Good Bad Bugs/Video Games/Simulation Game

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Examples of Good Bad Bugs in Simulation Games include:

  • Most Harvest Moon games tend to have at least two or three bugs each - though this has become rarer since Tree of Tranquility. These are usually among the annoying kind, but a few fit in this category. Among them:
    • HM's Day/Night system: Time seems to pass normally in an accelerated cycle, except for one thing - night will never end until you go to bed. This means that you can clear your entire property, till and plant seeds on every available square, and water each and every one of them...in one night. The only downside is that some tasks can't be done after a certain time of day (most importantly, the shipping bin resets in the morning, so anything you throw in after the shipper won't count until then) - but for everything else you've got all the time in the world!
    • HM's Love glitch: The game's eligible brides will like you more when you talk to them every day, but talking to them more than once in a day won't do anything... in theory. Actually, if you walk out of her house, then back in, it counts as a new day. Pretty much mandatory for getting the best ending, which requires you to have a wife and a kid... within three years.
    • HM 64's Horse Betting glitch: If you place your bets with the Mayor's wife, then exit instead of confirming, the bets will go through without costing you money.
    • HM 64's Dog Glitch: You can raise Karen's Heart Level to red in a single day by continuously showing her your dog.
    • HM DS's 1 Billion Gold glitch: Hiring the Fishing Sprites during Winter, then shipping junk items (items that ship for 1G each) during a day when they're working for you will set your money level to 1 Billion.
    • Friends Of Mineral Town: When stumbling upon an outdoor Rival Heart Scene, the clock will not restart until you leave that particular area. Stumbling upon such a scene with your fishing pole and basket in tow is an excellent opportunity to load up on lucrative fish and other items. Also, you don't lose stamina during Festivals, so you can power up your tools to full experience (except for the watering can, which can't be used while empty). Both glitches were removed in More Friends.
    • Back To Nature: On your first day on the farm, where Mayor Thomas will take you on a tour of town, before exiting your house, you can keep swinging your tools (except for the watering can) to gain full experience levels, since the game will lock your stamina level at 1 so you can go through with the required cut scene. Works with any day where you'll experience a cut scene as soon as you open the door, but this is the first one and most easily predicted.
    • A Wonderful Life: Cook with Ruby Spice as the only ingredient, and it will create a duplicate Ruby Spice, which can be sold for a tidy sum.
    • HM: DS lets you keep on getting friendship points by showing your pet to someone, with no limit. It is a great way to get early access to Leia the Mermaid.
  • SimCity 2000 had a bug involving the use of a joke cheat code. In the first SimCity game, typing "FUND" gave you some money, but Sim City 2000 instead offers you a loan at 25% interest (very, very bad idea). However, the game also dynamically adjusts what interest rate you get on regular loans by examining your current loans. Get a few of these joke loans, and the dynamic interest overflows and goes negative. A loan with negative interest? It means you get paid every year for having debts!
    • Also, the SNES version of the game had a bug involving a careful use of a pause button and the tax screen allowed to drop below zero, which instantly pushed it to the maximum value (then capped at $999999). An easy way to beat any scenario.
      • Likewise, holding the pause button at the beginning of the Boston scenario allows you to demolish the nuclear reactors before they go critical.
    • Also, in the original, a player could construct their entire transportation grid out of railroads where regular roads should go. It cost twice as much to set up, but completely eliminated any traffic problems and cut your pollution by an enormous amount.
  • The Sims can be quite amusing when it bugs.
    • The Sims 2 has a great bug where the aspiration reward that temporarily boosts toddlers' intelligence got "stuck" once in a while and left the player with a supersmart kid that learned skills at triple the speed. It was fixed in a recent expansion pack.
    • And broken and fixed and broken... depending on your expansion pack setup, it either is rare/fixed, happens fairly often, or happens every time you use the item.
    • You can also, with moveobjects activated, move a Sim somewhere, rotate the camera, and then start making (non-intelligent and temporary) clones of that Sim. Sometimes called the Door-Clone Glitch, since it was named after misusing the door feature in Build Mode. Same cloning process can be instigated by shift-clicking a Sim somewhere when in Buy Mode.
    • The Nannies were quite glitchy in the sims...they would do shit like light the house on fire, feed babies that were full, ignore the babies, stick around the house indefinitely, etc.
    • In the original you could make a floating house, and do it without console commands. Place a bunch of pillars down, and then build your house on top of them. You can then delete the pillars, and the house will remain standing. You've wasted a floor of your house, but you can always use that space for one giant swimming pool.
