Mines of Titan by Westwood / Infocom from 1989 comes to mind. The game plot involves travelling to cities on the surface of Titan. The key city, Procesnium, was expected to be discovered and entered via an underground network. However, if you find the city on the surface of the planet and attempt to enter it the game freezes and throws up strange graphics chunks in the display window. At the time I assumed I had a bad copy, or played it on an incompatable machine (Tandy), etc. I went back to this game, on and off, for years but was hit with the same problem. I found out only recently that the problem is a coding bug.
Drove me nuts! I spent many hours playing that game only to give up completely frustrated. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Dan Chisarick" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2003 9:13 AM Subject: [SWCollect] Vintage games w/fatal flaws > Just wondering if anyone has any good stories of an older game they > were playing that was somehow unbeatable due to a coding flaw, or just > downright not fun for design reasons. I've been looking for an > original 'Doriath' for years. I stumbled on this site, and my free > time being what it is these days, say "what the hell" and just read the > walkthrough. The game is unbeatable! That's not in the good sense: > > http://members.shaw.ca/Doriath/Walkthru.htm > > If you read the walkthrough and then follow the links at the bottom, > you never get an acknowledgment from the game that you've won. There's > a link to an interview w/the developers that explains you've > essentially "won" once you make it to a certain room. Its sad to see a > game never being polished because of artificial deadlines (like that > never happens anymore) or even more frighteningly, running out of > memory/disk space. > > Second to this are games that take hours to beat, give you one life, > have no save feature, and you can put the game in an unwinable state > and not realize it. Console games (at least earlier ones) seem > particular guilty of such offenses. Thrown in certain Mindscape games > ("Spell of Destruction" and "Fairlight" I think fell into this hole, at > least partially). > > Third would have to be needless player frustration: Jumping puzzles, > tedious movement puzzles (Sierra 3D games are notorious for this), and > I'd have to throw in my entering the words of "Truth, Love and Courage" > in the wrong order after spending 2.5 hours getting to the bottom of a > certain 8-level dungeon to get the Codex of Infinite Wisdom just to be > kicked back to the surface. Augh! (Its "corveramo" , no "veramocor" > :) > > Last, and somewhat humorously, ever type in a game in Basic or assembly > from a magazine, and it didn't work? Seems the feature title ALWAYS > had some little typo in it that would require you to buy next month's > issue to resolve? :) > > With DVD-ROM titles, cheat codes, strategy guides, and every game > either being Real Time Strategy or 3D shooter, endings are very well > defined :) How else would they sell level add-on packs? > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > This message was sent to you because you are currently subscribed to > the swcollect mailing list. To unsubscribe, send mail to > [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of 'unsubscribe swcollect' > Archives are available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent to you because you are currently subscribed to the swcollect mailing list. To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of 'unsubscribe swcollect' Archives are available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
