You can defeat the Dream Devourer from Chrono Trigger using an int overflow
A Hacker News discussion thread about an exploit in Chrono Trigger: the Dream Devourer, a boss from the game's DS port, can be defeated by triggering an integer overflow. Commenters debate the merits of Chrono Cross as a sequel, praise the game's soundtrack, and joke that memory-safe languages would have prevented such bugs from producing fun glitches like this one.
Yet another downside of using 'safe' languages. You don't get cool stuff like this.
- falsaberN1
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.
- PlunderBunny
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.
I never understood how that particular bit of logic could have been coded that way - it seemed so unnatural.
- SatvikBeri
Similarly, you can defeat the Egg Dragon superboss in Lufia 2 by healing before attacking: it starts with 65,535 HP.
- anon_cow1111
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)
- nubinetwork
The elixir glitch works on a lot of bosses...