days of like a battle chest.
00:11:32
Speaker
I think it's the last time. I mean, the guides still exist. I don't think they're nearly, they don't have... They're guides online, yeah. The proclivity. And sometimes they're just wrong, or gains get changed. Right. Well, yeah, IGN guides for sure. But even like printed guides, prima strategy guides, things like that.
00:11:52
Speaker
Because a lot of games have day one patches, you don't really know how accurate that information is going to be, even with a preview look before the game launches. So definitely less important now.
00:12:06
Speaker
Cyberpunk 2077. You think they have a guy? Oh my gosh. I don't know if they actually had a prima strategy guide, but can't mention it helps down much now. Um, by this point, it just has to be like, if you're having trouble playing the game.
00:12:25
Speaker
would feel bad for you son. We don't have a solution. And this game's not fun. That's not bad. There you go. So thank you for joining us for the freestyle in segment of the podcast. Did you appreciate my Wiki Wiki? Wiki Wiki wild. Such a good video. Really is. Yeah.
00:12:49
Speaker
But yeah, so Cheats, I think, they existed a lot more in older games, kind of just tossed in by the developer, sometimes meant for QA or, you know, left around and people had to find them eventually. But a lot of other times it was intended, you know, like, hey, have fun with it.
00:13:08
Speaker
run this code um multiplayer games basically or not sorry single player is what i meant to say there the opposite wasn't a thing cheat codes for multiplayer games would be weird they exist
00:13:26
Speaker
Yeah, but it's usually like on local instances. So like if you were doing Unreal Tournament with like a LAN with some people, you could set something up there or we're just playing against the AI. Like one specific example very related to that that I had here was like DK mode for Goldeneye.
00:13:45
Speaker
Like that's something you could turn on in multiplayer local. Give everybody gigantic heads, but obviously you're not playing that online. You know, to your point. And to be fair, they really just took that mechanic and put it into a dive kick. True.
00:14:05
Speaker
It's very derivative. Miles, in the next 45 minutes, riffing on dive kick. What word do you like to press the buttons in? Anyway. First, first I open with a kick. Oh, bold. I mean, that is how you play Sephiroth, but I like the idea of.
00:14:28
Speaker
having cheats as like, so like, let's say you are a developer on this game, you spend however much time putting stuff in. You probably have something like this is like a function test out. Oh, what happens if we change these parameters? What if we make them invincible? Or you just play testing, right?
00:14:44
Speaker
But then you get to share some of your like love and hard work by giving other people who play this game an opportunity to do the same. Yeah. Because like obviously there's you play a game and you beat it without cheat codes. Congratulations. Here's your steam achievement sticker or whatever. Yeah, cool.
00:15:01
Speaker
But on the other side of it, cheats are just fun to do. Like, I can't tell you how many times I've put on Power Overwhelming in Starcraft because I was bad at the game. But I wanted to see the story play out, right? Was that instant win? Power Overwhelming was you couldn't die, so all of your units are invincible. Ah, gotcha, gotcha. Which I forgot about, and then Archon said it. I'm like, gotcha, buddy. Yeah. It triggered it.
00:15:32
Speaker
Yeah, RTS games have a bunch of cheat codes down the years. I do think we're talking a little bit about the historical place of cheat codes. I feel like modern games more often don't dedicate. Stop you there for a sec. Yeah. So we're talking about two separate things here. One, cheat codes. Yes. This, I would say, is different from cheating.
00:15:56
Speaker
And probably the main distinction there is going to, I assume, be between single player and multiplayer. Right. If you're playing your own shit, I don't care what you do. Have fun. Play the game you want to play. Put in some cheat codes. They're fun and silly. Yeah, they're intended.
00:16:10
Speaker
If you're cheating outside of that against other people who are playing to have a good time and you're just doing it to cheat and win, that's cheating. Yes. Which unfortunately I do think that the modern era is that people would spend
00:16:29
Speaker
Fewer hours implementing cheat codes for games. There's not that many cheat codes in games anymore. So maybe there is more of a perception when people hear cheats. They can cheat in or hacking or otherwise manipulating a multiplayer game for some advantage, which is unfortunate, I think.
00:16:48
Speaker
It is. I can't think of a time where I've ever had somebody cheating or doing a script or a hack in a game where I'm like, oh, hooray. You've improved the experience of all people. So I load into the map, and then I get shot. Ooh, love it. Speed run. Guys, check out this next life. Want to see me do it again? But I think my most recent experience of this would have been with fall guys. Were you playing with us at the time?
00:17:18
Speaker
Probably not. I didn't play a whole lot of fallen guys. Oh, okay. I fell pretty early.
Cheats in Gaming History
00:17:23
Speaker
Ah. This guy. Here we go. That's the joke. Put a bow on it. But there would be people who would jump and then continuously jump through the sky. So they just avoid all the obstacles and then they're at the end of the course.
00:17:39
Speaker
Yeah, that's entirely miserable and pointless. Yeah, because like when you're doing a battle royale thing like that, you're like, I don't necessarily think I'm going to win, but I want to do my best. And then maybe you are trying to win to get crowns. It's literally impossible because someone's just saying I'm running this script that says you can't. You can't do that thing. That's only for me now.
00:18:02
Speaker
Yeah, it's, so this is getting to like part of the second spot. It's just like exploits, exploitation, cheating, go hand in hand. Um, but it's an unintended gameplay, whether you're explicitly using the systems in the game or external systems and processes to modify it. Um, and in multiplayer games, it's just, it's just pointless, right? It's, it's kind of meaningless. You're in there for the temporary power trip. You win.
