Well, it works both ways. The first offhand example I can think of was in the original Mafia. In one chapter your character has to win a car race. This was the hardest part in the whole game. The kind of challenge that makes one fling mice at computer screens. It was almost a no- win kind of challenge. Without winning there was no moving on in the storyline. Somehow someone found a bug in the game that allowed you to win the race quite easily. Eventually Illusion Softworks released a patch that made the race easier. But before that.. things were bad. So in the case of overall enjoyment, the bug was a good thing.

Now, for the same game, there are cheats that are easily downloadable that give you unlimited money, guns, ammo and health.
The game got boring very quickly because there were no more goals that were unattainable, the challenge was gone.
Diablo was the same way. Without a challenge there was not much left to do but walk around and kill things for no real reason.
In this case the bug is not so good. It took away the fun parts.


THE
GOD MODE
AARDVARK

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:There was some emulator that worked on my GP2x handheld system. I decided that I was going to "win" Wizardry on it.

I grabbed some maps that were on the Internet, so I could figure out where I was. I played it a lot for a weekend. (I believe I was not dating anyone when this was going on. Imagine that.)

Then I forgot where I put my GP2x. And I recall that I needed the maps to get around and that was that. But I got farther in that weekend than I did growing up. I still have yet to solve it.

I had the first one, a GP32, and loved it. The screen sucked though. That was back when you could get away with selling multi-hundred dollar devices with sucky screens. About a week before my wife had Mason she bought me a Gameboy Advance (the first generation) and the screen was so horrible that it was literally unplayable. I later got one of the SP2 ones and it's such a difference. In fact, I think the GBA SP2 is what made me get rid of the GP32. I liked the emulation angle of the GP32, but the screen ... THE SCREEN ... AHHHHHH. I hated it.

As an eleven or twelve year old kid I would have killed to own Wizardry maps.

AArdvark wrote:I used to play Diablo I and II with much enthusiasm until I installed a character editor. Then the game turned boring. It's just not the same when you cheat.

So the question is, is it cheating if you find a bug within the program itself?

In Wizardry, characters were allowed to carry 8 items. Mages had the ability to identify items, and determine if they were blessed (or cursed). To do this, you selected your mage, hit dentify, and then typed a number between 1-8. If you hit 9 however, and did it enough times, the game would glitch and give you a million XP.

According to Wikipedia, it was an honest bug in the Apple II version, but became so popular that they actually added it as a feature to the PC version. Discuss.

There was some emulator that worked on my GP2x handheld system. I decided that I was going to "win" Wizardry on it.

I grabbed some maps that were on the Internet, so I could figure out where I was. I played it a lot for a weekend. (I believe I was not dating anyone when this was going on. Imagine that.)

Then I forgot where I put my GP2x. And I recall that I needed the maps to get around and that was that. But I got farther in that weekend than I did growing up. I still have yet to solve it.

I used to play Diablo I and II with much enthusiasm until I installed a character editor. Then the game turned boring. It's just not the same when you cheat.



THE
15,000,000 ARMOR
AARDVARK

Wizardry was released back in 1981, although I don't think we got a copy until 1982. I'm pretty sure my first copy for the Apple II was a bootleg one as I remember having a Xeroxed copy of the manual. We did end up buying a copy of the game at some point in time, however. Maybe we pirated the Apple II version and then bought it for the PC a few years later. I can't remember. It's been three decades.

Wizardry was essentially and electronic version of Dungeons and Dragons. The computer took the place of a Dungeon Master, by throwing monsters at you and keeping track of your gold and experience points and showing you where you were through (what would be considered today to be extremely simplistic) graphics.

Like D&D, part of the fun of Wizardry was simply creating characters and assembling your party. There were lots of races (Human, Elf, Dwarf, Gnome, Hobbit) and classes (Fighter, Mage, Cleric, Thief, Wizard) to choose from. The game also had a pretty simplistic view of alignment: there were good, neutral, and evil characters. Good and Evil characters couldn't adventure together, but both could adventure with Neutrals.

Although it seems obvious now, Wizardry was the first game I remember playing where you could go other places than "the dungeon". There was a tavern, and an inn, and a weapons shop and an armor shop -- the idea being, with gold earned down in the dungeon, you could upgrade your equipment. With experience earned down in the dungeon, you could level up.

In the GameFAQs entry for Wizardry, someone asked "Does Wizardry have an automapping feature?" HA! HA HA! No, it does not. My dad used to bring home stacks of accounting paper which the two of us used to map out the 10 20x20 lvels of Wizardry's dungeon. While it sounds simple, there were plenty of spinners and teleporting traps that made creating a map quite a challenge.

There were lots of ways to cheat in Wizardry. One involved using a mage to identify objects that were outside of the scope of the game. Glitches like this one would cause the game to deliver players either a million experience points or a million gold pieces -- either one was enough to set you up for life. Back before the days of common encryption, you could also simply hex edit your characters and increase their experience, abilities, or net worth. There were after market programs (Wiz Fix) that would do this automatically for you.

My dad and I spent the better part of a year playing Wizardry. Dad used to work 3pm-11pm, so I would play Wizardry after school, updating our maps and taking notes along the way. When dad got home at 11pm he would take over and play all night. I'd pick up where he left off the next day.

I've always felt like Bard's Tale was just an updated version of Wizardry. I discovered Bard's Tale in 1985. Like my Dad and I had done with Wizardry, my buddy Jeff and I worked our way through Bard's Tale by tag-teaming it. We beat Bard's Tale II and III the same way, in fact.

I never got into the later versions of Wizardry, although I'm tempted to go back and try one. For that matter I never got into the console releases of the game, either. I know Wizardry was eventually ported to the NES and I'm sure some of the later ones made it to other systems, but to me it was always a computer game.