Breaking the game

[flying_whimsy]

As gamers, one of the most enjoyable experiences is doing something in a game you aren't supposed to. With the decline of PC gaming (or rather, the console to pc porting of games), this hasn't been as common, but it's still out there.

Whether it be cheat codes, trainers, creative applications of jetpacks, or finding weapons/ability combos that break difficulty like a mirror thrown off a cliff, what are your favorite game breakers?

Personally, I love god mode and the ability to freeze AI and projectiles; I played a totally different Halo 1 from everyone else.

EDIT: I meant broken more in that changing the fundamentals of the gameplay kind of way, not broken as in the Saints Row 2 pc port.

 

[hittite]

Invisibility cheats. It's just funny to sneak up behind all of the enemies and give them a wedgie.

 

[Sleekgiant]

Ever overloaded maps in Forge?

Go into Halo 3 and get infinite spawn on mines, keep throwing till the map ceases to load correctly and voila, broken game.

As far as cheats I do this
-Open Fallout 3
~
tgm
tcl
~

And now you are an unstoppable badass that walks through walls.

 

[Irridium]

Ever overloaded maps in Forge?

Go into Halo 3 and get infinite spawn on mines, keep throwing till the map ceases to load correctly and voila, broken game.

I loved doing that. Especially when you move and it blasts you so high it takes a minute for your body to fall.

OT: Oblivion.

Just start it up on your PC and BAM!, game is broke.

Also Bioshock. Freeze, lightning, and wrench. Pretty much all you'll ever need to go through the game.

 

[Sleekgiant]

OT: Oblivion.

Oh I lol'd good sir

 

[flying_whimsy]

OT: Oblivion.

Oh I lol'd good sir

As did I, but I'm in the campus library.

 

[Sleekgiant]

OT: Oblivion.

Oh I lol'd good sir

As did I, but I'm in the campus library.

Also while we're here

Click STALKER.exe
game broken

 

[Trivun]

I was playing Portal not five minutes ago, and ended up glitching myself in between two portals. It was on the bit after you escape the test-chambers, when you have a platform that you have to duck to get under and jump on the two lifts to get to the top of it, and you need to have a portal on the underside and top of the platform and jump out to get through. Sorry if you don't know where I mean, I'm not good at explaining stuff like that.

Anyway, I stood up so I was half in one portal and half in the other, then fired a blue portal at a different wall. The result was that all the portals disappeared and I couldn't move. Because of where I was positioned, as well, there were no walls anywhere that I could fire at to create a new portal and release me from my trap. Lucky the game auto-saves

 

[Underground Man]

My thing was always walkwalking/seamwalking to weird places in MMORPGs. You always get quite a view.

And cheat codes. DEBUGON FTW.

 

[Boomah]

Finding exploits in level designs in "professionally" designed maps/environments (bsp holes, halls of mirrors, etc). Just yesterday I found a bsp hole in darksiders for pc while fighting a boss monster and ran around outside the level for quite a while .

 

[s0m3th1ng]

Finding exploits in level designs in "professionally" designed maps/environments (bsp holes, halls of mirrors, etc). Just yesterday I found a bsp hole in darksiders for pc while fighting a boss monster and ran around outside the level for quite a while .

That game uses .bsp files? I remember having to deal with that shit from the Hammer editor for half-life. Goddamn R_speeds.

 

[Iwata]

Not exactly an exploit, but it is indeed fun to use a game's system against itself.

Such as scuttling your entire fleet in Homeworld to prevent the AI from adjusting itself to your forces upon entering a new level. That works better than it should. Unfortunately, I'm a masochist, and as such don't enjoy playing Homeworld unless it's really, really hard.

 

[repeating integers]

Not exactly an exploit, but it is indeed fun to use a game's system against itself.

Such as scuttling your entire fleet in Homeworld to prevent the AI from adjusting itself to your forces upon entering a new level. That works better than it should. Unfortunately, I'm a masochist, and as such don't enjoy playing Homeworld unless it's really, really hard.

What. You sir are insane. Homeworld is hard enough as it is, why would you want to make it even harder?

OT: I used to have great fun with the cheats on AoE 2, if that counts. Though I once tried to use the "torpedo *player*" cheat on the Mongol campaign against a nonexistant player 5... which broke the game and made it crash.

 

[Folio]

I broke portal by doing the 'infinite Portal barf'. You go the end of the game, collect ALL the stuff they have in the first office, and shove it in a Portal on the ground. The other side of the Portal should be directly on a wall beside the one on the ground.

This creates an infinite loop of item physics. Portal works like this: Every time you make a Portal, the game creates a copy of the room and the items you put through the Portal. So it keeps copying and deleting items that come through.

I stressed this loop so much, constantly adding and forcing stuff in it that there was some kind of digital 'snap'. All the items flew at a rapid rate and only a few remained.

I picked up a computer mouse and dropped it. It fell through the floor. I picked up a note pad and put it in the Portal loop. It accelerated in speed and flew through the wall.

Since then, all the items I picked up and dropped fell through the floor. O_O The collision check on items was off.

