I never understood how that particular bit of logic could have been coded that way - it seemed so unnatural.
You can defeat the Dream Devourer from Chrono Trigger using an int overflow (chrono.fandom.com)
114 pointsby ronreiter11 hours ago63 comments
PlunderBunny 8 hours ago
I figured out that, in the early versions of Realmz for the Mac, there was an enchanted item (a helm?) that added a few points to the wearer’s stats when equipped, but when removed it took away more than it added (i.e. left you worse off). It only took a few seconds for my programmer brain to start me furiously equipping and then un-equipping it, and sure enough, when that stat went to -127, one more equip-and-unequip was sufficient to give me a +128 bonus for that stat.
LoganDark 6 hours ago
I would figure the reason was because calculating it based on your inventory every time it's needed would've been expensive, so the developers decided to cache it, but instead of recalculating it from scratch when there's a stat change, they decided to try updating it incrementally, but I guess also imperatively. A string of mistakes has to happen to lead to such a situation but it doesn't seem super unnatural to me.
Nition 4 hours ago
I wonder if it was percentage based. That'd be one of the easiest mistakes to make.
- Player has a stat of 100
- Wears "+10%" helm
- Player has a stat of 110
- Removes helm, game subtracts 10%
- Player has a stat of 99
Actually, now that I think about it more, that wouldn't work as described above because once your stat got close to zero you'd enter a kind of Zeno's Paradox situation.
chii 2 hours ago
it's more likely that the stat for equipping is calculated differently to when unequipping (ala, "same" code in two different places, and one got modified at some point and forgot about the other).
SatvikBeri 7 hours ago
Similarly, you can defeat the Egg Dragon superboss in Lufia 2 by healing before attacking: it starts with 65,535 HP.
Ndymium 2 hours ago
A classic way of getting endless money in Transport Tycoon was to build a tunnel going from one edge of the map to another. The money counter would overflow and you'd get enough money to last you a lifetime.
As kids we didn't know why this would happen, we just knew that it did and used it every game.
mitxela 8 hours ago
Deshittified link: https://breezewiki.com/chrono/wiki/Dream_Devourer
thevinter 23 minutes ago
While I agree that fandom is shit - the link you shared doesn't contain any mentions about int overflow
handoflixue 16 minutes ago
It's buried at the bottom of Boss Battle Strategy:
"Since the Dream Devourer has 32000 HP, which is close to the signed 16-bit integer limit, it is actually possible to defeat it by healing it. By using powerful magic that it absorbs during its second phase, it can be (temporarily) healed past 32767 HP, which overflows the counter and makes its HP go negative."
thevinter 8 minutes ago
That part is not on breezewiki.com, is it?
falsaberN1 10 hours ago
I don't want Chrono Cross-contamination in my trigger, thanks.
Chrono Cross is a very interesting game on its own but it's a terrible sequel that is remarkably spiteful to its senior. (The thing with FATE and Robo, the Porre thing, the fate of Crono and co., it's a terrible fanfic made canon).
Trigger only worked because of Toriyama gathering the all-star staff (look up the interview with Torishima giving the details). Cross was out of his hands and it shows.
debo_ 9 hours ago
I loved trigger, got to play it on release. I loved Cross even more. I played that one about 5 years after its release.
Cross has this underlying sense of menace beneath the idyllic (and wondrous) atmosphere of the archipelago. I think it's incredible.
Personally I don't care much about stories in games. Most of them are awful anyways. I really gravitate towards atmosphere, and Cross has that in spades.
noodletheworld 9 hours ago
You can downvote the parent post all you like, but…
> Personally I don't care much about stories in games
I cant relate to this.
Chrono trigger is a game I love because of the great story.
If you’re playing rpgs and you don't care about the story or characters…
I have no idea. Its like reading a book and saying you don't enjoy the story; you're what, just there for the physical motion of turning the pages?
No idea. Chrono cross left no impression on me. I agree with the parent post.
SmasherEpilepti 9 hours ago
> I have no idea. Its like reading a book and saying you don't enjoy the story; you're what, just there for the physical motion of turning the pages?
I think you were intending for novels, but poetry books typically don't really have much in the way of "story", just aesthetics. Even for novels, there are many that I primarily appreciate the prose. I love everything about the Kingkiller Chronicle books, but the prose itself is quite pleasant in isolation, and I could probably appreciate the books even if the story and worldbuilding weren't good.
Plenty of RPGs don't have much in the way of story. The story of the first Final Fantasy is nearly absent. Same with the first Diablo, and most roguelikes. Obviously, you can enjoy an RPG without caring for the story or characters, because the main point the vast majority of games is to play them.
monkpit 8 hours ago
The analogy to a book doesn’t fit anyways.
