289: The Minus Touch

[Anacortian]

I think the reason we want old games on new platforms to still have the bugs of old is identical to the reason we don't want Mark Twain edited to the Chronicles of Narnia shuffled to chronological order: We want things to be as they were. Once the work is sent to print, it's finished, and amendment can only come with a exceptional reason and justification (Tolkien's amending of The Hobbit).

When I first played Legend of Zelda on the Wii, I got to one of those screens where there was too much going and the character would flash and move a little slowly. Surely the Wii has the ability to fix that old bug, but I found myself thrilled that they retained it. In that moment, I might as well have been sitting Indian-style on the floor, playing a NES and vacuum tube TV , with my brother begging for a turn, and the smell of Mom making dinner downstairs. The retention of that idiosyncrasy made the Wii replay more than a revisit; it became a reunion.

 

[millertime059]

When I first played Legend of Zelda on the Wii, I got to one of those screens where there was too much going and the character would flash and move a little slowly. Surely the Wii has the ability to fix that old bug, but I found myself thrilled that they retained it.

A wonderful point. There is something powerful about that nostalgic factor, where any minor change is an atrocity. Think of The Uncanny Valley, something is just off, and nothing seems right about it. It can be something small, bugs removed in an emulator, those eyes... horrible horrible eyes in an Uncanny Valley creation. Whatever the case you are distracted from all the good work.

This is part of the reason I loved the Mega Man 9 game. It intentionally recreated many of the old graphical glitches and bugs of the original games. Seeing the sprites flickering gave me throwbacks to the days of my youth playing Mega Man 2 & 3.

 

[MasterSplinter]

In 2009 two friends and me made a game for a videogame contest. A straight Mario copy with Worms controls and a Freddy Kruger plot (it's a dream and if you die there you die for real). It was made with Action script 1 and Flash MX so we couldn't make save files. We ended up using the ye'ol password to access level method. Almost at the end i convinced my friends to include a secret level, we had a horrible level we used to test things so we added a picture of us as the background and voila!.

 

[Fiend Dragon]

Back during the early Lich King era, I ran into a bizarre portal glitch in WoW where I disconnected while taking a portal to or from Undercity and Northrend, not sure which order, where my client displayed the Eastern Kingdoms landscape but the server knew I was still in Northrend.

SO, it let me use my flying mount and I got a nice long birds eye tour of the old world and the placeholder art used in Gilneas. There was a singular dwarf NPC standing on a pier at the very western coast of Tirisfal, just sitting there, staring out at the ocean longing, almost as if he was dreaming of going out there, to challenge social stigmas and become the first dwarf to sail the great seas.

I'm surprised that there's been no mention of Halo 2. It's possible it was just in local circles, but Halo 2's multiplayer was absolutely ruined for me once everyone got obsessed with breaking outside of the map limits EVERY SINGLE TIME to just... look around before getting bored and killing each other, which usually led to fights because it was hard to get back. Idiots. The amount of time people spent figuring out exactly the right place to jump, the right place to use a grenade, was just ridiculous.

 

[fanklok]

Guild Wars didn't have a "minus world" per se but before AN caught wind of it assassins could shadow step to get behind the enter/exit portals in the world map and stare out into the vast nothingness you weren't supposed to see, some parts even had land masses that let you go all the way to another portal and circumvent the entire area.

 

[the1ultimate]

I have to admit I find minus worlds kind of creepy for me the scariest would have to be the Beta Quest worlds in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

They seem to be assembled of outdated code, information from cutscenes and are arrived by skewing the your access point to the game - effectively playing the game at the title scene demo.

I have never accessed it myself, but I have heard of things such as a small Jabu-Jabu, inside a larger one in the pond, in an area where the game crashes if anything leaves the screen.

Personally I can barely explore beyond Hyrule field, despite the fact that nothing in the game proper scares me at all.

There is also kind of a minus world in Oblivion, which shares a similar worldspace to the testing hall (which doesn't really count as minor). It is a small square patch of land with some empty buildings, surrounded by water which doesn't necessarily fill every block where water should flow.

It's actually quite peaceful, and it's nice to know not everything in a game is rigorously programmed.

 

[V1CE]

My Dad and I were playing N64's F-Zero, when at the start of the race he hit Boost and lost control, then hit both sides of the road and bounced right off the track to the track below whitch was the Finish Line and bounced across it with a record time of 12 Seconds, we must have laughed for 10 Minutes straight! Then I/We tried for days to replicate it but it was a fluke.

I used to play Pilot Wings and just fly in a straight line for miles till the game island would dissappear behind me and then a few minutes later reappear on the horizon in front of me.

I think the next Tron movie should showcase the minus world effect, that would be very interesting indeed!
.

 

[SomeBoredGuy]

Reminds me of when I was playing Modern Warfare 2 with my friend on my brother's Xbox and he showed me how you could get to an empty version of part of one of the Pripyat levels of CoD 4 by going outside the map. Fun times.

 

[Worgen]

the last minus world I found was in ass creed brotherhood, I was parachuting off the house you get and into the water, I almost made it to the other side and ended up parachuting tho the water and going down under the city till I landed in.... well the game said it was water, you could splash around but it was just a lot of blue

 

[thenumberthirteen]

The only one I ever saw was in San Andreas. If you put in the Jetpack cheat while in the Gym on the first Island (the one with the boxing ring) you could fly up through the ceiling into a bizarre world of grey that was full of invisible walls and random NPCs. Freaky.

 

[Thaliur]

Interesting article. I remember spending hours trying to ge into the empty city in Two Worlds.

Well, as Dumant said "All that is visible must grow beyond itself, into the realm of the invisible".

