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Games with bugs stopping the game being finished thread


Magic Knight

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Ok - title says it all.

 

Games such as universal Hero (mastertronic) have been patched due to a bug stopping the game getting past a password stage

 

Colony (mastertronic) is one near impossible due to the random rocks and One man and his Droid i think is another which cannot be done. (another mastertronic game - no surprise)

 

Frustratingly - Rockford (mastertronic.......) appears to have a lack of tokens at level 9 making this impossible..

 

Does anyone know of other games that have these types of bugs making completion impossible? (Not counting random screen generators which go on endlessly - such as Rogue).

 

And also any patched version for the above etc that can be linked/attached?

 

It would be good to have these gems of games available in complete form (like Universal Hero).

 

 

 

Richard

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Hmm,

 

Sidewinder by Futureware, later by Zeppelin Games; there is a laser barrier which one cannot pass with the helicopter in the original version. A video at atarionline shows this and they also released a patched version, alas I cannot find the topic anymore...

 

Mystik / Mystix - World of Horror (german graphic adventure): The game uses compiled TB XL, from time to time errors appear, one enters the Runtime and is greeted with Error xx at line xxxx: Dos, Run or Load ?!? A look at the files on the DOS 2.5 disk also reveals that one or more files give Error 164 (when one repairs this Error, the file/s get shorter but still do not work)... thanks to these Errors and bugs the commercial game is unsolvable...

 

Adalmar (cheap german Defender of the Crown clone): same authors as Mystik and also compiled TBL XL; from time to time one is greeted from the Runtime with Error xx at line xxxx: DOS, Run or Load ? Due to another bug, one cannot conquer or capture all castles in this commercial game...

 

Tic Tac Toe (in full) 3D by Atari, the movie wargames tells, one cannot win this game... ;-) ;-) ;-)

 

Koronis Rift: original european disk version by Activision, one level (rift) cannot be solved, since they destroyed a data sector with their copy protection... :-(

 

-Andreas Koch.

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Hmm,

 

Sidewinder by Futureware, later by Zeppelin Games; there is a laser barrier which one cannot pass with the helicopter in the original version. A video at atarionline shows this and they also released a patched version, alas I cannot find the topic anymore...

 

Interesting!

I´d like to identify the version.

 

Tic Tac Toe (in full) 3D by Atari, the movie wargames tells, one cannot win this game... ;-) ;-) ;-)

 

but is it unbeatable at all ?

or only the joke of the movie :P

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Ok - title says it all.

 

Games such as universal Hero (mastertronic) have been patched due to a bug stopping the game getting past a password stage

 

Well, the true classic here is of course Montezuma's Revenge. Well, of course this was a demo piece, but one without ending because it wasn't completed. The 16K cart version that came later could be completed, but was kind of cut-down from the full version.

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In Red Max, there was a part where I could never get the bike through to be able to complete the level (2nd to last or last I think).

 

So I found the relevant part of screen data and patched the game to leave a gap. No idea if it was due to design or just a bad copy I had in the first place.

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Well, the true classic here is of course Montezuma's Revenge. Well, of course this was a demo piece, but one without ending because it wasn't completed. The 16K cart version that came later could be completed, but was kind of cut-down from the full version.

 

The UK Datasoft and Disk releases was a demo piece? Whats the story behind this one i wonder.. Time constraints?

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Databyte, not Datasoft.

 

Parker Brothers saw the game and wanted a smaller version for cartridge. Funny thing is the program never made it to ROM - well, only as a prototype - and ended up as a disk release.

 

Databyte bought the rights for distribution in Europe on tape / disk (for the finished game, of course).

 

--

Atari Frog

http://www.atarimania.com

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In Red Max, there was a part where I could never get the bike through to be able to complete the level (2nd to last or last I think).

 

So I found the relevant part of screen data and patched the game to leave a gap. No idea if it was due to design or just a bad copy I had in the first place.

