Classicamiga Forum Retro Edition
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Thread: The most broken game
Harrison 15:07 17th September 2010
Kids today have zero attention spans... I feel sorry for them. Blame it on the "throw away/I want it now" culture of today..
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burns flipper 12:03 22nd September 2010
I encountered some bugs in The Settlers, which I put down to it being a very complex game in terms of what the computer had to keep track of.

Sometimes it would crash when I was saving the game - usually if I had a big map and had up to 50 hours play-time on it. Crash is understandable!

One time, when I cretaed new buildings it would not create the path between the flag directly outside the building and the building door - so when the worker woud arrive, he could not enter the house.

Another time I had a network of roads, some of which went over a lake so had a boatman manning it...and when I sent the knights back to the Castle to refresh them, they all walked on water! They walked along the paths built on the lake. I was curious to see what would happen if I removed the path - would the knights start actually walking on water? - so i removed the road whilst about 10 of the highest-level Knights were walking home...and they all just disappeared...

And one time I had a guard hut by an enemy border, and he had one too, and I managed to connect one of my roads to his flag. I can't remember what happened next, it would be cool if I started stealing his resources for my buildings!
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Harrison 12:14 22nd September 2010
I also encountered a few similar "bugs" in The Settlers, but none of them were really game breaking.

Issues with paths was the biggest one I had. Sometimes no one would travel along a path and it needed to be removed and remade. Or resources would illogically be moved in the wrong direction, when the building to process them was right next door along the route. This sometimes led to a mass of resources building up on a junction and builders or processing buildings sat waiting with nothing to do.

For a game of its time it was an amazingly complex thing for the Amiga to process. As you say, if you had been playing for a long time on a map there would be a lot happening on that map to keep track of and update.
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Sharingan 14:05 22nd September 2010
Gonna second Moonstone here. Loved the game to bits, but the frequent and seemingly random crashes were game-breaking.

I kind of have the feeling that they (the developers) knew about the bug, but couldn't be bothered to fix it.
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Harrison 17:32 22nd September 2010
I read in a few different places that the Moonstone problem was more that most people were using a pre-release pirated copy with some bugs, as buying a real copy was hard as the game was rare to find in stores.

I never managed to complete Moonstone. my copy always crashed right near to the end.
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J Stanley 18:43 14th October 2010
Insanity Fight, actually that was the first game I ever booted up on my A500. The sound was awesome and blew me away but it kept crashing for no good reason.
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slicer1000 10:45 15th October 2010
Theme Park was also a buggy game on an A500 version the grass was not green and if you made your park to big the game would become unstable. That was the retail version as well. Just to point out that a lot of bugs in amiga games only appeared in pirate versions of the games
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Vangar 23:23 6th November 2010
I've always had trouble booting Bubble Bobble, and when I did the game's physics and speed seemed to be flaky compared to the Master system or Arcade versions.
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Harrison 15:11 11th November 2010
Originally Posted by Vangar:
I've always had trouble booting Bubble Bobble, and when I did the game's physics and speed seemed to be flaky compared to the Master system or Arcade versions.
Bubble Bobble is quite an early Amiga game and was released for the first A500's with Kickstart 1.2 and 512KB of chip ram. If running on an A500 or A600 it runs at the correct speed, but it hates having fast ram present. On a newer setup it is very unstable and doesn't load very well. On an A500+ or A600 it sometimes loaded fine with relokick, but not always. It doesn't need to like newer chipsets. Sometimes it would crash during loading. And on an A1200 I don't think I ever got it to run from disk, but it does using WHDLoad.

These issues were true for many early 1986-1988 games on the Amiga and not really bugs as such. Rather the programs not complying with coding standards and hitting the hardware directly.

When running correctly it is a great version. Although you can't beat the game running on MAME.
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Harrison 15:17 11th November 2010
Originally Posted by slicer1000:
Just to point out that a lot of bugs in amiga games only appeared in pirate versions of the games
Yeah, most pirated copies of games that appeared were cracked versions of pre-released versions of the games. Often the versions of a game sent to journalists for review. Most were still not quite complete for retail as the reviewers needed to review the games months in advance to make sure the magazine review was in the issue that coincided with the game release.

I'm surprised the publishers and developers didn't realise where the sources of the pirated copies were coming from. A lot of pirated versions often appeared even before the official release dates. And in fact that still happens for new games.
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