00:18:33
Speaker
It's pointless even to the person I should feel even in the short term because the whole point of a competitive game is to compete. And if it's a foregone conclusion that you're going to win because you can just cheat to the end, headshot everybody, do whatever, then why play basically? Except to just ruin other people's fun. And I realize that is a motivation for some people.
00:18:58
Speaker
I will agree with that. But it feels good for me to do that if it's won through competition. So I played a Dota game this morning. It was a nice Saturday morning Dota. Yeah, wake up. Cheery. Everybody was actually really nice. That's good. But we worked together and it felt good to take those team fights and be like, oh, we're stomping on them.
00:19:21
Speaker
Now, you don't go into like a flame thing, like calling the other team a shit, but you're like, it feels good to have gotten that. And also like to the point that they probably feel a little bit bad, right? Yeah. Just push that boundary.
00:19:36
Speaker
And then I forgot the other point that you mentioned that I was going to connect to. No, that's fair. It's mostly just the ruining other people's fun being the primary form of it's the only thing someone who is exploiting to the detriment of others could get out of it.
00:19:53
Speaker
I guess is what I'm saying. Yeah. Oh, sorry. My other comment was going to be a dumb thought I had of the real life comparison of that is somebody who goes to like a little league game with like a 3D printed trophy that they made at home. Right. And like, as the game's finishing up, they're just like, they're going on the, on the field and just like fist pumping while holding the trophy. And they're like, what? Look at me. I've made it.
00:20:22
Speaker
Or in our, to make the example even more specific to the way that these games are often times played, you ran around the field constantly pushing the kids over and then at the end held the trophies up, right? It was me, all me. There is no accomplishment.
00:20:39
Speaker
And there's not, I think, as much of that in our list. Obviously, I feel a lot of people have played multiplayer games where they were up against a hacker, a cheater, a script kitty, whatever you want to call them. And it did, you know, unfortunately ruin the experience, but
00:21:00
Speaker
For the most part, those are relatively transient. They don't stick around too long just because multiplayer for games doesn't usually last forever. And they won't be as memorable in the long term as I think some of the other examples of exploits or cheats that we have here on the list will.
00:21:18
Speaker
Well, before we get off of cheat codes specifically, I did want to ask, do you have any fond memories of a specific instance? Absolutely do. It's not even the ones that I put on this list.
00:21:33
Speaker
The one I was thinking of actually while we were talking about this is I used to play the old army men games. Army men, army men two, army men three toys in space, army men air tactics, air attack, all of that. Army men, Sergeant's Heroes. Sergeant's Heroes is a PlayStation one, yeah. I think one of the ones I mentioned wasn't actually on PC. Army men three, I hate the fucking hands.
00:21:58
Speaker
And they all had the isometric ones, in particular, had cheat codes. So you could be like, there was a cheat code for spawning a magnifying glass, which was the global, if you have sight of a unit, you can just melt them on the spot weapon. Like Armyman 3, calling backup, reveal the map, give sight, you know, make your main character invincible. The classic array. Let's see if I can find some of the names here, but I did really,
00:22:28
Speaker
like grab those off of a site, print them out. Oh, you did the print out too? Yeah. Yeah. I liked that whole era of I'm not going to go back to like a favorites tab or something, possibly as like a young kid, you were doing something inappropriate with it anyway. But like you'd print out so many things from the internet. If it's just like, here's some information, I'll just have it by the computer.
00:22:53
Speaker
Here's a picture of something that I wanted to buy as a poster because I'm like 12. But now I have like a cool video game character I can like tape to the wall. Yeah. Yeah. And part of the tragedy was I'd usually print it out at the library, which is kind of like a double.
00:23:08
Speaker
It's like twisting the knife to the library. What are you doing with your time, kids? Well, I'm just playing video games this summer. What are you here in the library so I can use your paper and your ink? I come to consume your resources because my parents are not as generous as you. Yeah, I looked up some of these. So all of the codes begin with an exclamation point. You just type them in chat. That's very common for NTS game codes. Ruby Ray was magnifying glass. Nice. Lou's mission was give up.
00:23:38
Speaker
Oh, I'm glad that. Do you want to quit? No, I want to cheat to lose. Reveal the full map with Spidey senses tingling.
00:23:48
Speaker
Sounds familiar. Promote all of your selected soldiers to five-star generals. Patent, speech, like that one. And then win, win mission, which I was not like smart enough to memorize. And I didn't know what it meant back then. It was just Vinnie, Vinnie, Vici. I saw I conquered. Yeah, exactly. I know that now, but as a kid, I was like,
00:24:13
Speaker
These aren't words. This means anything. Kid reads his first good. What the fuck is this shit? Uh-huh. On the side here, I also Pete from Starcraft's. Mm hmm. Black sheep wall reveals entire map. Absolutely. Breathe deep. Five hundred Vespene. Power of the Warming, obviously. Operation Qual to build faster. Yep.
00:24:42
Speaker
Instantly, I think. And the instantly win mission is there is no cow level. Yes, the recurring code in Blizzard's games.
00:24:54
Speaker
so much so that they eventually added a cow level as a joke. Actually, several times they added a cow level as a joke, and that is usually the code to get there. Back, but yeah, the good old Blizzard. Yeah, well, maybe. Who knows? Based off allegations, they may have never been good, but at least old, the old Blizzard. But yeah, I really like these old codes.
00:25:25
Speaker
I have fond memories of punching in the codes. Like for GoldenEye, it was like unlock the codes, then you just select them, turn them on, much less than type them in. But games used to have that kind of mechanism of either if you want, you can use the codes right out the bat, or perhaps you unlock the codes by accomplishing something in gameplay, beating this level within a certain time.