The closest thing would be telling someone they’re reading a choose-your-own-adventure book wrong somehow, and even then it’s a stretch.
American87 5 hours ago
Playing devil's advocate:
If someone revealed to you that they enjoyed "You are a shark" as much as "Cave of Time", and after inquiring you learned that they don't read the page, they just skip to the decision, and backtrack if they get a The End:
Did they enjoy the game? If there are enough of these type 2 readers should the industry start catering to them over legacy type 1 page readers?
monkpit 5 hours ago
The point is that it doesn’t matter, they enjoyed it. The fun police weren’t invited to do an investigation, no matter what scenario or analogy is applied.
Saying “you didn’t like it right” is gatekeeping.
monkpit 9 hours ago
Why announce that you’re incapable of allowing someone to hold an opinion that doesn’t match yours?
Would it be so wrong for someone to enjoy something in a different way than you do? Or should they be chastised for enjoying it the wrong way?
You’re welcome to ask what brings them enjoyment, to broaden your views, instead of dismissing them.
falsaberN1 7 hours ago
Cross does look very good, I can agree to that, but there are things that bother me severely besides the story, mostly how the gameplay is designed in a way where just smashing circle will win you any battle because Serge is ridiculously strong and mandatory. The element system is very interesting but outside THOSE TWO GUYS (you know who) and the final boss, you are never compelled to use it because the fights are so easy that it's just faster to have Serge cut everything to size. If you choose Glenn over Razzli (and if you choose Razzli you have to get Korcha) the game becomes even easier. And despite the huge roster of characters most of the times it's just more efficient to use Serge, Glenn and Kid/Fargo for stealing (if you want a 100% run).
Even if you go out of your way to use your favorite characters or try to use elements it just becomes slower but not harder. There's almost no reason to use the League of Extraordinary Accents. This game SCREAMS to have something like Lufia II's Ancient Cave where you can get some thrills with those mechanics. The fixed level system really works against it.
There's potential in there, but it feels like most of the mechanics shy away from using it.
Also, despite the music being great, the battles and boss battles reuse the same theme 99% of the time, which gets tiring fast. And the regular boss battle theme happens to be the worst track in all of the game (DU-DU! DUDUDUDU-DU-DU! pirori pirori pirori~ DU-DU! DUDUDUDU-DU-DU!)
But the worst part is the freaking dwarfs trying to give you the eco-friendly message about how humans are destroying the environment and whatnot...despite humans not even being industrialized in all of El Nido (except for those guys outside of time) and they say that while committing genocide against the fairies with heavy smog-spewing machinery and tanks. Like give me a break... Every human settlement in El Nido is comfy nature-friendly villages and you are giving me the talk while riding a freaking tank.
debo_ 6 hours ago
The thing I like most about the PS1 era of JRPGs is that a lot of them were highly experimental. Trigger is sort of the most-polished culmination of a style developed across 8-bit and 16-bit jrpgs. Games like Cross, FF8, the SaGa Frontier games, even Legend of Mana are where Square really started to experiment, and I'm glad they did.
Cross is mechanically a mess. My least favorite part is how you must equip eleventy billion elements, it's tedious as heck, and it sort of discourages you from trying other characters because even bulk-switching elements doesn't work well due to slot and native element differences.
It was also very slow by contemporary standards. That 10 second camera wag before every fight gave them time to load assets etc., but it is very frustrating to watch every time.
I still think the atmosphere shines brightly enough to surmount these issues. It's not just that the game is beautiful, it's that the vibe is completely unique to this day, imo. FF7 also had that undertone of menace and "something's not quite right here", but there was always at least one obvious threat. In Cross, it's hard to ever put your finger on what has really gone wrong for most of the game, but you can feel in your bones that something creepy is going on. The juxtaposition between that and some of the most beautifully poignant art and music on the PS1 just hit the spot for me.
falsaberN1 4 hours ago
Funny, I very much prefer Legend of Mana and SaGa Frontier (specially the first, has more robots).
The atmosphere in Cross is really good yeah, but the plot and gameplay issues really hold it back. I can forgive it being a bad sequel (mean-spirited towards Trigger at times for some odd reason) or having a silly plot, but I can't forgive the wasted potential. Feels like the director lost interest once the Radical Dreamers portion was remade.
bitwize 4 hours ago
> It was also very slow by contemporary standards. That 10 second camera wag before every fight gave them time to load assets etc., but it is very frustrating to watch every time.
I used to call that the "Sony-mandated camera spin" because I half-seriously thought that spinning the camera over the field and characters was a prerequisite for getting a PlayStation devkit in the first place. It's in so many JRPGs, it was in Bust-A-Move (Bust-A-Groove), the dancing game, when one character solos, etc.
