It’s weird up there. Different controllers will change the layout of the world. I think I’ve even seen maps for the hidden kingdom demarcating what controller you need to get to certain parts of it.

The game is totally awesome, I agree, but it terrified me as a child. It had the creepiest rendition of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” ever, and there was the spiders, and all you had was the flashlight, and that one part kept bouncing you away if you didn’t have enough diamonds, and oh god, the time limit. Man, that game gave me literal nightmares.

Consider Street Fighter Alpha 3. One of the most difficult matchups in the game for both players is V-ism Akuma vs V-ism Zangief. At first it may look like Akuma has the advantage – he has a fireball, about a million ways to move around the screen, and control space. Gief by himself has a vicious close game and probably the best jumping attack in the game…not enough to really turn the tide. But thanks to a few quirks in the game, Gief can not only fight back, but make it a difficult battle for Akuma. What’s known as the “Kattobi Cancel” for some reason, will send Zangief flying across the screen when he clicks into his custom combo mode, suddenly allowing him to close a ton of space and plaster Akuma with the CC of his choice. Another odder glitch involves his spinning piledriver – someone discovered at some point that by canceling the first couple frames of an attack into the grab will double the range, allowing Zangief to grab Akuma outside of Akuma’s longest normal attack range. And in a game where spacing and mind games are incredibly important, it creates a very difficult fight for both characters that forces the players to outthink each other.

There’s other examples; Roll Cancels in Capcom vs SNK 2 effectively make any special move invincible, Alternate Guard in King of Fighters 98 makes you ungrabbable, and Marvel vs Capcom 2 is pretty much one giant glitch in itself. It’s fascinating to see how these games are played change over the course of just a few years.

On a side note, probably my favorite glitch was in Atari 2600 Mountain King, where you could reach a whole new world created essentially out of garbage code.

Monkey Island 2 on Hard Mode

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yDeiCQxm2A

A shame, too. It’s incredible, how much mileage you can get out of an exploitable glitch. It changes the game completely.

When I watch a video of a speed run of an old game, I am frequently struck by the idea that I’ve been looking at the game wrong, playing it wrong, my entire life. Oh my god, I just realized I’ve written about speed runs before:

I feel like speedruns force you into looking at an old, familiar platformer in a new way—“I never even thought to do that,” or “I had no idea you could warp like that!” In one remarkable moment in this particular speedrun, for instance, every airborne foe is appropriated as, in effect, a floating stair step. It’s a revelatory, mysterious, even magical feeling, to see this old thing in such a new way.

And—I think this is related—speedruns reveal that a seemingly linear 2D platformer, isn’t really linear at all. After watching this Super Mario Bros 2 speedrun, I feel like, only just now, I realize that this game is full of possibility. There are, in fact, a myriad of different ways to play it and beat it, a myriad of divergent pathways to one end. It takes my perception of the 2D sidescroller—move left-to-right, ever forward toward the end goal—and, literally and metaphorically, gives it depth and moment.

Except that I’ve abused the word ‘myriad’ there, I’m pleased to say I still agree with myself—that doesn’t actually happen very often, when I look over things from a year ago, or longer—and that I still find it mysterious and magical, to discover that two-dimensional ‘linear’ games aren’t linear at all, because they are so breakable.

Unrelated to all this: Sharkey remarked that part of the tragedy of game-breaking is, when an old game gets ‘broken’ you’re generally able to play on. The game doesn’t necessarily crash or ‘glitch out’ so much as it transports you to a secret, messy game board, for instance. Most modern technologies crash in lieu of glitching, making the opportunities for game-breaking woefully scant.

I don’t think you’ve copped-out, and for me, personally, those are the two circumstances in which I do cheat. Out of frustration at being stuck, or sucking badly (Modern Cheat), or for the fun of pushing the boundaries of the system that the game designer(s) have created (Magical Cheat). I will admit that, in the past, after Modern Cheating, I’ve felt pangs of guilt and even given up on games rather than continue on with the “ruined” experience. Once I’ve opened up Pandora’s Cheat Box, why even try to go back. That might be a reason (along with the lost free time of youth) I play games almost exclusively on Easy, nowadays. Also, maybe there is a third “Competitive Cheat” that covers multi-player games?

The “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” article makes a compelling case for our brains getting rewired in some way, and it actually had me worried. Upon first viewing it, I did the exact type of skimming that it was describing before realizing that and then forcing myself to go back read through the whole thing. Are we beginning to skim through games by cheating?