00:25:46
Speaker
gives you a paintball mode, for instance. Or Resident Evil, very commonly, gives you infinite ammo for weapons. Once you either max out the weapon, you just upgrade it all the way, which you could do potentially before you even beat the game. And then usually beating the game in a certain time or something gives you unlimited rocket launcher, which is just like, I'm here for a walking simulator, basically. Dear God. Yeah.
00:26:15
Speaker
I don't know, it's for a bit, I'd say probably a couple of years, I've cared less about needing full completion, wink, from like a game sense. It's not that way. I'm good. Actually, yeah. Like somebody who stops eating when they're full, plebeians. I just throw the plate off the table, slap down the check.
00:26:43
Speaker
Sorry, I just interrupted your train of thought massively. But you were talking about you don't care about completion for the game as much. Oh, yeah. Like with Sekiro, love that game. I've played it like three times. Did I go and beat?
00:26:57
Speaker
the final boss that was optional? No. So do I feel like I've completed Sekiro? Technically, no. But I played through the main game and enjoyed it and will continue to enjoy it. And that's enough for me. I wouldn't put on cheats just to see what it is. I would just look up a video on YouTube at this point.
00:27:15
Speaker
Right, which is which is completely fair. Maybe that's one of the reason cheat codes don't exist as much. But how many things just exist online? Yeah, it's like you can look up a guide, you can do whatever. It's less necessary to include some of these. But I do think that they can add. Ironically, right, because most cheats are about beating the game faster, not all, obviously, but most of the time you're getting an advantage. That was the reason it was marketed to people, at least.
00:27:44
Speaker
But there's just so many other concepts that have kind of continued to eclipse them. New game plus being the way that you'll continue to engage with the game, going back for DLC. They just don't really spend the time for something like cheat codes, which is just you're modifying the experience a bit.
00:28:05
Speaker
I think people unfortunately would make it a cosmetic. It's been time making a cosmetic item instead of like a cheat code now. That makes me sense. Well, that's the thing. It's a lot of, obviously it's like become a huge industry, gaming as a whole. It's more profit driven. So it's harder to put in things just for, it would be fun for somebody because that's not going to make bucks at the end of the day.
00:28:31
Speaker
But it's always cool when it goes through, because it's somebody who had a passion for it being fun for the sake of being fun. Yeah. Like, I was watching the Nakey Jakey video on, weirdly, cheats and exploits. Oh, wow. Oh, coloring some of my commentary. But let me get this in a bullet point for no reason. As I'm reading off of his, hi, I'm Nakey Jakey. Come here.
00:29:01
Speaker
He just had a really good breakdown on...
00:29:05
Speaker
the different types of cheats and exploits or why big head mode was huge in like Tony Hawk and a bunch of other games at the time. Because it was it was just fun and silly, right? Exactly. And a lot of times, like the decision to put a cheat code in a game, this is before a lot of massive production teams. So as soon as you have just a ton of people working on something, I feel it becomes more difficult to introduce Easter eggs and cheat codes and things like that.
00:29:35
Speaker
That's not strictly true, I realize games still have easter eggs, but they're usually like...
00:29:40
Speaker
You can tell that it's kind of like a corporate approved sort of easter egg. Even if it's good, it was an idea that got passed through a filter, like to make it to the to the user. And that is not what you're saying, but could you provide an example of what you mean? So like in The Witcher 2 near the beginning of the game, there's an easter egg where there's like a broken cart of hay and then like a dead body next to it that's wearing robes of remarkably similar to Altair.
00:30:10
Speaker
And here was an Easter egg. It was just like a poke at Assassin's Creed. They're entirely different games. I don't think it's a legitimate, like, man, Assassin's Creed sucks, am I right? But you can tell that, like, that took our assets, right? That took all these other, it took work to put that in the game. And so it must have passed through some validation process, potentially, you know, QA or whatever.
00:30:38
Speaker
some higher up signed off on it. And for some of these games on our list, a developer could just be like, hey, I've got a couple hours. It wouldn't be hilarious if and then that was the impetus for the cheat code.
00:30:54
Speaker
So something that would be less family approved. Yeah. I mean, in some cases there's definitely some things on the list like that, but, um, also just lower barrier to entry, lower effort. It's obviously easier to make a character God mode or something, but paintball mode for one or big head mode, just like blow up the scale of a character's head. Um,
00:31:20
Speaker
It doesn't take like a full team to sign off on the idea. No, it's hey, can we input a flag that changes this value from 50 to 1000? Okay. Yeah, I do think that's where a lot of this came from.
00:31:36
Speaker
Yeah, it's really weird to me how much mileage stuff like that gets. But even just like in a character creator, the amount of time that I've seen other people and myself waste on like, they look silly because the proportions are wildly outside of the normal values. Are you even playing Dark Souls in 2021 if you're not like randomizing your character seed until the values are no longer within the standard system bounds?
Complex Cheats & Easter Eggs
00:32:06
Speaker
It's just in the same way that farts are funny I Feel like these types of things will be appreciated as well. Yeah, it's just silly and dumb fun Yeah, and a lot of these so like to go to some specifics I think on some cheat codes Obviously we have to mention the mandatory Konami code Kind of even though it wasn't the first cheat code
00:32:32
Speaker
It's the most prevalent. I don't have to ask, do you know what it is? There's some A, B's, lefts, rights and starting to select somewhere in there. I don't play Konami's games because, you know, obviously the boycott. So my excuse.