Sony actually had policies like this; for example, sprite-based PlayStation games were popular in Japan but near-forbidden in North America, because SCEA's marketing strategy was to emphasize 3D polygon graphics and convey a sense that the world had moved on from sprites. Of course, much like modern mobile policies, if you were big enough the rules could be bent for you. Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and other tentpoles could thus release sprite-based games.
javchz 9 hours ago
Cross has an amazing soundtrack tho. I think this is probably the main area where didn't felt like a downgrade.
But I agree. Chrono trigger it's the closet thing to perfection in a JRPG. Just pure mastering of the craft in all areas, music, art direction, gameplay, pacing, etc.
It's not that cross it's bad, not at all, has a lot of innovation, but Trigger has a big shadow to scape.
mitthrowaway2 7 hours ago
For what it's worth, the fangame "crimson echoes" is a great alternative sequel.
nomilk 2 hours ago
I recall my friend's older brother and his friends all loving chronotrigger some 3.5 decades ago.
Is it worth playing today? (I don't have any gaming consoles, and use macOS)
(I've never played an RPG, except for Disk 1 of the original Final Fantasy VII, which I really enjoyed).
Root_Denied 2 hours ago
I'd say it's still very worth playing. It has a lot of tropes that future games took inspiration from, and it's art style is iconic (in part because the character designer and art direct was Akira Toriyama, of Dragonball fame). If nothing else the soundtrack will grab you by the ears and draw you in.
I've seen people bounce off of it, no shame if that happens - in typical JRPG fashion of the time it came out it's involved (there's some non-intuitive progression steps) and takes about 20-30 hours to complete.
There's a DS version which I can't speak to since I've only played the original SNES version, but I understand it adds some additional content that's not required for the story.
peheje an hour ago
Available in play store on Android also. Cheap
plastic-enjoyer 2 hours ago
Yes. It is one of the most polished JRPGs, and there are no random encounters or grinding. The game can be played through in 24 hours, with optional side quests.
nubinetwork 43 minutes ago
I play it on average once a year, the full 6h playthrough.
acbart 9 hours ago
There's a live music concert for Chrono Trigger playing right now. That game had one of the best soundtracks of all time.
ramesh31 9 hours ago
>"That game had one of the best soundtracks of all time."
Agreed, there's just something really special about it. You may appreciate these guys, I've had their playlist on repeat for years while working: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p636Rw_L3XU&list=PL1FBFF9D52E7...
tfigueroa 9 hours ago
100%, really a fantastic soundtrack - still gives me chills.
Thank you for sharing this - here’s what I’ve had on my playlist recently: https://youtu.be/zWeGxKsPXZ4
ihsw 8 hours ago
You might like Chrono Symphonic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JQxH77NWEQ
OCReMix is quite good for this.
lucgray 5 hours ago
I love this jazz arrangement https://open.spotify.com/album/4NtHhdEp0nCFLz3SwoM4QB?si=rUV...
And despite being trigger/cross love this one as well https://open.spotify.com/album/7izJQDtszjo9DbOVEMsvEj?si=HnN...
Hard for me to listen to the last one without getting a little emotional, something about the lyrics and simple piano accompaniment
matheusmoreira 4 hours ago
The other OCRemix albums are highly recommended too, especially the early ones.
marcusverus 6 hours ago
Sublime. Thank you for sharing.
dvno42 3 hours ago
Yasunori Mitsuda's music has had a lasting impression on me. From Chrono to Xenogears and beyond, I had some strong feels associated with his music. Thanks for sharing that link :D
jMyles 8 hours ago
I cut a one-take version of Frog with some of my fav. musicians:
falsaberN1 7 hours ago
So many memorable tracks and setpieces...we had it good.
smj-edison an hour ago
Corridors of Time is still sublime. After I heard that song I had to figure out the notes. Turns out there's this random tool that turns game music rips into midi, so I was able to figure out the chords in that song. I still play it from time to time.
seam_carver 8 hours ago
In Fire Emblem 3 Houses, the final boss of the Azure route has 199 HP and is standing on a 60 HP heal tile.
If you deal 3 damage, it goes to 196. 196+60=256.
This overflows to zero and you win.
nubinetwork 10 hours ago
The elixir glitch works on a lot of bosses...
shusaku 9 hours ago
I feel like this is particularly amusing though because as I understand it this boss is not in the original game. So on a DS which is so powerful you should never have glitches due to such technical limitations, the developers flew insanely close to the sun.
christophilus 4 hours ago
A friend of mine and I played Secret of Mana until our money overflowed the bounds of an int (or whatever was backing it. It evidently caused save game corruption, and that was the end of our epic run.
lawik 3 hours ago
That is a way cooler end.
I soent a lot of time grinding up the levels on the spells to get the extra cool effects that would happen more frequently as your spell level approached 9. Though it would never pass 8:99 if I recall correctly.
