The "It's not a bug, it's a feature" thread.

[sogetsu]

I found this today:



A clever way to work around the issue. If you know other examples of bugs turned into game features (and I'm sure there are plenty of them), post them here.

[derboo]

Ninja Ryūkenden I is (in)famous for its extreme difficulty. Especially after losing against the last boss, and having to start at the beginning of the whole chapter, a lot of gamers were faced with despair. At that time, was it your conscious aim to create such a hard game?

Mr. Yoshizawa directed the action part for the first game, but that was actually something a programmer had implemented this way accidentally. However, it wasn't tried to fix it. They were like "hey, that's not bad, either". *laughs

www.hardcoregaming101.net/ninjagaiden/ninjagaiden12.htm


Wizardry had a bug that gave a Bishop a lot of experience when trying to identify item 9 (there were only 8 item slots per character). This became known pretty soon after the first game was released, but Woodhead intentionally never fixed it, so it kind of became a cheat instead of a bug.

[alphex]

Street Fighter Alpha 3 has the crouch cancel infinites. Short version: If you're getting juggled, you can flip out of a combo the second the guy beating you up is in a neutral state. By jump-attacking, crouching once you land, jumping again, attacking them again and so on, you never are in a neutral state. Thus, if you have perfect timing, you can do infinites with some characters. It got picked up by pro players (but pretty much broke the game for those who actually like their games to be fun) and is arguably a feature.

Same for Alpha 2, which had unblockable sweeps the second you activated a custom combo and the other guy was not crouchblocking already. Pro matches consisted of players constantly crouching, to avoid that one.

And of course, combos in Street Fighter 2 were not intended. That is probably the most awesome one.

Also DK64 crashed a ton without the extended memory, so it got bundled with the game since they were unable to figure out why that happened / how to bypass it.

[Weasel]

Ever wonder why Mahatma Gandhi is so inclined towards all-out nuclear war in Civilization? It's not just silly anti-characterization; it stems from an integer underflow in the original Sid Meier's Civilization. Gandhi was designed to always be at the lowest possible aggression towards a given faction, but certain circumstances would cause the aggression value to be reduced below the lowest possible value, which causes the number to suddenly max out, and Gandhi declares "No more Mr. Passive Resistance!" The dev team at MPS Labs thought this was funny enough that the phenomenon continues to exist as recently as Civilization V.

[🧀Son of Suzy Creamcheese🧀]

The first thing that pops into my mind is the Ghandi thing in Civilization of course.

Another thing that pops into my mind is the Double Cherry from Super Mario 3D World. It started off as a mistake from one of the programmers, but they decided to turn it into a feature.
Funnily enough the same thing created the Luigi Mushroom in Mario Maker.

[Deleted]

Bunnyhopping goes here, and has become such an unintended-but-accepted feature of oldschool shooters that it's included in Quake Live's tutorial.

Also, the Giants' homerun club slam from Skyrim.

The way it works is that in Skyrim any damage to a character that exceeds their maximum health is converted into additional physics momentum. This has normal-looking results with most weapons and attacks in the game against most targets, but when a Giant hits your average human the club's damage exceeds their health by a HUGE factor, leading to the result seen in the link.

The Bethesda developers learned of the bug pretty early on, but they thought it was so funny they didn't bother to patch it.

[TheGunheart]

I recall reading that the ability to knock enemies airborne and hold them there with repeated attacks actually was inspired by a bug in an early build of Onimusha where the player could keep enemies airborne by continually slashing them. Naturally, it didn't really fit with Onimusha's gameplay, but it was absolutely perfect for DMC.

[GamerL]

Jul 1, 2015 2:23:03 GMT -5 @houseofpun said:

Bunnyhopping goes here, and has become such an unintended-but-accepted feature of oldschool shooters that it's included in Quake Live's tutorial.

Also, the Giants' homerun club slam from Skyrim.

The way it works is that in Skyrim any damage to a character that exceeds their maximum health is converted into additional physics momentum. This has normal-looking results with most weapons and attacks in the game against most targets, but when a Giant hits your average human the club's damage exceeds their health by a HUGE factor, leading to the result seen in the link.

The Bethesda developers learned of the bug pretty early on, but they thought it was so funny they didn't bother to patch it.

And I'm glad they didn't because it really is hilarious.

[dire51]

Jun 30, 2015 20:53:35 GMT -5 Weasel said:

"No more Mr. Passive Resistance!"

"He's out to kick some butt!"

[moran]

"I'll have a steak. Medium rare."

[X-pert74]

Didn't the developers of Superman 64 try to explain that the green sky in the game was because of kryptonite or something?

[Deleted]

Jul 1, 2015 19:44:50 GMT -5 X-pert74 said:

Didn't the developers of Superman 64 try to explain that the green sky in the game was because of kryptonite or something?

That's not turning a bug into a useful feature, though---that's just devs attempting to polish a turd.

[kaoru]

A lot of the exploits in Final Fantasy II probably aren't meant to be there, but only few got fixed in the re-releases. Same with chainsawing God to death in Makai Toushi SaGa.

[Deleted]

Wavedashing. It's not officially sanctioned or praised by Nintendo, but the Smash Bros. competitive community probably couldn't live without it.

[Aoi]

Jun 30, 2015 20:36:42 GMT -5 alphex said:

Street Fighter Alpha 3 has the crouch cancel infinites. Short version: If you're getting juggled, you can flip out of a combo the second the guy beating you up is in a neutral state. By jump-attacking, crouching once you land, jumping again, attacking them again and so on, you never are in a neutral state. Thus, if you have perfect timing, you can do infinites with some characters. It got picked up by pro players (but pretty much broke the game for those who actually like their games to be fun) and is arguably a feature.

Same for Alpha 2, which had unblockable sweeps the second you activated a custom combo and the other guy was not crouchblocking already. Pro matches consisted of players constantly crouching, to avoid that one.

And of course, combos in Street Fighter 2 were not intended. That is probably the most awesome one.

Also DK64 crashed a ton without the extended memory, so it got bundled with the game since they were unable to figure out why that happened / how to bypass it.

^ These

Also from SF, the crossup, option select, fuzzy guard... just about all fighting games are one big glitch.


I'd say the DHC and Exchange glitches in MvC3, but those never become "features".

Edit: Oh! Kara inputs, plinking... lol