/vr/ - Retro Games

Here is another example from Phantasy Star III: Start up a new game. Before doing anything else, head to the nearest shop, sell your boots, and buy an Escapipe. Play the game normally until Rhys is thrown into the dungeon. Now, instead of opening the chests to advance the storyline, use the Escapipe. You'll be teleported out of your cell and back to the entrance of the dungeon...which throws the game's normal event progression out of whack, preventing you from advancing any further. You cannot interact with the usually-inaccessible NPCs in the hall, and Maia will be placed back in Rhys' room, also rendered moot as her event will not trigger again. It's however somewhat impressive that the developers figured this is something the player can do and gave the king a helpful error message, as seen in the pic.

>>4328347
What I don't get is if they planned for this by giving him unique dialogue, why not just make it so the pipe won't work in this one instance? Surely it would have been easier?

>>4328359
nah, gotta fuck with people. troll your clientbase, and they'll love you even more.

>>4328359
Personally I think it's an awesome reward for the player for thinking outside the box and using an item for its intended purpose properly. However they also realized it's game-breaking in this sequence. Preventing the playing from using it entirely would diminishes the value of the item because the player then might not be sure if there are only certain situations they can use that item.

In Duke3d there are some non lethal pits you can fall in where you are given a free jetpack (presumably to get out). You can just burn off all the fuel in a few seconds and be fucked for eternity.

>>4328414
Oh Doom 2 had a lot of those except with no way out, they just didn't give a fuck.

>>4328419
I think in Doom there was always a way out though wasn't there?

The minus world in Super Mario Bros. is a good example of this and you can also get stuck in places like these and be forced to either reset the game or wait the timer out.

>>4328419
I can only think of one, everything else either drains your hp or has a tele out.

I've never encountered one of those "diabolical traps" in Sonic 3 and Knuckles. How easy is it to get stuck?

>>4328456
Usually in Carnival Night when going through ramps but I've had it happen in Chemical Plant in Sonic 2.

>>4328448
barrels of fun has one in the main room aint it
the ending stretch of tricks and traps right before the exit is also inescapable

>>4328482
>the ending stretch of tricks and traps [...] is also inescapable
Incorrect, sir. The mud floor drains your hp so you'll die off in single player. Multiplayer has been accounted for as well. Walking into the mud hall (to the exit) opens up an auxiliary teleport, and taking which places you at the exit - in the event that the mud room platforms have already lowered. Doom 2 is remarkably accounted for as far as multiplayer.

>>4328427
You can die in e1m3 if you walk into the green pit in the beginning

>>4328345
on the 3rd disc of final fantasy, you can use a chocobo to walk in shallow waters, so I was using this to go from island to island essentially and for some reason got of the chocobo or something happened and so I was stuck on that island on the 3rd disc lol

I did start over I wasn't having a good run of the game anyway lol

In Shadowrun for the Genesis I managed to k.o. the final boss instead of reducing his hitpoints which meant the end sequence never got triggered.
I had never bought implants for Winston because he kept wrecking shit with his fists.

>>4328603
There are no Chocobos in Final Fantasy.
Also the game is on a single cartridge.

>>4328603
>lol

>>4328712
better than whatever vedditors use as replacement nowadays

>>4328345
Nobody ever seems to have heard of it, but there was this really old school RPG called Falling Stars. One of the neat things it had was a hidden reputation stat, and the higher your reputation is, the more people are willing to help you, give you quests, join up with you, etc. If you reputation gets too low, too early, it will be impossible to win the game.

While you are told that breaking into houses can lower your reputation, if you say, didn't pay attention early, you can break into enough homes that your reputation can never recover to the point where you even find the minimum you need to win the game. Oops.

Also, don't throw the bag end key away in your game of pic related. You need to give it to Lobelia or she'll have you arrested, and then the Nazgul pay you a visit in the lockholes.

>>4328916
What self respecting hobbit would throw away they key to his own hole?

>>4328621
clearly they meant either 7/8/9

>>4328615
Are you saying that Winston was such a badass that he punched a dragon into submission, that the dragons mentality couldn't stand the onslaught of troll fists to the face?

>>4328621
I was playing ff8

>>4328916
That's actually the very first quest in the game, quickly followed by escaping the Shire. You have a time limit. Spend too long dicking around the Shire, and the Ringwraiths will show up and murder your entire party.

>>4328429
In that pic (if Mario hasn't gone too far to the right), you should be able to jump, glitch into the bricks, then jump again to get onto the top row of bricks.

>>4328456
In my experience they happen more often in Sonic 3 Complete, but I've only ever emulated.

>>4328601
Not him but if you can die it's a "way out". We're talking about inescapable situations.

If you go to the last area of Super Metroid with no charge beam and not enough missiles, I think it's impossible to kill Mother Brain

>>4328359
Probably something that was is discovered by testers late into production. It was probably determined to be easier to just set a flag for a dialogue event rather than to rewrite the code for using items to check for this one specific instance. You have to think about things in term of time investment vs benefit.

>>4330116
Mother Brain is also unwinnable if you don't have enough energy tanks.

>>4330116
Yeah, and you can't even go back after the Point of No Return. Suck really.

There is section of the game in FF III where you are thrown into a prison. To escape, you have to mini your party, one guy will give you the spell i case you don't have it already.

But if you didn't rest before and lack of magic points, or you don't have a member able to throw white spells, you can't do anything not even by switching jobs since you only obtain magic points by resting.