I lent the game to a friend. His kid brother overwrote every save file with one called Mnupll.
Love the game. Never redid that. Would have liked to max out weapons because I think you could grind for orbs in the final fort.
anon_cow1111 7 hours ago
I think it could be an unpopular opinion, but I like seeing these completely stupid link-to-a-wiki with no context whatsoever posts. Things that force you to actually RTFA of some obscure bit of tech trivia feel a little bit more like how using the internet used to be all those years ago.
(I still need to finish the FoE romhack though)
avaer 5 hours ago
Parallel rabbit holes if you like this stuff:
- in Pokemon gen 1 you can wrap your stats back to zero by buffing them too much
- In FF7 you can overflow the damage calculation to kill Ruby in one hit
- Mario 64 has a mountain of usable glitches; "parallel universes" let you skip collisions at high speeds
- GTA 3/VC/SA have crazy mission/wrong warp corruptions involving parallel game simulations
- NES Mario can be corrupted to execute arbitrary code in TAS
- OOT can be heap-corrupted so badly you can write a loader for an entire DLC via controller ("triforce%", my choice for most insane controller based hack of a game)matheusmoreira 4 hours ago
> NES Mario can be corrupted to execute arbitrary code in TAS
Pokémon, too!
a1o 7 hours ago
This boss doesn’t exist in the SNES version right? I don’t remember it.
jjice 7 hours ago
Nope, just in the 2010(ish) DS version and later.
Founderarcstone 11 hours ago
One of the best games ever made very cool you made this.
sph 10 hours ago
Yet another downside of using ‘safe’ languages. You don’t get cool stuff like this.
surgical_fire 10 hours ago
Nuclear Gandhi would never have been a thing.
ufo 10 hours ago
Nuclear Gandhi is an urban legend. Turns out there was no such bug in Civ 1.
tialaramex 8 hours ago
And in more recent games where there is Nuclear Gandhi it's because of that legend.
If you write a game in a decent language where such a thing won't happen by mistake you can still have it be present on purpose and in some cases that even fits the game's lore.
Random glitches are confusing and bad. Falling off the world in Blue Prince due to collision bugs is annoying for example. However "glitches" which are intended behaviour are fun. I've enjoyed every time I saw somebody get that note and gift from Mrs Babbage because they drafted that particular room in that particular place and it had an effect which in hindsight they now realise was both foreseeable and regrettable...
surgical_fire 6 hours ago
I know. The urban legend would still not be a thing.
sph 2 hours ago
It would’ve been debunked by Snopes on day 1: “impossible, the game is written in Rust”
(I can’t think of one language that defaults to saturating integers)
CodesInChaos 9 hours ago
Many safe languages still suffer from integer overflows. For example in Rust and C# you can pick between an exception being thrown, or silent wrapping when an overflow happens.
vhcr 7 hours ago
Or using the saturating methods.
bigstrat2003 4 hours ago
I don't think that's suffering at that point. The programmer has made an explicit decision to let things overflow, so he should be prepared to handle that possibility. It's not like a language where overflow happens silently without warning.
JoshTriplett 9 hours ago
I remember the days of DOS and getting a direct pointer to video memory. And I've enjoyed the long history of video game exploits and even arbitrary code execution. But at the same time, I'm also glad that era is over. The same bugs that help you jailbreak a phone can also be the bugs that help you gain illicit access to one.
rep_lodsb 7 hours ago
Illicit access as defined by Google / Apple? If the three letter agencies are interested in you, they don't need to exploit any bugs, they can just demand access from those two companies, and get it. To the device that you carry in your pocket 24/7, with GPS, microphone and camera.
In the days of DOS, the BIOS would load the first sector of a floppy disk or hard drive into memory and transfer control to it. You could replace that sector, and not a single line of code that you didn't write yourself would be executed after that. THIS is how it should be on a PERSONAL computer. A virus could do the same, of course, and gain full control of the machine, but that is not an argument against giving control to the user. You could blame DOS for not intercepting attempts to rewrite the boot sector and asking the user for consent, but completely preventing something like this in the name of security would be even worse!
Imagine if back then, there was a "secure boot" mechanism so that only a boot sector with Microsoft's cryptographic signature was allowed, and that boot sector code would in turn verify everything loaded afterwards. Linux wouldn't exist. So, neither would Android, but the situation would be much the same as it is now, only with Microsoft Phone OS instead -- and absolutely no concept of how it could be different, of a computing device controlled by its user instead of a giant corporation.
zdragnar 7 hours ago
You aren't arguing for jailbreaks, you are arguing for the phone to be in the user's full control.
Ideally, ios and Android would be secure enough that no jailbreaks are possible, but open enough to allow the user to replace the OS with one of their choosing.
Having it locked down and then resorting to exploiting loopholes is the worst of both worlds.