00:32:49
Speaker
Do you know what the code is? No, I was trying to think of it in the moment. OK, I think somebody could say it to me and I could tell you if it was right or wrong. Is it? So is it up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, start, start, something like that? I feel like I feel like we're 90 percent of the way there. But one person will be like, I actually remember you, you idiots. If I search for it, I know it's going to be immediate.
00:33:13
Speaker
Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A. See, there you go. Start. Yeah. So this is before the select button, kids. It's how you know. Yeah, it's very quick. When I googled that, the top result was actually someone who had it tattooed on their arm. So I was just reading some of someone's arm. Appreciate it. Yeah.
00:33:37
Speaker
It's, so this is a classic. I think this is basically considered required for Contra. Um, to get, you had like five lives or something, not a lot of lives at the beginning. And as this was an arcade game, you know, like it was meant to just eat your money. So this code gave you 99 lives, which gave you a chance at winning. Contra's hard as fuck, just saying. Yeah. A lot of those old games do not handle so good.
00:34:06
Speaker
They're not this hot take, right? Not particularly fun, just due to the difficulty. I'm not a huge fan of that type of game. Side brain. I don't really like any of those side scrollers so much.
00:34:21
Speaker
It's like a decent genre. It's just stuff always felt kind of off to me for hit boxes as a smash aficionado now. And the bullshit happens there. What's going on for this contra hit box? I promise you, I will swear three times at either Jake or Sakurai today after this episode.
00:34:41
Speaker
Yeah, that's a classic. Obviously, a lot of games use the Konami code, not even just Konami's games. But I believe most of their games has at least do something. Even Google does something. Yeah, it's it's an homage to video game history at this point. What was it in Google?
00:35:04
Speaker
Jake's testing it out now. Oh, well, I screwed it up. It's fine. Some other ones, a quick mention. Doom, original Doom had IDDQ or IDDQD, which was God mode.
00:35:21
Speaker
Um, and again, going back to our reference of like a person just implemented this, it was id and then Delta Q Delta is what that stood for, which was like one of their fraternities. You're like, yes, that is a very explicit personal reference that goes on to become a meaningful long-term cheat code, right? What was it? Which game had the cheat code O-O-G-W-T-F-B-B-Q?
00:35:51
Speaker
WTF BBQ. I literally am not going to be more useful than Google for this. So I'll Google it and see if this is a trap somehow. Resistance two.
00:36:02
Speaker
There you go. What I was starting as a bit came in to be an actual fact. So we all learned something today. Or a trophy. Can't really tell. But yeah, that's one of them. Here's an interesting one I saw when I was doing some research for this, which I say to make myself sound more important. Mortal Kombat, which I was scarred by more than played back in the day when I was young.
00:36:27
Speaker
apparently had a cheat code to add blood back into the game after they released a version without blood, due to sensor reasons. You can't do this anymore. This would get you in a lot of trouble if you released a game and it's like, we removed skulls because of like Chinese censorship. And you're like, and you can use a cheat code to add the skulls back in. That wouldn't fly. No, that wouldn't be too good.
00:36:57
Speaker
Do you have any cheat codes, any other cheat codes you can think of that were particularly impactful for you? I realize we covered Starcraft, which unfortunately is like easy mode for cheat code pickings. I was kind of the main one. A lot of other games I would have played back in the day, I don't think had cheat code options. Yeah.
00:37:24
Speaker
Any sort of manager, games like The Sims, Game Park, any of that had cheat codes for money, usually?
Game Exploits & Real-Life Examples
00:37:32
Speaker
Oh, I definitely did that for, it would be roller coaster tycoon. Yeah. I definitely got money in there because I don't know how to run a park, but I wanted to make something, something funny. And it's just close to real life, right? You just take loans, obviously, and then you just make money forever. I'm pretty sure that's how that works.
00:37:50
Speaker
And if they say that your business failed, lie. Denial gets you out of a lot. My business is the most successful, actually. Oh, maybe worms. OK. I probably have played enough worms in my time that I would have also cheated in that. Did that work just in the single player? Yeah. I didn't need to cheat for multiplayer. I was just better than other people. That's fair.
00:38:18
Speaker
Superior genes is how you were cheating in real life. I will say like when I would try and like shit on my friends type thing where like you have friend over and like you play a game more than they do because you own it, right? Right. We can play this in the computer, right? Yeah. I think they're going to have a worm team size of up to like eight or ten. I'm like, you know what? I'll just take two.
00:38:41
Speaker
But the shitty thing about that is it will always alternate the teams. Right. So while they have 10 to start off with, you go every other time. So really early, you just start like multi instant killing their people with like a bat. Jeez.
00:39:02
Speaker
What I'm realizing from this story is I was an asshole. I think most people were though. I think everybody has some, or hopefully some experience of like, here's the game I'm practicing and friends come play it with me. I think like the most egregious genre is definitely fighting games for that. It's like, they're like, what did the buttons do? And you're like, they do attacks. And over here, you're like full combo in them, like popping them up in the air. They haven't even touched the ground since you started explaining how the character works.
00:39:33
Speaker
Different at different times and first-person shooters with level awareness and weapons. Yeah, I feel like all of the James Bond games were like that for me because I had the GameCube version of
00:39:47
Speaker
Nightfire. Yeah. So, like, I knew all the level layouts. I had odd job. I knew how to angle the hat. And I would also screen look. Again, I was an asshole. You had all of these. It's like a game joke plugged into your controller. And my friend was handcuffed and couldn't move. It was the 90s. It was a different time. It was a different time. So on that topic of screen looking,
00:40:16
Speaker
Yeah. I would consider that to be the old school exploits or an exploit where social. Social. Yeah. Exploit. You're on a split screen. Your eyes will wander. But sometimes they linger too much. Right. And now you have like running into a wall. Oh, you screed looking. You're looking at me as I run into the wall, huh?
