You can defeat the Dream Devourer from Chrono Trigger using an int overflow(chrono.fandom.com) |
You can defeat the Dream Devourer from Chrono Trigger using an int overflow(chrono.fandom.com) |
I never understood how that particular bit of logic could have been coded that way - it seemed so unnatural.
- Player has a stat of 100
- Wears "+10%" helm
- Player has a stat of 110
- Removes helm, game subtracts 10%
- Player has a stat of 99
Actually, now that I think about it more, that wouldn't work as described above because once your stat got close to zero you'd enter a kind of Zeno's Paradox situation.
I soent a lot of time grinding up the levels on the spells to get the extra cool effects that would happen more frequently as your spell level approached 9. Though it would never pass 8:99 if I recall correctly.
I lent the game to a friend. His kid brother overwrote every save file with one called Mnupll.
Love the game. Never redid that. Would have liked to max out weapons because I think you could grind for orbs in the final fort.
Chrono Cross is a very interesting game on its own but it's a terrible sequel that is remarkably spiteful to its senior. (The thing with FATE and Robo, the Porre thing, the fate of Crono and co., it's a terrible fanfic made canon).
Trigger only worked because of Toriyama gathering the all-star staff (look up the interview with Torishima giving the details). Cross was out of his hands and it shows.
But I agree. Chrono trigger it's the closet thing to perfection in a JRPG. Just pure mastering of the craft in all areas, music, art direction, gameplay, pacing, etc.
It's not that cross it's bad, not at all, has a lot of innovation, but Trigger has a big shadow to scape.
Cross has this underlying sense of menace beneath the idyllic (and wondrous) atmosphere of the archipelago. I think it's incredible.
Personally I don't care much about stories in games. Most of them are awful anyways. I really gravitate towards atmosphere, and Cross has that in spades.
Even if you go out of your way to use your favorite characters or try to use elements it just becomes slower but not harder. There's almost no reason to use the League of Extraordinary Accents. This game SCREAMS to have something like Lufia II's Ancient Cave where you can get some thrills with those mechanics. The fixed level system really works against it.
There's potential in there, but it feels like most of the mechanics shy away from using it.
Also, despite the music being great, the battles and boss battles reuse the same theme 99% of the time, which gets tiring fast. And the regular boss battle theme happens to be the worst track in all of the game (DU-DU! DUDUDUDU-DU-DU! pirori pirori pirori~ DU-DU! DUDUDUDU-DU-DU!)
But the worst part is the freaking dwarfs trying to give you the eco-friendly message about how humans are destroying the environment and whatnot...despite humans not even being industrialized in all of El Nido (except for those guys outside of time) and they say that while committing genocide against the fairies with heavy smog-spewing machinery and tanks. Like give me a break... Every human settlement in El Nido is comfy nature-friendly villages and you are giving me the talk while riding a freaking tank.
> Personally I don't care much about stories in games
I cant relate to this.
Chrono trigger is a game I love because of the great story.
If you’re playing rpgs and you don't care about the story or characters…
I have no idea. Its like reading a book and saying you don't enjoy the story; you're what, just there for the physical motion of turning the pages?
No idea. Chrono cross left no impression on me. I agree with the parent post.
Agreed, there's just something really special about it. You may appreciate these guys, I've had their playlist on repeat for years while working: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p636Rw_L3XU&list=PL1FBFF9D52E7...
Thank you for sharing this - here’s what I’ve had on my playlist recently: https://youtu.be/zWeGxKsPXZ4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JQxH77NWEQ
OCReMix is quite good for this.
- in Pokemon gen 1 you can wrap your stats back to zero by buffing them too much
- In FF7 you can overflow the damage calculation to kill Ruby in one hit
- Mario 64 has a mountain of usable glitches; "parallel universes" let you skip collisions at high speeds
- GTA 3/VC/SA have crazy mission/wrong warp corruptions involving parallel game simulations
- NES Mario can be corrupted to execute arbitrary code in TAS
- OOT can be heap-corrupted so badly you can write a loader for an entire DLC via controller ("triforce%", my choice for most insane controller based hack of a game)Pokémon, too!
If you deal 3 damage, it goes to 196. 196+60=256.
This overflows to zero and you win.
(I still need to finish the FoE romhack though)
In the days of DOS, the BIOS would load the first sector of a floppy disk or hard drive into memory and transfer control to it. You could replace that sector, and not a single line of code that you didn't write yourself would be executed after that. THIS is how it should be on a PERSONAL computer. A virus could do the same, of course, and gain full control of the machine, but that is not an argument against giving control to the user. You could blame DOS for not intercepting attempts to rewrite the boot sector and asking the user for consent, but completely preventing something like this in the name of security would be even worse!