  • The Norn genomes in the release version of Creatures 2 had a flaw in their simulated neurochemistry, so that when a Norn walked into a wall, instead of getting the signal to turn round and walk away, they would often continue to walk into the same wall over and over. This habit became known as 'Wallbonking' and is considered a classic Norn trait among the fandom, even though a fixed genome and later games (mostly) eradicated the behaviour.
    • This was far from the only problem in the Creatures 2 genome -- the Artificial Stupidity was so rampant, it was dubbed "One Hour Stupidity Syndrome." While many programmers released fixes for this, which targeted various aspects of the genome, the original genome is still quite funny, in a schadenfreude kind of way. To clarify, after one hour, the bugged genome would ensure that your Norn would become incredibly stupid, to the point of total paralysis.
    • The "flying lemon" bug in the first Creatures is fondly remembered by fans.
      • Other flying objects too, like the coconut Crab COB.
  • A glitch in Spore lets you abuse how the game sets the limits for creature widths to make asymmetrical creatures, with different hands on each sides, or different limbs on each sides. Eventually this was made easier by making it a legitimate game feature.
    • Also, limbs (but not hands or feet) turn invisible if the starting joint isn't connected to the torso. Somebody made a whole range of Rayman-based creatures this way! This glitch is also very commonly used to make creatures that perpetually hover above the ground (using invisible legs).
  • Monster Rancher Advance 2 has a Good Bad Bug... that unfortunately comes with a side-order of Laser-Guided Karma. Essentially: At the start of the week, before doing anything else, save your game. Turn it off and on again quickly. If done correctly, your monster will lose Fatigue and Stress points, meaning that, if done repeatedly, they will never tire. The universe's retrobution for cheating to train your monster? If done repeatedly, this trick will actually kill the saving on your actual game, due to its origins as a memory-clearing glitch.
  • Animal Crossing: City Folk has an oversight in the programming which makes it possible for the player to completely bypass the "normal" methods for getting nearly anything. When you go to someone else's town via wifi and then leave, as you disconnect and Copper wishes you a good day, the player can press the Home button to reset the game. Wifi normally does not let the player use the Home button at all. This allows for cloning items, including money. By having the host save the game, the guest can drop the item in the host's town and then use the oversight to reset the game BEFORE you return to your town, meaning the save when you return will not happen. When you start the game back up, you will have the item in your inventory, and your host will have a copy of that same item. Thus, it's possible for two people teaming up to get as many of a given item as they wish or as much money as they wish, and in this way completely bypass the normal methods of earning money or certain items.
  • NASCAR Racing 2003 Season: Unrealistic car setups worked well with the original retail version on the faster tracks, to the point that the cars handled more like Indy cars and were somewhere between stock cars and Indy cars in terms of speed.
  • The original Transport Tycoon keeps cash on hand as a 32-bit signed integer, limiting your money to +/- 2.1 billion GBP (all other currencies are multiples of this base amount; USD = GBP x 2, JPY = GBP * 100 etc). It's possible to build a tunnel extending from one end of the map to the other, which would make the cost overflow. Shift-click to get a cost estimate, keep searching until you see something with a cost in the negatives, then build. Instant jackpot of 2.1 billion pounds. Did I mention this can be done shortly after the game starts? This was fixed in Transport Tycoon Deluxe.
    • In a similar vein, cash-on-hand can also overflow, suddenly shifting from 2 billion on hand to 2 billion in debt. The AI companies are not smart enough to begin wasting money once it approaches this number.
  • Before being patched, in some games of the Silent Hunter franchise (the 3 and 4, this troper thinks) when one destroyer rammed your submarine to sink it (a tactic used in Real Life, even by a battleship) the destroyer, not you submarine, went to meet Davy Jones
    • This troper also remembers playing the single mission that had you in the middle of the main Japanese fleet during the battle of Leyte Gulf and how while posing to torpedo the heavy battleship Yamato a destroyer located behind her started an attack run against his boat. Both the Yamato and the destroyer collide, nasty metallic noises started to sound, and the Yamato sank the destroyer without even stopping or attempting to change course
  • There was an online Martian Rover Sim in 3D, which had been designed as part of the mission's publicity. The Sim was designed to show how the rover would move and collect samples. It also had some speed settings which, instead of speeding up the whole animation, increased the speed of the rover, allowing some really stupid stunts. You could take the rover to the edge of the map, where there was a small wall, climb it, and head out into the wide red yonder, which caused the rover to drive upside down through the air, among other things... Not bad for an educational resource!
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