00:40:41
Speaker
This is how we learned deflection. I learned deflection when my little brother was born. No, he did. Yeah. Yeah. That would have been my most egregious one. I feel it's tough not to. Sometimes other people's screens are just more interesting. You already know what you're doing. So go to whatever's more interesting. Look at other people's screens. Obviously it was more of a problem before online. Um,
00:41:12
Speaker
But it is very difficult if your peripheral vision, if you see yourself in your peripheral vision in a shooter and you're like, huh, yeah, it's it's hard not to do like a quick turn around. Quick spot check. Got the person behind me.
00:41:37
Speaker
Yeah. But yeah, exploits in general. Exploits is obviously a very large category. A lot goes into exploits. This counts. People ruining multiplayer experiences could count direct. So exploits, I think,
00:41:53
Speaker
I would define more as exploiting the systems as they exist in the game. And then cheat codes are using the cheats that exist in a game. And cheating is the more general category of playing a game like it's not intended to be played, usually with external influence.
00:42:19
Speaker
I can't disprove anything you said in that sentence, but it just sounds slightly off to me. Maybe cheating. So cheating. Here's a good question, then. If you find an exploit in a game, say the ability to buffer like a double jump, so you can like double jump in a game, single player game, where it's possible without using a game shark or any other way to modify the game, is that cheating to use that exploit?
00:42:52
Speaker
I don't think so. But if you look at it from the sense of the I just want the I completed the game without doing anything outside of that sticker, yes, I guess it is. But if I think about skips and Dark Souls and other bugs that you can do because you're exploiting the game systems for an unintended purpose to get a benefit from it, but who gives a shit? Right.
00:43:21
Speaker
That's my thought. If it's a single player game. So this is the tricky one because now we're kind of like boiling down to the terminology here. For a multiplayer game, if you could double jump or shoot twice as fast due to being able to exploit a button in press, a button combination or something like that, buffer something, would you consider that cheating?
00:43:47
Speaker
I don't know about that specific example of inputs, but
00:43:52
Speaker
Something in the system. Yes. You glitch through. Because my immediate point of evidence for this is going to be Smash Brothers Melee, that janky fucking game. It has so many issues as far as it's designed for how it works for multiplayer, like the existence of wave dashing being a thing. They didn't fucking plan for that. But what is wave dashing for the audience? Do you know?
00:44:19
Speaker
It is. I'll put you on the spot. It's a jump and an air dodge that you can, I think, input really quickly. So essentially, you're getting a lot of iframes that you can input it very quickly. Right. I don't think I ever successfully did it, but I know that pros do it a lot. That's all I know.
00:44:38
Speaker
Yeah, and it's insane. But at this point, it's become meta, right? Yeah. So I think it was an exploit, but then it became the norm. So now it's no longer. But I would say something like ice climbers being able to do a wobble. Hmm. Which I can define is they just hit and grab each other, alternating and infinite combo. And you as the other player can't do anything about it at all. Mm hmm.
00:45:06
Speaker
So I think that is a cheating exploit. OK, interesting. So you attach the term cheating for multiplayer games. The morality component of whether you should use it is cheating. Are you playing the game within the spirit of fairness? Versus single player, where cheating or using cheat codes is just, are you playing the game like it was originally intended? So there's a slightly different variation, if that is that accurate.
00:45:37
Speaker
Yeah, I guess my main reason for like using the ice climbers example is technically they still have to input perfectly the people who are playing ice climbers, but
00:45:52
Speaker
It seems like a very small barrier of entry to just completely ruin somebody else's thing. There's no reprisal. There's no competitive answer to getting wobbled. You just don't get grabbed. But how do you know what they're going to do over the course of 10 minutes? Right. There's going to be an opportunity likely. Yeah, I think that's fair. I think part of my take on this is
00:46:17
Speaker
agree with that assessment. It's basically like, to whom would I ascribe the title of cheater, right? If someone is cheater, then they're cheating. And multiplayer, that could be playing the game like it's not intended through exploits or cheats that were programmed into it. You can make the argument that's intended, but I'm coming from the point of playing the game sort of like vanilla.
Advanced Exploits in Games
00:46:42
Speaker
Right. And multiplayer, it's you're playing with tools that other people don't have access to. And it's not just because you bought a better character, it's because other people aren't aware that they can hide in rocks and become invulnerable or warp through walls or have infinite ammo due to a bug or something like that. On that mention, do you remember
00:47:10
Speaker
Forget exactly what it's called. I guess just dicking around in like Halo 2 maps where you could go outside of walls or get super jumps. I remember when we were trying this out on the PC version not too long ago. Not as fun, by the way. You really gotta go back to the old Xbox. You have time travel for it. But I would consider that at least to be cheating in a game. Yeah. Because even if I took the time to like set it up,
00:47:38
Speaker
99% of people are not going to know that I can get to the top of the map and why they've been headshot three times. How did you even get up there? Would you agree with that assessment or do you think there's some leeway? That's basically true. I mean, this is the sort of thing people get banned from multiplayer games for. If the developer is like, there's a bug and we're going to patch it, and then you continue to exploit that bug, then you're cheating. You're just not playing.
00:48:05
Speaker
You're not playing it in the rules. And there's a lot. There's a lot of exploits. We've already mentioned some of them. There's a couple I wanted to hit on specifically. One of the more interesting ones, and this gets used a ton in speed running, which obviously relies on exploits a lot. One of my favorite ones I heard about recently was like,
00:48:32
Speaker
I think it's a Majora's Mask speedrun where midway through the game, you play a different game till like a buffer or something on the memory card and then switch back to the first game for an advantage. It's absolute insanity.
