Comment by staplung
4 years ago
Loved Scorched Earth. Had this fun bug/feature related to the weapons market. Between rounds you used your earnings to buy more weapons for the next round. There was an option to make it a "free market" which meant that the prices would get jacked on the weapons that you bought most often. But - and I didn't know this at the time - the price of an item was represented as a signed int so if you jacked the price high enough (which didn't take long) the price would flip over to a very high magnitude negative number and they'd literally pay you to take the nukes/MIRVs/dirt-bombs/napalm off their hands. Good times.
One of my favorite games of all time, begin (a text based Star Trek game) has a similar bug where you could warp in the negative direction at infinite speed. I still remember the commands: w 90 -100, f a t. (warp 90 degrees at warp -100, fire all torpedoes!). Assuming the enemy was 270 degrees from you —- you’d fly the ship backwards at them!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begin_(video_game)
I know the guy who wrote that - Tom Nelson. I don't think he knows this bug! I'll let him know (he's rewriting it in a client-server version for multiple players).
Bugs aside, the Free Market mode makes for a really nice dynamic where you had to get good at all sorts of different tactics and weapons, instead of just being good at one of them.
At my school, I just did the more pedestrian hack of editing the config files to change the prices of the expensive items XD