Re: Hardcore Computist Magazine online...

[Paul Guertin <pg@sff.net>]

On Sat, 14 Feb 2004 23:50:59 -0500, "vector" <someasshole@aol.com> wrote:

> On Sat, 14 Feb 2004 22:10:13 -0500, Paul Guertin wrote:
> 
> > I probably had more fun boot-tracing The Bard's Tale, and hacking the
> > data disks to give my characters 65535 hit points, than actually playing
> > the game -- which of course I played honestly, otherwise why play? The
> > hacking part was my reward for winning.
> 
> I respectfully disagree.  The point of a game is its challenge to beat it,
> right?  If I hack it myself, I credit that as a valid victory.

The point of a game is to have fun with it. For me, some games are
fun to play by the rules, some are fun to hack, some are both,
some are neither.

In the case of The Bard's Tale, winning the game without hacking was
more fun (for a longer time) than hacking-to-win would have been. It's
very easy to find out where experience points are encoded: back up
your data disk, start the game, wait a while until a gang of low-level
enemies come up, kill them and get experience points, then do a
sector-by-sector compare of your data disks to find the bytes that changed.
That takes 10 minutes (maybe an hour if you have to write the sector
compare program from scratch). Once you know that, give yourself a few
million exp points and presto, invincible characters.

I made that mistake once of ruining a game by creating invincible
characters and then trudging from dungeon to dungeon, winning battle
after battle until I killed the big boss without realizing I'd done it.
Then I realized it was about as interesting as cheating at solitaire.

Paul Guertin
pg@sff.net