00:48:48
Speaker
But relatively in that space is ACE, or arbitrary code execution, which from a computer science background is also just super cool. But the idea is you are setting up some buffer of memory, something to be run later, and then you go somewhere else to execute that code, and the game does something it wasn't intended to do.
00:49:12
Speaker
Most notably, a classical example is Ocarina of Time and the room with the first boss fight and the great Deku Tree. Deku Tree, however you say it. You fight a giant spider. And from that spider, if you have the right collection of items and you hit the wall a certain amount of times and you drop and you pick up a bug multiple times, you can walk into the heart warp, get the heart piece in warp and warp to Ganon's castle at the end of the game.
00:49:41
Speaker
Okay, so this is the wrong warp, I think, right? Yes, absolutely. Yeah, it's crazy the things that people have found for that. I like that it exists one as a story because it's just, oh, that's a cool, funny thing that happened. Yeah.
00:50:04
Speaker
And lost the second part. No, that's fair. That's fair. God damn it. We're a little bit out of it today, but just got back from traveling, so it's understandable. Yeah, there's some really cool things. The other mention I had for arbitrary code execution is, and this is a more true example because a wrong warp isn't arbitrary code. It's just code that you're
00:50:25
Speaker
setting up in the game to get like missing no or something like that in Pokemon. For Twilight Princess on the Wii, there was a way you could do arbitrary code execution on the memory pack, the memory card.
00:50:42
Speaker
And this allowed people to run a program on the memory card, which allowed for the very first Homebrew Wii systems, because this was an exception and they could break through and take control of the system by running other software.
00:50:58
Speaker
Oh, OK. I had heard of Homebrewed Wii's back in the day, but some friends had them. I never owned a Wii, so I was never this adjacent to it. That's actually really cool, because that would always allow you to download other games and play them on your Wii. Yeah, anything. They could change the system, make updates, like their own updates to the software. It's an entry point that breaks into the secure Nintendo platform, basically.
00:51:26
Speaker
From a tech perspective, it's really cool from hacking.
00:51:32
Speaker
There's a lot of similar examples. One in brief, I remember, I can't remember the exact game, but there was a developer that used arbitrary code execution in a buffer overflow to actually patch their game that didn't have patching capability. It just had online capability. And it was a really cool article. So anytime the exception would be thrown, it would call this arbitrary code to say, I need to download this patch.
00:52:02
Speaker
Uh-huh. They would buffer all of the code that they wanted to run and then hit the overflow and run the code that they attached to it. And it was actual insanity. Old computer science was nonsense. This still is.
00:52:19
Speaker
And I love that. It's really cool. I think most of the other things on this list are more traditional, less technically complex examples of exploits. Are there any others that stand out to you here? Well, I did want to ask about we haven't talked about this probably since the Dota 2 episode, but the infamous exploit of the Dota 2 Fountain Hook. Yes, Navi executed this at an international.
00:52:47
Speaker
Yes, and it was quite the talk of the town. Do you recall how the procedural setup was for this exploit? Yes. So it's pug, pug, Jesus. Pudge is a character who can throw out a hook, kind of like Blitzcrank or somebody else. Once it touches them, it's going to bring them back to pudge. Yeah. And the move would stay active until the chain brought the character back to pudge.
00:53:12
Speaker
There's a separate character called Chen, I think who has it, where he can essentially send a teammate back to the fountain where you heal.
Impact of Exploits on Gameplay
00:53:22
Speaker
And then if enemies are ever in there for any ungodly reason, they die. They take a lot of damage. It's a very strong turret, essentially.
00:53:31
Speaker
So what you could do is start the channel for Pudge to be sent back to the fountain. Meanwhile, Pudge throws out his hook. Pudge gets sent back to the fountain and then the chain goes all the way back from where Pudge hooked that person to the fountain. And they're stuck in this being pulled backwards animation across the entire map as a map wide hook takes them there.
00:53:55
Speaker
Yeah, so basically the argument was between it takes a lot of skill to pull that off, but it seems like a very cheap way to get a kill. Yeah. You basically get a guaranteed kill on one person. And I think in this particular match, the Na'Vi match, they just kept going for the enemy's hard carry. The gyrocopter? Yeah. A very powerful character. A lot of defensive abilities. The rest of the team is going to try to protect him.
00:54:24
Speaker
and they eliminated him from the match entirely and neither pudge nor chin are powerful late game carries so this allowed the rest of their team to like bowl him over basically. Yeah so where do you where do you land on that?
00:54:41
Speaker
It's definitely the gray area because you're just using the mechanics as they interact, precisely as written in the game. But clearly, eventually, the decision was made that this was too powerful of a combination and they nerfed it. So I think it was morally fine to use it up to the point that either the developer chimes in or just changed the rules of the game.
00:55:07
Speaker
I think the change in this case was that if Pudge hooks an opponent, they're always pulled to the point where Pudge landed the hook, not where Pudge is. Yeah. Which is an easy interaction. Didn't nerf either character in normal circumstances, but did break this exploit. I feel like overall, I agree with that. But at the same time, I feel like there has to be
00:55:35
Speaker
If you get a piece of information about something where you just accidentally see somebody's screen, maybe if you're doing split screen for Halo 2, I feel like a part of you has to say, hey, let's not skirmish for 10 seconds. I saw where you are on the map type thing. Right. I guess an internal honesty. Yeah.