I really like Red Max - but never got past about 4 levels - please share this mod if you have it avaialble ;)

 

Not quite impossible to complete but Shart Raider near the end of 1st level and the otherwise excellent Fire Fleet something on 3rd level are spoiled by pretty much impossibly hard playfields - both would benefit from a hack too (fingers crossed) ;)

 

p.s. there is a thread here somewhere about patching Colony

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p.s. there is a thread here somewhere about patching Colony

 

It can be found here> http://atariage.com/...tronics-colony/

 

Mark did some patches for the screen issues, but the bug with the random rocks is still there (when ordering stuff it goes a bit silly with rocks randomly apeparing) . Shame mastertronic didnt bug test this more prior to release - in a weird way its quite an addictive management game!

 

Richard

Edited by Magic Knight
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This is a good thread. Valuable info here. While various releases of Montezuma's Revenge have circulated, I do believe a fully working version of MR exists. You can tell which one it is by the sound that is made when the hero uses a sword on one of the skulls, if I remember correctly. I think there were some other differences, but I don't recall.

 

The MR with the intro music and more detailed graphics is much less playable.

 

It's also interesting that so many Mastertronic games were flawed.

 

Oh, and I can't believe there is a game called Shart Raider, trbb. Nice.

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Parker Brothers saw the game and wanted a smaller version for cartridge. Funny thing is the program never made it to ROM - well, only as a prototype - and ended up as a disk release.

Well it's not like it went to waste. The 5200 version of the game is the exact same as the 8-bit version with some minor coding changes. I always wondered why the 8-bit version never got released on cart. I'd guess it was the collapsing market, but you'd think that the 5200 version would have been dropped first before the 8-bit version (same deal with Mr. Do's Castle).

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I think you can cheat your way to the end of Shaft Raider but the game appears to hang afterwards. I believe the program is trying to load the second part from tape and, obviously, fails. More the case of a bad crack than shitty programming probably.

 

In Aerion Software's Fury, the key that you grab on one of the last levels disappears right away and you can't open the gate. No idea whether this is because I was playing a copy...

 

IIRC, Pothole Pete is unfinished. You eventually reach a black screen and can't do anything.

 

--

Atari Frog

http://www.atarimania.com

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I believe Montezuma's Revenge was sold during the final months of Parker Brothers' existence. It was probably cheaper to go for a disk version, particularly if you could offer a combo Commodore 64 / Atari release. They did the same thing with Mr. Do!'s Castle, though you have that odd Canada-only cartridge.

 

--

Atari Frog

http://www.atarimania.com

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Hmm,

 

Sidewinder by Futureware, later by Zeppelin Games; there is a laser barrier which one cannot pass with the helicopter in the original version. A video at atarionline shows this and they also released a patched version, alas I cannot find the topic anymore... (...)

 

I remember this one.

The annoying thing was that this happend at the end of the last level.

I saw the endscreen anyway because I disabled the player that was used for the collision detection.

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I am not surprised with unwinnable Tic Tac Toe. The best you can do with computer, which is perfectly logical and cannot be distracted, is a draw. From (short) time I played Atari games, I believe Crownland is one of those games. Literally is almost impossible to get past scene 2-2 due to quirky collision detection (solid enough to not be another Simon's quest, but not enough to not let player accidentally trip over edge of platform) and large bottomless pit near end of the stage. I had to cheat my way past there in order to finish this good otherwise game.

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At least some versions of "Zeppelin" (is that Synapse?) also had bugs in the "earthquake" feature that caused random blocks to fall down from the ceiling of the dungeon. It apparently could happen that these blocks did not only hit your zeppelin, but also innocent parts of the game code. (-;

 

I believe I have a fixed version somewhere.

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Like Fres says - good information here - makes you realise the uncompleteness of some of the A8 releases - Any patched versions of the above?

 

So far we have Universal Hero, Sidewinder (patch to be found) and Colony semi-fixed. It would be great if i can list this shortly here at some point with links to the corrected version etc.

 

keep 'em comming!

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