A Glitch Saves Time, But Not Online

Article - Rob explores the lighter side of developer over-sights...

'Mission Failed' again.

I don't recall exactly which Vice City mission was getting to me - needless to say I was chasing someone with urgency and intent - but every time I got close to my target something would go wrong.

For what seemed like the seventeenth time I started the mission again: chase the suspect and kill him. My latest attempt seemed to be fairing no better than any of my previous efforts and, even worse, was the realisation that my graphics card was starting to go on strike. Textures were vanishing, street curbs were nowhere to be found and then solid walls started to disappear.

Then, in the distance, something astonishing happened. The car I was chasing sunk into the road as if it were careering off a cliff. The car vanished and a welcoming sight flashed up on the screen.

'Mission Passed - $1000'.

To this day I still don't know what happened to my unfortunate fellow criminals. I can hazard a guess, though: there was a glitch in the game engine, most likely caused by my struggling graphics card. The card lacked neither the necessary time nor the muscle to give the distant road a solid floor - in essence the getaway car drove off the edge of a very small world. Not that I'm complaining of course; my target was killed (literally because of a technicality) and I passed the mission.

The events of this little episode got me thinking. While the majority of the time game glitches can be the most infuriating obstacles in the world, occasionally there are those that can change the very nature of a game and, indeed, improve a game. Sometimes these glitches might be spontaneous one-offs, like the one I discovered in Vice City, but what about the more stubbornly frequent mishaps, should we be so quick to judge them?

Helpful glitches have been around forever, none more so than in Atari's 1979 classic Asteroids. It was a fiendishly intense and difficult game, unless you exposed its Achilles heel. By flying into the top corner of the screen, where the score was located, you could snuggle into a little cove of invulnerability where asteroids dare not venture. No doubt many top scores have been achieved by this method.

The choice of whether you want to exploit such glitches has long been one for the individual. The only question you need to ask yourself if whether you believe you've cheated or not. Certainly glitches bend the rules that are supposed to exist - in my case I probably should have replayed that Vice City mission - but, more often than not, we can't help but use them to our advantage.

And, up until the mid-nineties, the only thing you could let down was your own conscious. Then the internet came along. Now, if you 'bend the rules', you run the risk of being branded a cheat and becoming an outlaw.

Quake II was one of the early examples of such problems. By altering specific settings it was possible to combine the jump and strafe keys so that you could have a speed advantage over other players in a game. This was known as 'bunny hopping'.

During the single-player game bunny-hopping simply presents itself as an opportunity to get some payback against the whole concept of A.I (let's face it, in most games A.I. cheats) but should you be allowed to bunny-hop against fellow humans?

Some discredited bunny-hopping as a glitch not to be exploited, while others considered it an 'acceptable skill'. Either way, bunny-hopping, and many other similar glitches in other games, has become incumbent. Why? Because they present a challenge. They're stable glitches that require an element of skill and they're available for anyone to use; the argument is simply whether they should be used.

Advantageous glitches can be found everywhere, including the console market (Mario Kart 64 and its abundance of dodgy shortcuts being one of the more famed examples) but it is on the PC that glitches are more evident, not only through the diversity of hardware technology but through digital surgery performed by amateur coders.

In the wrong hands, glitches can quickly become the scourge of gaming, especially when it comes to online gaming. With careful manipulation of a game's code, unscrupulous types can purposely create glitches know as hacks. These can be anything from the ability to ghost through walls to generating extra resources out of nothing. In these cases innocent glitches can be abused beyond their original identity and universal accessibility, giving hackers an unfair advantage. In its early days Quake III Arena suffered in particular from hacks. One hack, know as the CVAR Hack, enabled players to disable curves and textures, as well as 'spiking' other players so that they could be seen through walls.