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.
Stephen King's "The Mist" for PC is unbeatable because there is a typo in one of the dictionary's words. Other versions don't have this problem, I think. I tested (frustratingly ;) the Thunder Mountain budget re-release and confirmed. No idea if the original has this problem; I also don't know about other platforms.
---SPOILER WARNING!!!---
Dragon Lord (more info at www.mobygames.com/game/sheet/p,2/gameId,1469/) had you breeding dragons to take over the other villages in a fantasy-setting world. The reason? From the box: "If you become the first of the three Lords to piece together the magic Talisman you will achieve the ultimate prize... immortality!" Sure enough, the first (and only) time I won the game, I entered Dwarf Mountain, pieced together the talisman, and... turned to stone. Anyone familiar with Doctor Who will be channeling The Five Doctors right about now. Personally, I thought this ending was quite awesome, but some others thought it sucked.
---END OF SPOILER---
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.
This was incredibly frustrating in Eye of the Beholder PC version -- when you win, you get a single text screen that explains how you emerge from the sewers victorious, with no sound or music, and then hitting a key drops you to DOS. The developers explained that because of deadlines and disk space requirements, the elaborate animation that is present in the Amiga version simply didn't fit on the PC version (Amiga 3.5" disks hold 800K, PC DSDD 3.5" disks hold 720K).
Another fun story comes from the Blue Sky Rangers for the game Vectron. From intellivisionlives.com: According to the instruction book, if you beat the top level, #99, you will be rewarded with "a special little visual treat." The treat? Due to space constraints, there was only room for a message reading "Congratulations. You are very good." The difficulty increases so much, though, that it is impossible to beat level 99. Or at least, Mark Urbaniec (the programmer) hopes it is. "If I went through all that to see the 'special visual treat' and all I got was, 'You are very good,'" Mark notes, "I'd sure be pissed."
Although I haven't won it yet, Archipelagos (more info at http://www.mobygames.com/game/sheet/gameId,6055/) has 99 user-created levels and then a random-level generator for levels 100 to 9999 :-). I am assuming you get a "good job" message at the end of the user-generated levels. (On a side note, Archipelagos is one of my favorite games of all time. I told Paul Carruthers that, and he was kind enough to send me a copy of Archipelagos 2000 as a thank-you.)
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" :)
Which Ultima game was that?
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? :)
Argh, yes! I was frustrated one too many times doing that. Being a budding programmer at the time, I ended up just read the listings and interpreting what they did in my head. However, the clever listings at Family Computing magazine knew some people would do this, and they intentionally scrambled key pieces of data in the DATA statements, needing a descramble at program run-time.
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Jim Leonard ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.oldskool.org/
Want to help an ambitious games project? http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
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