289: The Minus Touch

[Brendan Main]

The Minus Touch

Beyond the edges of a game's map lies an unknown and bizarre land, the Minus World, where anything is possible and the normal rules simply don't apply.

Read Full Article

 

[JamesBr]

Interesting read. I must admit, I've always enjoyed accidentally clipping clipping through the world's geometry and falling into the negative space beyond the game world. Hell, if I'm playing a PC game, I occasionally turn off clipping just to explore everything for a point of view otherwise unintended. Although it's all well and good to see everything that the developers wanted you to see, there is definitely a sense of wonder when you step through a wall, turn around and see the entire world sprawl out in front of you. I especially like doing this in underground levels or games that are set in a sequence of room and hallways. Being able to see how the entire dungeon is constructed by observing it from the outside is very cool.

 

[vxicepickxv]

Well, at least you're not talking about the minus worlds of the MMO. The great and dreaded underground, available only by falling through the world. Never a good place to do anything except hide the bodies. Of course, if you do fall through, it makes for a very short and painful corpse run.

 

[New Troll]

Though most "minus worlds" come at me by surprise and end up ruining my day, I still have to try and push-stab-destroy every hindering tile in every old-school RPG cause you never know. Accidentally found an entire town in Super Hydlide so you never know what's under those obstacles.

 

[Lucifron]

Sweet article. Vanilla-WoW had a few awesome minus worlds. Sneaking into Hyjal and filling my screenshot folder with "Under Construction" signs and Archimonde's corpse hanging from the world tree was pretty frikkin' awesome.

 

[Indignation837]

Very interesting read! I love going onto the wikis for various games and looking at their odd little quirks, especially TES4: Oblivion. I still occasionally go looking around in that game just for glitches, like a pair of dismantled character bodies I found floating underneath the Imperial Sewer exit, only visible by disabling clipping. Games have a natural element of exploration, but I think there's something about finding a place that the developers didn't even intend for you to that makes minus worlds even more exciting than the rest of a game.

 

[utimagus]

I remember the first minus world I found was in battletoads in the "lasagna" speeder level. When you get to the last checkpoint, if you die, then as your toad just run into the death ball soup under the lasagna, you will be transported to an unbeatable version of the same level. Unbeatable as it has no ramps, but you still have to make all the jumps. That and it seems to be much faster and intended to kill you to sync you with reality.

 

[shiajun]

The Tomb Raider games made with the original Core engine had this wonderful "corner bug" which is just a delightful glitch that allowed you to clip through a corner and end up high up on a ledge adge you couldn't otherwise access. It is exploited for speed runs and such but I was just fascinated by the way you could end with magnificent vistas of the levels as if you were watching from a helicopter. It sometimes did give the games scope. And sometimes, it revealed that hidden niche with the juicy secret that you weren't supposed to see until you were at the right spot. It's not properly a minus world but it did place you in places where the seams of the world decomposed. Kind of like the end of the world in The Thirteenth Floor.

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.

 

[Wolfram23]

I fell through the bottom of a city in Dragon Age: Origins. The one at the north east corner of the world, the really big one.

About 3 feet below the surface is water. Lots of water. So I was swimming under the streets and buildings, but I could still see above me. It was pretty wierd.

 

[Heart of Darkness]

This actually reminds me of a game I played this past weekend at Otronicon. The game, which I think was an in-beta social simulation called OLive, wasn't particularly great, but the best part I had with the game was traveling to the very edge of the world map and falling off the bottom, only to hit the bottom of the room. I could do everything I could do normally down there--seeing as I never changed maps--, but the only thing I could see was a vast plain of sky blue ground; there wasn't even any indication that there was terrain above me when I looked up from a first person view.

Okay, so it's not exactly a minus world. But hell, I had fun seeing the game from a top-down perspective and watching my character disappear beneath the ground. Ahh, fun times. Oh, yeah, and the rest of the game sucked, too.

 

[Pregnant Orc]

Is the Links awakening glitch world decribed in the article the same as the one available from the boss fight in the first temple?

 

[wildpeaks]

That reminds me of this one in Beyond Good & Evil:
Beautiful sun rise over an infinite ocean

-----------------------

Kind of like the end of the world in The Thirteenth Floor.

Ahh I love that movie

 

[SnipErlite]

approach a door, only to realize it's just a door-painted wall. How wonderful are those moments we can reverse these rules - when we turn walls into doors

I found that oddly poetic. But yes, I love breaking a game and finding out how to get outside the map.

It's both wonderful and terrifying breaking something so well crafted. In fact falling of the map in a game can actually be a bit scary

And of course, one always goes back to the exact same spot and tries to re-create it. Most glitches and map-breaks are really hard to achieve consistently though.

 

[matrix3509]

Very interesting read! I love going onto the wikis for various games and looking at their odd little quirks, especially TES4: Oblivion. I still occasionally go looking around in that game just for glitches, like a pair of dismantled character bodies I found floating underneath the Imperial Sewer exit, only visible by disabling clipping. Games have a natural element of exploration, but I think there's something about finding a place that the developers didn't even intend for you to that makes minus worlds even more exciting than the rest of a game.

As much as I can't stand the Gamebryo engine of Oblivion and Fallout 3, I will admit that it was the most fun engine to mess with on the PC. I remember finding a way to disable any character skeleton, making them fall into a pile, and then you steal something from their house and they are still able to yell at you for stealing (the first time I did this I laughed myself to tears). The same effect can be used with a custom spell that keeps an NPC's stamina a zero. To watch them fall over while still staying alive never got old for me.

 

[ender003]

I found a neat little corner in GTA4 that let me fall through the map, only to land in a nearby intersection. It's a very small hole, barely big enough to fit the scooter into.

 

[Dragonpit]

WoW certainly has it's share of minus worlds. Try the quests in Stranglethorn. One takes you into a phazed Zul'Gurub. At the end, and enemy holds you in place and NPCs try to rescue you by telling you to grab the rope ladder. Fail, you die, and your corpse falls through the floor. Welcome to the minus world.

Have fun. ^_^

 

[Desert Tiger]

Most people call this "Blue Hell".

 

[Twad]

Castlevania Symphony of the night had a huge "minus world" iirc

 

[aldowyn]

I've never been much of an explorer - part of why I wouldn't be very good at that kind of QA.

I can see the appeal, though. To discover a place not meant for you to see, with quirks not in the original game. It's like the myth of the river Styx, where your memories and dreams come to haunt you, only in video game form. The junkyard where the forgotten and disabled parts go.


... Too bad I lack the patience for the repetitive acts needed to find these, that made them sound really cool.

 

[YeyJordan]

Always a thrill to discover these! In my youth, I found one in the Arnhem Knights level of MoH Frontline. It was like I was standing on a glass floor and could see sky beneath my feet and the whole level as it curved around me (it was vaguely donut-shaped). Even triggered the enemy tanks early.

I was so proud :']