 

[GonzoGamer]

There is Big Rig Racing of whatever that game was called where physics didn't exist and you could just drive into infinity, up 90° walls and out of the world, and accelerate up to the speed of light. Fascinating.

Big Mother Truckers I think.
Good point. If the game isn't a complete mess, things like this are cool. After exploring every corner of San Andreas, falling into Blue Hell is pretty cool.
However if it happens in Fallout Vegas after your game has crashed a dozen times that day, it feels less "ooo look what I found" and more "how lazy were these guys"
Intentional secret areas on the other hand are a whole 'nother story.
What RPG was it (Luna?) that had the mountain you could cut through instead of skirting the entire map. Of course the mountain didn't look like it had a cave, you just had to know to rub up against that part of the environment.

 

[Sniper Team 4]

The only worlds I have ever wanted to leave are the Nazi zombie maps. For one, I ask myself, "Why I am staying in this zombie infested place when I could just dive out a window or climb and fence and run?" Also, there are details outside of the play area that I want to look at. I was utterly thrilled when I found out you could get outside of the map in Shi No Numa and run into the swamp. To top it off, there was a hidden message outside of the map, meaning the developers wanted people to escape.

 

[Joshimodo]

There is Big Rig Racing of whatever that game was called where physics didn't exist and you could just drive into infinity, up 90° walls and out of the world, and accelerate up to the speed of light. Fascinating.

Big Mother Truckers I think.

Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing.

the last minus world I found was in ass creed brotherhood, I was parachuting off the house you get and into the water, I almost made it to the other side and ended up parachuting tho the water and going down under the city till I landed in.... well the game said it was water, you could splash around but it was just a lot of blue

I had it happen in AC2, in one of the tombs. Jumped for a ledge, only to have the ledge knock me over and slide through it, outside the walls. The guards could see me, and were just running into a wall, and all I could do was swim around beyond the game barriers.

Also had it happen in the final boss of AC:B, which was a *****. When you have to stab the guy in the neck to take his armour off, it glitched, catapulted me away, but then reverted to an off-centre image of me trying to stab him in the neck, for eternity. After pausing, everything but the background had disappeared.

Guild Wars didn't have a "minus world" per se but before AN caught wind of it assassins could shadow step to get behind the enter/exit portals in the world map and stare out into the vast nothingness you weren't supposed to see, some parts even had land masses that let you go all the way to another portal and circumvent the entire area.

Yeah, 2 areas allows any class to do it for a short time as well. One in Cantha, the other just north of Sanctum Cay.

I had a Droks run from an Assassin, who just Shadow Stepped behind the portal and ran around. Made the journey through Lornar's Pass and Snake's Dance much easier.

 

[GonzoGamer]

There is Big Rig Racing of whatever that game was called where physics didn't exist and you could just drive into infinity, up 90° walls and out of the world, and accelerate up to the speed of light. Fascinating.

Big Mother Truckers I think.

Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing.

the last minus world I found was in ass creed brotherhood, I was parachuting off the house you get and into the water, I almost made it to the other side and ended up parachuting tho the water and going down under the city till I landed in.... well the game said it was water, you could splash around but it was just a lot of blue

I had it happen in AC2, in one of the tombs. Jumped for a ledge, only to have the ledge knock me over and slide through it, outside the walls. The guards could see me, and were just running into a wall, and all I could do was swim around beyond the game barriers.

Also had it happen in the final boss of AC:B, which was a *****. When you have to stab the guy in the neck to take his armour off, it glitched, catapulted me away, but then reverted to an off-centre image of me trying to stab him in the neck, for eternity. After pausing, everything but the background had disappeared.

In Asscree Brohood I had something like that happen to me. Trying to tackle a courier, I bounced off his back and while stuck in that hanging off a ledge pose my Ezio started floating up and back into the sky like Chris Angel. I eventually saw the entire breakdown of the entire landscape: the Island of Rome surrounded by a paper thin ring of mountain. It stopped when I tried to access a memory: dropping me off to the closest place on the map to where I went over it.
As I hadn't run into too many glitches, I thought it was pretty cool. A similar thing happened to me in Fallout NV and I wasn't as amused.

 

[Danz D Man]

There's a glitch in Shadowrun (Xbox 360/Vista version) where you can still access the "large version" area of a "small version" map. (I'm finding this hard to explain. The map Poco has a big version and a small version, and the area that doesn't exist in the small version is just blocked off).

You can fly over the walls and access the larger version, but it's completely dark and Teleport doesn't work in it. But anything that creates light still makes light for a few seconds. It's really cool.

 

[Tim Latshaw]

"Delightfully Narnian." That's such a sweet term.

I think one of the best parts of glitches like these, which you touched upon, is how they can break you out of the "box" of the game world and remind you you're playing something that was made by people and that it was probably really hard and complicated to do so. It may sound weird, but the flaws make me appreciate what goes into a game more.

 

[Iron Lightning]

I'd say the most interesting minus world glitch I've experienced was in EVE Online. I was just drifting through space towards an acceleration gate when I slipped into another dimension. A brilliant green radiance flooded space, almost blocking out the stars, the guidance lights turned into auras of emerald plasma flowing like honey down an invisible dome. In the distance new radially-symmetrical nebulae formed out of the same beautiful material that replaced the guidance lights. In awe, I cut my engines and waited, starring at this wonderful new space. After several failed attempts to plot a waypoint in this structureless environment, I proceeded along my previous path and slipped back into the blackness of the intended world after only a few kilometers. I looked around and realized just how dull the void is when it is a destination and not merely a medium for travel. I think it was then that I started in EVE Online with its universe of planetlike mirages lacking any indigenous life.