In the original Link's Awakening, if you use the skip-screens skip in the dungeon where you get the flippers, you can make it so that you:

- Need a key to get into the room with flippers in (can't screen warp into it)
- Need flippers to get that key

I actually did it when I was a kid.

>>4328345
Well, there's the old Pokémon games.

-You can use glitches. Catching and even just battling Missingno can glitch a number of things, most notably your hall of fame, although you may not care about that. You can fuck yourself over more severely by doing the Glitch City glitch without a pokémon with Fly or Teleport and saving the game, trapping yourself forever.

-You could trap yourself on Cianwood City or Cinnabar Island by releasing all your Pokémon that know HMs like Surf or Fly. You could say this for all HMs though, since they're all necessary to beat the game.

-Apparently you can't get the Pokédex if you evolve your starter on the first route of the game, meaning you can't get Pokéballs and you can't pass the old guy blocking your path. This is only in the Japanese Red and Green though.

-Again in R/B, if you somehow spend literally all your cash and beat every trainer before entering Saffron City you're stuck since there's no way of earning the money required to buy the drink for the guard. In Blue you can circumvent this somewhat if you have a Meowth with Pay Day.

Also (I admit I just Googled this) apparently you can get stuck when fighting against Lorelei in gen I. If you use a Fighting type that knows only the move Rage against her Dewgong (for example, Primeape), you'll get stuck for a very, very long time. Due to the AI, the only move the Dewgong will use is Rest (as it is a Psychic-type move, even if it doesn't do damage). You'll use Rage on turn 1, deducting 1PP from the move's 20PP, but after that you won't use any PP since the attack just continues every turn. You'll never be able to beat the Dewgong since it's constantly recovering HP, and the Dewgong will never run out of PP since gen I's AI doesn't use PP.

So, you'll have to wait for the attack to miss, which happens once every 250 or so turns, before you can use up another PP, and keep that up until you start using Struggle and eventually kill yourself.

>>4328347
Wizards and Warriors 3. Your inventory space is limited but you are allowed to collect items that you can't use yet, which prevents you from collecting the items that you need to use in order to progress.

I can't recall if it was Link's Awakening on GB, or Link's Awakening DX on GBC, but in one of them it was possible to use a key in the wrong place in a dungeon, rendering the game unfinishable if you saved after using the key.

I was really pissed about that one, as it was very far into the game when it happened.

In Half-Life, if you make the kill shot on the Nihilanth with the RPG from below, it will get stuck in its death animation forever. The only way out is to reload or kill yourself.

ITT: Bad game design

In Warcraft/Starcraft it is possible to harvest all the resources on a map, eliminate all but one non-unit producing structure, waste all the resources you collected, and then kill off your own forces (with summoned Daemons, Infested Terrans, etc) to the point where neither you nor your opponent has any fighting units left and neither can win or lose without reloading/restarting.

Some text based games like Zork or HHGTTG are completely unwinnable if you miss a key item or the like forcing a restart.

>>4332001
It's the original GB version only, they fixed it in the GBC version.

If you land in the middle of a forest in FF4-6's overworlds then walk off your airship's tile, it becomes impossible to leave the forest because every time you step on your airship's tile, it forces you into the forest.

Final Fantasy Adventure is obvious what with having to buy keys in stores.

I remember that in Super Mario Bros 2, at least in All Star version, there was a suicide command, like L+R+A+B (can't remember well). Probably the devs knew something like OP shows could happen. I believe it is the only mainline game with a suicide command.

>>4332131
Yeah but this thread is for situations that wouldn't normally occur. A lot of old adventure games and HHGTTG in particular delight in leading the player into unwinnable situations without warning. If you don't pick up the toothbrush in the first room of HHGTTG, fuck you, you've screwed yourself and you won't find out until the end of the game.

>>4332612
Actually many NES games had an in game reset that was activated with the 2nd controller. This is sometimes used by speed runners, like in The Legend of Zelda.

>>4332828

It was not exactly a reset, however, but something like forcing a death. You would lose a life and restart the stage imediatelly.

>>4328456
>How easy is it to get stuck?

If you are between a wall and an object that moves next to the wall, you have a 50/50 chance of being killed or being pushed into the wall. It happens most often if the wall is not 100% unpassable, ie. it has empty paths in the inside, such as on carnival night or chemical plant.

>>4330648
Why did they even put that point of no return in the game in the first place?

>>4330698
Also spending all your cash and not having any keys or costumes

>>4332125
I've had something similar happen in SC multiplayer. Me and my opponent managed to kill each others' entire set of workers and lair/command centers, turning the game into a deathmatch of the last man standing. It was a map that had expansions only reachable by air, so while my opponent had control of the central area (Which was 90% of the map), I had a damaged base in the corners of the map with no command center and no SCVs. After losing all my air units and him not having any to begin with after destroying his mutalisks, we hit a stalemate since neither of us could build more to reach the other player. It was just an army of hydras on the center that eventually managed to catch my battlecruisers while picking at his remaining forces.

>>4332664
HHGTTG is actually full of bullshit like that though. I know other Sierra games did it too, but that one always sticks out the most.

It's one of the few times I can conclusively say I think it's bad design. It would've been far more merciful to kill the player earlier in the game for not having an item like that rather than wait until the very end.

>>4332460
That only happens in certain spots. FFV has a cave that you can land on where the same thing happens.

>>4332460
You can't fucking land on a forest, you retardo.

>>4328347
>>4328379
While this is cool it's kind of dumb they worked on this when the rest of the game was completely unfinished