00:55:59
Speaker
I think there's a difference though. Like in your example, I think that's because the accepted way to play the game is that you don't screen look, right? Everybody comes to the table with that same expectation. And if someone doesn't, everyone's going to call them a douche bag. They're going to kick them out and we'll get any more pizza or whatever. Um, but in Dota, like these two abilities interacting this way. Well, I guess the question is how long was it known that it was that way?
00:56:27
Speaker
I'm not sure. I'm sure it was probably within that patch. I think both teams knew of its existence prior to playing would be my assumption. Yeah. Na'Vi were just very practiced with the combo and they literally practiced the combo. So they were able to utilize it to, uh, to an effect. I don't think anyone was ready for, for that international, um,
00:56:54
Speaker
I think a lot of it comes down to the developer in that case. You can either use best judgment, like, is this just strictly a better way to play the game? If so, it's probably an exploit. But a better way, a strictly better versus just efficient way to play the game, that's an argument that could be made, right? Like, how good does something have to be before it's an exploit if everything interacts like the tooltip says it does? That's true.
00:57:24
Speaker
Yeah, I can't hard fault them for it. Obviously, as soon as they... Two things they could have done, the developer could have either set a statement saying, we are considering this an exploit and abuse of this will be a banable offense or released a statement saying it's intended for all use or just patched it if you consider it like a middle priority.
00:57:52
Speaker
I feel like you can't not fix it and then ban people if you do it.
00:57:59
Speaker
Yeah, but it doesn't have to be at the same time. And I don't think it should be like a hard ban. But if you release a statement that all players see on login or something, like here's an issue with the game right now. And if you break it, you you buy it or buying it as being banned. I mean, that's within their prerogative to enforce it, then not all games can patch that quickly.
00:58:27
Speaker
So you're saying this would then affect like the current gameplay of people playing. Cause I was thinking about it initially from like a competitive standpoint, who gives a shit if you're doing it in pubs. Right. But I mean, to be fair, a lot of people play pubs and people today even, um, in my game it's five V five. Um, yeah, that would still like make a shitty experience for people.
Funny Game Incidents & Balance Challenges
00:58:53
Speaker
It would suck if you had been practicing a given lane comp or just in general and then you lose to a very cheesy strat that the developers haven't had a chance to fix yet because they found out today.
00:59:08
Speaker
Yeah, there's usually a commiserate response for multiplayer games, like the bug we described here, or the interaction with hooking people all the way back to fountain requires setup, requires coordination. They'll probably wait and fix it in the game, unless it's completely screwing over a tournament with no hope of reprisal. A bug like existed for a while where Chin could, I think it was either Chin or Enchantress, could control Roshan.
00:59:35
Speaker
and make him leave the pit and just control A down mid to kill everything. I'm pretty sure they disabled the hero or they hot fixed the game or something. That was a quick fix. That's an emergency. There's no question about whether it's breaking the game or not. Also, I want to retell my story briefly of the six Blade Mail game. There was a patch where they changed how Blade Mail worked.
01:00:04
Speaker
So you get some flat damage and a percentage return and then you activate it. We should start with what Blade Mail's supposed to do, I think. Blade Mail, when activated, returns all of the damage that you take to the target. So somebody's like punching the face, they're taking the damage back too. So it's a good get off me button, right?
01:00:27
Speaker
So in this patch, I'm not sure how it's specifically coded, but we found out that from the wording and trying it out, you can have multiple blade mails, activate them all at once, and return 600% damage. So somebody goes to punch you, and then they lose a limb.
01:00:47
Speaker
But that existed for exactly one game that we played. But we found out about it and then abused it in that because it was funny. And my argument to the court is that the other team agreed. I feel like everybody found that funny that day. And then it wasn't used and abused throughout time. Yeah, exactly. It's an outlier.
01:01:10
Speaker
You also probably didn't queue up into a competitive game. Correct. This was... Always all pick, always non-ranked. Yeah. I think that's a good example. That covers a lot of things. I don't feel we have to cover everything on the list here, particularly looking at the time. But one that... Or actually, I'm gonna go with...
01:01:36
Speaker
Actually, I'm just gonna go with four. This is the bottom four on the list. I just liked all of them. So the first was Modern Warfare 2, Call of Duty. A lot of people are familiar with that. I love the javelin in Modern Warfare 2. Using it as it's intended, just like picking an arbitrary point on the map, like going down sites with this massive weapon, being super vulnerable, and then calling a missile on it.
01:02:05
Speaker
Like, not a person. A person has to literally walk there and then die to a random missile. But when it hit, it was hilarious because the kill chem was just them, like from the missile, them just walking into its path and then dying to armature to random cause, basically. Not good. Hilarious.
01:02:27
Speaker
I'll say it's better than martyrdom. I'll say it's better than martyrdom. Great that you said that because this bug is super martyrdom basically. For a time there was a primed javelin exploit which required you to like ready the javelin and throw a grenade at the same time.
01:02:44
Speaker
And the effect was you could run around with the javelin, I think like pointed down or something. Um, and as soon as you died, or, uh, I think you like released the trigger, the javelin would explode, which is a very, very large grenade radius, instant. You could also knife people while running around like this. Cause it was a lot more fair too.
01:03:12
Speaker
That's a lot of kill opportunity. It was a problem. You could get shot, explode, run up at him, explode. Then you have a kill streak for dogs. Easy peasy. Easy peasy. You die a lot using this approach. I don't think you can survive the javelin explosion to yourself either. So you're saying I don't equip tactical nuke? Yeah, no, probably not efficient for this one.
01:03:42
Speaker
but I just really like that one.
