Broken Games

One time, when I was a kid, I rented Super Mario Bros 3. The game unfortunately had difficulty working and when the old “blow on the cartridge” trick didn’t work I gave up and stuck my fiendishly small child fingers into that NES cartridge, and tried to clean it with my bare flesh. It actually worked. At least until I got to the 8th world. Then it was FUBARed.

Growing up in the NES, one got used to seeing glitchy screens, and (surprise!) that’s actually where the idea behind the Sprixelsoft logo came from. I actually used a program called glitchNES  to create the odd shape that you see in there as well as this post’s featured image. Believe it or not, but that broken jumble of pixels actually stirs up nostalgia!

Something that’s interesting about today’s digitial distribution method for games, is that it’s easier than ever to get patches into games. There were quite a few games in my childhood that could have benefited from patching (I’m looking at you Quest for Glory IV), but it’s also great when years after the fact undiscovered bugs surface to the top.

Here’s a couple of great ones that have been written about on Kotaku:

• http://kotaku.com/how-to-break-final-fantasy-iv-499854588
• http://kotaku.com/5924518/how-to-break-final-fantasy-vi

Wonder how bug-free we can make our game?

On an un-related note; if you haven’t got your fill of me rambling just yet, here’s an article that I wrote yesterday for Young Web Builder for my multi-part series on indie game dev.