Thursday, January 20, 2011

Top Ten Glitches That Changed My Life. 1

Within the next few weeks I am going to do a reoccurring post that will follow the top ten glitches that I have experienced in my life. These will be my own personal accounts of glitches so you may see some that happened to you and you may see some that did not. Along with talking about the glitches themselves I will be talking about how they effected my life as well, be it virtual or real life. The term glitch will also be used liberally to mean anything that breaks, distorts, borks, cheats (not codes), or does something in the game that is unusual or unintended. I would love to hear what anyone thinks everything so let me know in the comments.

Final Fantasy Tactics
Accumulate to Victory

The art in this game was amazing!
When I was but a wee lad my mother bought my father a game called Final Fantasy Tactics because she thought it looked like chess on the back cover. Even though my mother has no concept of any game past Pac-man she still has a lot to do with my current taste in games. Being that the game was rated teen I was forbidden to play it being about nine or so. I am certain now that this was a ruse, a feeble (but effective) attempt to make my play a game that required brain power. It was thus that in the odd hours of the night and the weekends when I was alone that I would spend many hours battling trolls and trying to wrap my head around the class system. Being so young it took me quite some time to understand that I could change any character into another class and then into another if I leveled up the previous class. So for the first few weeks of this game I had super powerful Squires (weakest class besides Chemist) with the whopping four abilities that they had, one of them being Accumulate.

Accumulate was a move that would raise your attack by one point for the current round. This seemed useless to me at first, seeing as how after ten moves I would only do an extra thirty damaged or so. This was until I realized the real reason that this move was in here, grinding. Every time that you used Accumulate you would gain ten XP and about 15 JP (job points) and because no matter your level you only needed one hundred XP to level up you could level up faster than you could eat Cheetos. Within one battle you could raise your attack to ninety nine points which means you could almost go ten levels in one battle, plus the JP you acquired would almost max out any job you were training in. The battles would last well over an hour sometimes up to two hours if you wanted to really push it but once you finally attacked even the weakest character could kill most mid level bosses in one hit. Once you gained the Time Mage you could also cast haste and slow around the field to keep you about nine steps ahead of the enemies. 

Finding this trick really did break the game for me. I no longer had to work so much on strategy since the bosses levels never changed to meet your own. I would just teleport behind people with my small army of doom and bash them into a creamy pulp. No one dared to stand before the mighty Snick and his legion of Accumulators. So it was that in the early hours of the morning I one hit KO'd the final boss and beat the game I was never supposed to play to begin with.

What Did You Learn?

This game taught me something for both my real life and the virtual worlds. I learned that in games that feature stats you can either spend lots of hours manipulating those stats through armor and weapons to make you character more powerful for his level. Or you can spend the same amount of time making your character into a ham-fisted naked god who has no need for petty helmets and shields by buying him tickets to the grind fest.

In real life I took away a lesson I have never forgotten. It does not matter how long it takes you to do something that matters. What matters is what you learned, how you grew, and how well you accomplished you goal at the end of the day that really matters.

-Snickelsox

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