Good Bad Bugs/Video Games/Roguelike


 * In the retail PC version of Rogue (which came out in The Eighties), every item has an internal number for its to-hit bonus and an internal number for its damage bonus, even if it's not a weapon. And any item can be wielded, even if it's not a weapon. Most items in the game have these internal fields initialized to 0, but the food ration you start the game with does not. Thus, if you wield your food as a weapon, you will never miss when you swing at a monster, and one hit will instantly kill anything.
 * To discourage players from descending below dungeon level 26, each level you go down adds 1d8 to every monster's hit dice and 1 point to every monster's armor class. You can use the "wield food" trick to descend VERY deeply into this tomb of horrors, but even a food ration isn't completely invincible. At around level 1000, it starts taking 2 hits to kill a monster. At level 2000, it takes 3 hits. At level 3000, it takes 4 hits. And at around level 3900 or so, you'll start missing and soon won't be able to hit anything at all.
 * Level 20 was supposed to be the highest experience level your character could attain. So what happens when you drink a potion of raise level when you're at level 20? Your level cycles back down to 1. However, you don't lose any hit points when this happens. You then have the opportunity to gain levels back up to 20 again, and you gain ANOTHER 1d10 hit points with every new level you gain. It's possible to get to level 20, drink a potion of raise level, get back to level 20, drink another potion of raise level, over and over again, beefing your hit points up into the thousands. (Provided you don't get your hit points permanently drained by a vampire in the mean time.)
 * Once you pick up the Amulet of Yendor on level 26, you are allowed to climb up stairs as well as down them. PC Rogue had to run on a 256K PC with only a floppy drive, so it didn't keep track of what was and was not on any dungeon levels other than the one you were currently on; when you ascended from level 26 to level 25, an entirely new level 25 has to be randomly generated. To prevent you from "level grinding", levels above the lowest level you've visited are devoid of items, so you'd eventually starve to death. However, if you go back down to the lowest level you'd previously visited (e.g. level 26), the level WILL have items on it. Thus, you can go up and down between levels 25 and 26 indefinitely, racking up XP and weapon/armor enchantments until you're a god of sorts.
 * Saving the game consists of, basically, dumping core to a file. Every variable in the game gets saved and will later be restored, including the random number generator's seed value. This means that for an enterprising gamer who is willing to make copies of the saved-game file, and restore those copies if (s)he died, it's possible to know exactly what will happen next so long as you make exactly the same moves you did the previous time.
 * In later editions of Rogue (compared to the early Unix and retail PC versions), there was the new feature where throwing a potion could affect a monster--but it also worked when wielding it and when doing so the potion would never break or get used up, making a paralysis potion the most valuable item in the game.
 * Let's not forget the Unix version where the "identify" scroll was split up into "identify potion", "identify ring, wand, or staff", etc. but where every type of identify scroll could identify a staff although the staff was not listed as an item it could be applied to.
 * Castle of the Winds had a couple of interesting bugs:
 * When you start a new game, you get to assign your stats. If you minimize your Constitution, you'll get enough points to max out your other stats. If you then pick Magic Arrow as your starting spell, and use it continually, even once you run out of mana, an action that drains your constitution if you do it too much, you will eventually run out of constitution. Normally, this would also cause you to run out of hit points, but for some reason, at level 1 you will stay alive. If you then cast Magic Arrow again, your Constitution will underflow, and roll over to the absolute maximum (which is far above the max you can assign in character creation). Suddenly, you go from having 2 HP to 34. Combined with your other, maxed out stats...
 * Shops are implemented in the same interface as your normal inventory, with the shop's inventory replacing the "Floor" inventory. However, if you cast a movement spell (Phase Door, Teleport, etc) while in a shop, the game will glitch slightly, and cause the shop's inventory to appear as a pile of items on the map on the shop's tile. Now, normally you would not be able to access this pile, as the shop appears as soon as you step on to the tile. However, if you use Phase Door to teleport onto the tile, you bypass this, and can now pick up the shop's entire inventory for free, which you can then sell back to him.
 * If you made sure there were no monsters left on a dungeon map before leaving it, you could Rune of Return and rest/sleep on the village/castle to your heart's content and no new monster would appear in that map. You actually had to return to the map in question and rest/sleep there for new monsters to appear. This was most useful in the final dungeon, but made it less exciting.
 * In Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, you could completely ignore the "hunger" mechanic in late post-credits quests: only the team leader would ever get hungry, and you could switch out the leader with a teammate anytime you wanted, resetting your belly to 100. This was fixed in the second game by not allowing the switching of the team leader in mid-dungeon.
 * In the the expansion set to the second game, Explorers of Sky, a few Joke Items were added that were spelled wrong and meant to be confused with other items. Also added to the game was a "recycling" (item-crafting) feature where you could submit a specified number of arbitrary items and receive a prize ticket for some other awesome items. Thing is, if you submitted any joke items to be traded for a prize ticket, they would not be removed from your inventory if they were selected in a certain pattern, allowing for (almost) free, infinite attempts at the prize booth.