01:03:45
Speaker
The other one that I really liked is, this is a historical gaming moment, but in World of Warcraft, which I only briefly played because I wasn't with a group at the time, there was the corrupted blood incident. And for those that have never heard of this, it became so popular and so studied that it was used as modeling for terrorism and epidemic research.
01:04:13
Speaker
All right, well now you have to tell the story because I've not heard it and you've built it up. So the source of corrupted blood, it's a debuff.
01:04:22
Speaker
that in the game came from the last encounter in a raid series, or like a raid. The boss of this encounter would hit people with corrupted blood, and it's a spreading dot, basically. For the highest level characters, not a big deal. For low level characters, kills them very fast. But it spreads to nearby characters. The problem was, at the time, pets could be affected by debuffs.
01:04:49
Speaker
So, someone with their pet in the encounter got the debuff. Okay, not a problem. The pet will probably die. Well, they don't want the pet to die. Put the pet away. The pet now has the debuff stored.
01:05:02
Speaker
And as soon as they're brought out, it will re-propagate. Oh. So you can see how bad this gets when they leave the encounter. They go to a major city like Ironforge, where all these players are running around and they're like, be free, my virulent child.
01:05:22
Speaker
And there's screenshots you can still find online of just like in WoW when people died, they'd leave bones, just bones all around these cities. To compound this problem, NPCs were immortal or there were immortal NPCs. But they could also get the stacks. But they could get the buff, becoming asymptomatic carriers.
01:05:42
Speaker
of this death disease. That was going to be my next question because obviously if this happened, I would expect like a wildfire to go through like a town or city, but then you've burned through everybody on the server, right? Yeah. Not with the NPCs though. Exactly. And people can respawn and catch the buff again if anybody, or debuff again if anybody had it. And high level characters. You have to be within range technically too.
01:06:07
Speaker
Yeah. But people are running all over the place. This is when two million people are playing well. Oh, wow. I didn't mean to. Right. Oh, interesting. That's my term. I'll kill you. And so it probably would have burned out because the community Blizzard was not like, I don't know why this was their approach, but they were like, hey, people can voluntarily quarantine to avoid this debuff.
01:06:37
Speaker
And so they'd go to these like, you know, quarantine areas, burn it off. And then other people would get their pets infected, come back in and screw it up. And this is what got studied was different human behavior. There were people who panicked. Like there were people who tried to separate themselves. Some like healers came in and tried to keep people alive while the buff ran out. And then there were other people who wanted to spread the debuff and tried their best to do that.
01:07:08
Speaker
This is where the term bug chaser comes from. It's really cool. I understand the idea of that being funny though.
01:07:19
Speaker
Just like, it has like budget photography style. Like there were news articles about this. I think Washington Post made a news article about it because it was studied a whole lot. And ultimately to solve the problem because their own community was acting against them and perpetuating this was, they made it so pets could not receive the debuff, the dot.
01:07:46
Speaker
and they also did a server rollback.
Conclusion & Feedback
01:07:51
Speaker
So, pretty serious.
01:07:57
Speaker
patch that like pets could still get it, but like if they get put away, clear any of that shit. Yeah. Now there was probably like some persistent buffs or whatever like associated with like Beastmaster class, but I assume they're some rational. They took a rapid approach once it was like, this is major news story worthy showing up places and Blizzard couldn't get a handle on it.
01:08:29
Speaker
So anybody who read and saw this story knew that there was no hope when the coronavirus broke out. They're like, we couldn't fix this in a video game. We're not going to be able to fix this in real life. I mean, also people voluntarily do not want the patch, so. Yeah. Yeah. I'm actually going to cut one of the bottom ones off, but the other one I wanted to mention was Final Fantasy. Well, as long as I can keep one of them
01:08:59
Speaker
Yeah. Just for aesthetic reasons. Put it up on the wall. Final Fantasy VI, there's a lot of bosses that are immune to certain magical effects or conditions, particularly instant death, because why would you make your boss vulnerable to instant death? That seems like a bad idea. However, there was a spell called Vanish.
01:09:21
Speaker
which made them invisible but which I think made them very hard to hit in melee or impossible to hit something like that but it reduced their magical resistance and unintended bug associated with it removed their status resistance so one two punch vanish your boss hit them with doom the boss will not die
01:09:50
Speaker
Not unintentional, but clearly an exploit of the mechanics. God damn. Um, was there any other as any others on this list you thought were particularly notable or interesting? Uh, not at the moment. That's fair. That is fair.
01:10:14
Speaker
I'll leave people with the silliest one then. And Skyrim, if you put a bucket on an NPC's head, their vision isn't, it literally comes from their head and it's blocked. So just in real life, if you put a bucket on someone's head, you can steal all of their things.
01:10:34
Speaker
So try that the next time you're in Skyrim and you want to grab a bunch of stuff. Have the trusty bucket, which unfortunately I don't think you can put that in your inventory, but maybe you can. In which case, great thieving strat. As you walk into someone's shop, drop a bucket on the ground, pick it up, place it on their head, and then just start pocketing stuff out of the counter.
01:10:57
Speaker
Trick or treat, puts bucket on head, steals all candy and goods and clothes. Bell rings as you leave. Thanks for coming by. But if anybody else has any thoughts or perhaps you'd like to share some of your own favorite exploits in video games,
01:11:20
Speaker
or ideas for future episodes, you could send those in at soapstonepodcast.gmail.com, or you could join the discussion on Facebook at facebook.com slash soapstonepodcast. And as always, we'll see you in the next one. Have a good night.
01:12:12
Speaker
Thanks for watching!