But that's not it. At the end, there is a puzzle with a cube and a rocket launching turret. I managed to rocket the glass tube but the cube... you guessed it, fell through the floor.

Nothing happened for a long time. Until suddenly! CUBES! EVERYWHERE! Millions of collision-less cubes flew through the walls! My computer was lagging like a snail! Adding Portals was not clever either.

Crash. I broke Portal.

 

[Iwata]

Not exactly an exploit, but it is indeed fun to use a game's system against itself.

Such as scuttling your entire fleet in Homeworld to prevent the AI from adjusting itself to your forces upon entering a new level. That works better than it should. Unfortunately, I'm a masochist, and as such don't enjoy playing Homeworld unless it's really, really hard.

What. You sir are insane. Homeworld is hard enough as it is, why would you want to make it even harder?

OT: I used to have great fun with the cheats on AoE 2, if that counts. Though I once tried to use the "torpedo *player*" cheat on the Mongol campaign against a nonexistant player 5... which broke the game and made it crash.

That's just it, the difficulty cuve in Homeworld is just right, so breaking the game to make it easier makes no sense, fun though it may be.

Speaking of which, it'd be nice to get a new entry in the series, were it not for the fact that Sierra died.

 

[Ralen-Sharr]

I always find it fun to try to get into places I'm not supposed to be in a game. Most of it is places I'm not supposed to be YET, but still fun.

Once I even found a sign that congratulated me for finding it. (Gothic 2) Gotta love that stuff

 

[SonicWaffle]

A friend of mine had a bug in his GTA 3 on the PC that allowed the game to run fine, until he pressed a certain button which would crash the game. The button is question? The shoot button!

Serves him right for pirating it.

 

[repeating integers]

Not exactly an exploit, but it is indeed fun to use a game's system against itself.

Such as scuttling your entire fleet in Homeworld to prevent the AI from adjusting itself to your forces upon entering a new level. That works better than it should. Unfortunately, I'm a masochist, and as such don't enjoy playing Homeworld unless it's really, really hard.

What. You sir are insane. Homeworld is hard enough as it is, why would you want to make it even harder?

OT: I used to have great fun with the cheats on AoE 2, if that counts. Though I once tried to use the "torpedo *player*" cheat on the Mongol campaign against a nonexistant player 5... which broke the game and made it crash.

That's just it, the difficulty cuve in Homeworld is just right, so breaking the game to make it easier makes no sense, fun though it may be.

Speaking of which, it'd be nice to get a new entry in the series, were it not for the fact that Sierra died.

I never broke the game at all (didn't know how, really), though it sometimes broke itself with weird, mind-bending glitches. Like the time a Kadeshi Needleship tried to baseball-bat all my captured multi-beam frigates, which all proceeded to phase through it and out the other side... until the game corrected itself and a bunch of MBFs all found themselves INSIDE the enemy Needleship, and promptly blew up.

It was all very odd.

 

[Chewster]

I used to like playing StarCraft, and quick-building a giant fleet of whatever the strongest flying units were using the cheats, and just decimate the enemy. This was more enjoyable in the expansion though, since they gave you a ton guys to obliterate.

I actually remember using a Gameshark with GoldenEye, to break the game for the better. Remember all those multiplayer levels that said "This Door is Locked" at a certain point? The level was still there, you just couldn't get to it. So when you turned on the ability to walk through doors, the levels doubled in size. We also used to play snipers on the Cradle, which was fun. Also, if you turned on infinite ammo and used the throwing knives, the game wouldn't make the thrown knives disappear and so the framerate would drop, super fast and you got to play the game in clunky slow motion.

Most of the time, if a game of mine breaks, it isn't in a "holy fuck, that was so cool in a fucked up sort of way". It is usually more in a "Goddammit, I'm stuck in a corner, behind some shit and I cannot jump my way out" sort of way. Though occasionally, Fallout 3 would break and launch dead bodies way the fuck up into the air for no reason, and that was always amusing. I also once saw a radroach stuck inside a pile of debris, which was less amusing.

 

[AnAngryMoose]

I broke portal by doing the 'infinite Portal barf'. You go the end of the game, collect ALL the stuff they have in the first office, and shove it in a Portal on the ground. The other side of the Portal should be directly on a wall beside the one on the ground.

This creates an infinite loop of item physics. Portal works like this: Every time you make a Portal, the game creates a copy of the room and the items you put through the Portal. So it keeps copying and deleting items that come through.

I stressed this loop so much, constantly adding and forcing stuff in it that there was some kind of digital 'snap'. All the items flew at a rapid rate and only a few remained.

I picked up a computer mouse and dropped it. It fell through the floor. I picked up a note pad and put it in the Portal loop. It accelerated in speed and flew through the wall.

Since then, all the items I picked up and dropped fell through the floor. O_O The collision check on items was off.

But that's not it. At the end, there is a puzzle with a cube and a rocket launching turret. I managed to rocket the glass tube but the cube... you guessed it, fell through the floor.

Nothing happened for a long time. Until suddenly! CUBES! EVERYWHERE! Millions of collision-less cubes flew through the walls! My computer was lagging like a snail! Adding Portals was not clever either.

Crash. I broke Portal.

*Golf Clap*