Top ten glitches that changed my life. pt3

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.

Grand Theft Auto 3

Tanks... tanks everywhere

Hey guys how are you?!

I remember being so happy when I opened that present on my birthday to see the colorful album art of GTA 3 staring back at me. I was stunned that they would buy me a game where I could kill hookers and set people on fire, those being my favorite pastimes in that game. Sure this game may have had some complex ideas about right and wrong ( I think) and was wrought with violence, and maybe that did shape me as a child but I have not gone on a flamethrower rampage yet. I also remember the day that I discovered the tank cheat code and subsequently broke the game entirely.

This games was renowned for being a major contributor in both kid violence and sandbox game play. It also was renowned for being super buggy with a wonky camera system and planes that could not fly. This is why I used cheat codes in this game to begin with, I just wanted to play, not try and do stupid racing missions. During one of my run-and-gunscapades I wound up atop a doughnut building surrounded by police and in dire need of a miracle... or code. Rockets were ineffective against the masses and the health cheat took too long to enter. I knew that I would surely die if I set foot off the rooftop and so I decided to try and make a tank appear on the roof so I could ride away with style and a cannon. I did the ritualistic dance to summon the tank from the Nega and I watched as the portal opened and the tank fell from the sky, not on the roof, but onto a pile of cop cars. My characters soul may have been sacrificed but the lulz that were had were well worth the price. I began to do the cheat over and over again making a pile of tanks that crushed all the cars that came near me.

"Loan me a 20?"

Slowly but surely I noticed a change in the world. There were small pyramids of tanks where a battle had occurred and I had used my dark powers to win. But there we so few cars around, and the streets seemed dead. I would look for a cab but none would come near. Occasionally I would find a group of people and I would slaughter them, the stars would pop up on my screen and I would hear sirens but no cops would arrive on the scene. No ambulances would come by to help the dearly departed, they would just lie there as my o so alone character stood over them with a rifle. No this is not the beginning of your new favorite creepy pasta, though I might just do that, it is what happens when you overload the games cache.

My city looked like this in some places.

The tanks were somehow a constant strain on the processor and were always put in place even if that part of the map had not even loaded. This meant that all the other cars had no room to be created, even most of the ones that were supposed to always be placed in the same location. The only way to get around was to summon another tank and go from there. Even the missions became broken as some critical cars would never load. I took it upon myself to fix this problem but seeing as how most tanks were indestructible and I had made just over nine-thousand of them the better decision was to just restart.  I did not want to do this as I had just made it to the third island before the realization set in but it was the only option. With bitter tears in my eyes I deleted the save file off my card and began anew. My new character oblivious to the horrors that had befallen his predecessor.

What did you learn?

I learned that while sometimes you can cheat a little and everything will be fine. Sometimes however, even in real life, too much of cheating will burn you in the end. Too much of a bad thing is a bad thing. I also learned that you should never save your game when using cheat codes.

-Snickelsox

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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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