Imagine if back then, there was a "secure boot" mechanism so that only a boot sector with Microsoft's cryptographic signature was allowed, and that boot sector code would in turn verify everything loaded afterwards. Linux wouldn't exist. So, neither would Android, but the situation would be much the same as it is now, only with Microsoft Phone OS instead -- and absolutely no concept of how it could be different, of a computing device controlled by its user instead of a giant corporation.
Ideally, ios and Android would be secure enough that no jailbreaks are possible, but open enough to allow the user to replace the OS with one of their choosing.
Having it locked down and then resorting to exploiting loopholes is the worst of both worlds.
If you write a game in a decent language where such a thing won't happen by mistake you can still have it be present on purpose and in some cases that even fits the game's lore.
Random glitches are confusing and bad. Falling off the world in Blue Prince due to collision bugs is annoying for example. However "glitches" which are intended behaviour are fun. I've enjoyed every time I saw somebody get that note and gift from Mrs Babbage because they drafted that particular room in that particular place and it had an effect which in hindsight they now realise was both foreseeable and regrettable...
And despite being trigger/cross love this one as well https://open.spotify.com/album/7izJQDtszjo9DbOVEMsvEj?si=HnN...
Hard for me to listen to the last one without getting a little emotional, something about the lyrics and simple piano accompaniment
Cross is mechanically a mess. My least favorite part is how you must equip eleventy billion elements, it's tedious as heck, and it sort of discourages you from trying other characters because even bulk-switching elements doesn't work well due to slot and native element differences.
It was also very slow by contemporary standards. That 10 second camera wag before every fight gave them time to load assets etc., but it is very frustrating to watch every time.
I still think the atmosphere shines brightly enough to surmount these issues. It's not just that the game is beautiful, it's that the vibe is completely unique to this day, imo. FF7 also had that undertone of menace and "something's not quite right here", but there was always at least one obvious threat. In Cross, it's hard to ever put your finger on what has really gone wrong for most of the game, but you can feel in your bones that something creepy is going on. The juxtaposition between that and some of the most beautifully poignant art and music on the PS1 just hit the spot for me.
The atmosphere in Cross is really good yeah, but the plot and gameplay issues really hold it back. I can forgive it being a bad sequel (mean-spirited towards Trigger at times for some odd reason) or having a silly plot, but I can't forgive the wasted potential. Feels like the director lost interest once the Radical Dreamers portion was remade.
I used to call that the "Sony-mandated camera spin" because I half-seriously thought that spinning the camera over the field and characters was a prerequisite for getting a PlayStation devkit in the first place. It's in so many JRPGs, it was in Bust-A-Move (Bust-A-Groove), the dancing game, when one character solos, etc.
Sony actually had policies like this; for example, sprite-based PlayStation games were popular in Japan but near-forbidden in North America, because SCEA's marketing strategy was to emphasize 3D polygon graphics and convey a sense that the world had moved on from sprites. Of course, much like modern mobile policies, if you were big enough the rules could be bent for you. Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and other tentpoles could thus release sprite-based games.
I think you were intending for novels, but poetry books typically don't really have much in the way of "story", just aesthetics. Even for novels, there are many that I primarily appreciate the prose. I love everything about the Kingkiller Chronicle books, but the prose itself is quite pleasant in isolation, and I could probably appreciate the books even if the story and worldbuilding weren't good.
Plenty of RPGs don't have much in the way of story. The story of the first Final Fantasy is nearly absent. Same with the first Diablo, and most roguelikes. Obviously, you can enjoy an RPG without caring for the story or characters, because the main point the vast majority of games is to play them.
The closest thing would be telling someone they’re reading a choose-your-own-adventure book wrong somehow, and even then it’s a stretch.
If someone revealed to you that they enjoyed "You are a shark" as much as "Cave of Time", and after inquiring you learned that they don't read the page, they just skip to the decision, and backtrack if they get a The End:
Did they enjoy the game? If there are enough of these type 2 readers should the industry start catering to them over legacy type 1 page readers?
Would it be so wrong for someone to enjoy something in a different way than you do? Or should they be chastised for enjoying it the wrong way?
You’re welcome to ask what brings them enjoyment, to broaden your views, instead of dismissing them.
Saying “you didn’t like it right” is gatekeeping.