Unseen Darm Tower View

[korzic]

I posted this discovery in the spam thread, but MP83 suggested posting it somewhere more public, so...

Anyway, in Ys I Eternal/Complete/Chronicles, on the Mountain Path screen there is an up-close view of Darm Tower, but due to the games' boundaries (cliffs, crates, etc.), you never get to see it during normal play (well, just barely).

Yesterday, I managed to get around these boundaries by moving Feena around in the thieves' den doorway, and then getting the door to close. If done right, this will force you (or Feena, if positioned properly) partially inside the left or right (usually right) part of the building, and enable you to scroll the screen farther than what is normally possible, allowing you to see a view of Darm Tower that probably only the programmers/artists have seen.

Here are the pics from the Eternal and Complete versions. For Chronicles, it looks just like it does in Complete:

"Full" View (Eternal, Complete)
Bottom View (Eternal, Complete)
Top View (Eternal, Complete)

[hedron]

You should've been QA. Although, I hear that's actually pretty grueling work.

[korzic]

Nov 4, 2010 0:07:26 GMT -5 hedron said:

You should've been QA. Although, I hear that's actually pretty grueling work.

Hmm, from what I can tell, Falcom seems to be doing a pretty good job with their games' quality. The majority of bugs/glitches I've found in the Eternal/Complete/Chronicles versions of Ys I & II have been pretty minor (rarely even a sequence break), and of the few that are serious/make the games unwinnable, most are so obscure that the majority of players probably won't come across them.

And yeah, I've heard that about game testing. For a job like that, I personally think that I'd really need to enjoy playing the games if I'm going to spend that much time with them. I can't say that I enjoy many games quite that much, but these newer versions of Ys I & II are among my favorites, and were it not for speedrun testing, I probably wouldn't have come across most of the bugs/glitches that I have.

[cercia]

I totally agree with the above, you are a true Ys adventurer arent you?

[Rhyanna]

This is an awesome little secret! Great work on finding this!

[GundamuExia]

O.O

[mrcritterfur]

Nov 4, 2010 0:07:26 GMT -5 hedron said:

You should've been QA. Although, I hear that's actually pretty grueling work.

I was QA at EA for Superman Returns, Madden 07 on the PS2 and DS.

Yes. They treat you like shit. At EA at least. 

One time, I found a crash bug. It was a pretty simple bug too (it had to do with the slide animation when you're quarterback).

Anyway, I entered it in to the system, like I was supposed to. 20 minutes later they bring us all into a meeting and yell at us for a crash bug (or lead told me he was sorry, since I had only been on the team for about 10 minutes at that point). 

Apparently, this was a very simple, single button press game crashing bug, in the E3 build for demo They were REALLY pissed. 

Come to find out later, my crash bug had been found, and ignored because it was believed to be a bug of a bug (which is ignored since it's a bug, caused by a bug creating a situation where the game doesn't work right to begin with). Bugs of bugs fix themselves when the initial bug is fixed. 

But I found out it was a simple animation bug. Because i could reproduce it every time, when a certain animation happened. Apparently it had been ignored for weeks. 

Needless to say, I wasn't liked very much after that on my team. 

Although I do remember another time I found an exploit (not necessarily a bug). And one of my friends was doing the legacy mode (some mode where you played historical games, and tried to recreate glory moments. Like down in the 4th quarter by three touchdowns, and have to come back to win it all). And my friend's job was LITERALLY to do nothing other than play those legacy games and make sure they worked. It wasn't easy. Because all of them were like "Score 2 touchdowns with 2 minutes left in the 4th quarter, or something impossible like that,. And if you messed up, you had to start over (I don't think you could restart from a list either. I think you had to restart from the beginning). Needless to say, he hated his job (they did pay fairly well though).

So when I mentioned I made an exploit that made onside kick recoveries pretty much 110% successful, he politely asked me not to bug it, so he could use it to make his job easier. So I said "Sure, have at it." 

Once he was removed from the legacy mode, I bugged it (still don't know if they deleted it). He was much more fun to work with when he was able to win repeatedly like that

I remember Superman Returns was hell. They even told us it would be. Because there were so many delays (the game wasn't even released until the DVD came out, causing them to lose millions, and the game sucked. It had a lot of glitches and a lot of removed content). I found a big bug where if you turned all the volume down and listened to music on the Xbox while playing, audio still came through from the game. Apparently, that was a BIG deal. I had apparently found what's called a "legal" bug, or hardware bug. I can't remember. Basically, I turned the volume down, so the game shouldn't be making any noise. But it did at certain spots. And that was a big deal for them, since it involved a problem in the game and the hardware. 

The last bug I entered in the PS2 version was in franchise mode. I found out it was possible to automate your system to play games, even when you were over the salary cap, and had too many injured players to make a team. Yet I was still able to play. Apparently, my one bug, got split into like 5, and they were BIG problems, so much so that they had to call me back over to explain it to them. Apparently the programming team tried to pull a "That's what it's supposed to do since it's automated" argument, which meant they did not want to have to fix this bug since it basically turned their major hyped franchise mode into a joke. 

The tester who took over was like "Uhhhh, no. You can play for multiple years, automated, with a 5 player team. That's not how it's supposed to work. And you can go over salary cap. That's not how it's supposed to work."

I would look at my old bugs from time to time, and that one apparently went back and forth for months, and took them forever to figure out.

Yeah, game testing can be entertaining, but it kind of sucked too. Out of a floor of at least 50-100 employees, there was only one girl. And a lot of sweaty dudes. And a lot of people hopped up on Mountain Dew. And people kept stealing my Bose Headphones.