Strange Glitches In Games 282
Parz writes "Even the best of game developers can leave a big dirty glitch buried within its products that can turn a gameplay experience on its head (sometimes literally). Gameplayer has trawled through the web to locate video footage of some of the more amazing and hilarious examples of glitches in games. It acts as an interesting insight into the bugs that some games — especially today — ship with. What interesting bugs have you encountered?"
Final Fantasy Bugs (Score:5, Interesting)
Two off the top of my head:
In Final Fantasy 7, you can cast a spell like regen (which gives health over time) during a battle then you can pop open the playstation cd lid. The fight pauses, but you keep on getting healed.
In both Final Fantasy 2 (4j) and Final Fantasy 3 (6j) there were bugs which allowed you to duplicate items thanks to programming errors.
Quake (Score:4, Interesting)
Most of these were discovered and put to normal use in the game as the community adapted:
Rocket jump
Wall strafing
Bunnyhop
And if you count things with strange but intentionally designed behaviour, then telefrag.
Glitch in Deus Ex (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder though, is exploiting a bug in a game in this manner concidered as cheating? I didn't hack any files, I didn't enter a cheat code, I just kept repeatedly talking to a character, who appearantly liked giving me xp for nothing.
Minus World (Score:5, Interesting)
My favorite glitch has always been the Minus World in Super Mario Brothers. Mostly I'm just amazed that someone actually found it. I mean you had to smash like exactly five bricks or something, and then duck and jump into the wall, where you would then be transported to a pipe that took you to an unending water-world. Truly baffling.
C & C glitches (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyone remember these:
- selling buildings, and then stopping the action to get free infantry
which combined rather well with this one:
- dragging the '$' sell cursor off the sandbags so you could sell things you normally couldn't (like infantry)
Online games still not validating input (Score:1, Interesting)
Any minimally good web developer has already learned about input validation and sanity checking on many levels, but for some reason even the biggest game software houses still release stuff that can be ruined by the simplest attacks. Modded software and cheating devices have been around for decades, how come they are still that naÃve? Is the server-side processing overhead so big that it's justifiable to let virtually anyone ruin the experience of every other player they meet?
Ultima I on the C64 (Score:5, Interesting)
If you popped the disk out of the drive and walked a little way to make it access the disk to load more terrain it would instead generate miles of random tiles. Some of the tiles were endless stacks of chests. You could open those chests and get tons of gold. Works all the way up through Ultima 4. I never played any after that.
World of Warcraft flying off the boat (Score:3, Interesting)
There was a bug in World of Warcraft after the Lich King release where you could end up flying across (and through) the entire would if you dueled a death knight who was on a particular boat. Here's a video of it [wowinsider.com].
Under the ice in Zelda: OOT (Score:5, Interesting)
In the spirit of full disclosure, I didn't discover this one, and it's documented fairly well elsewhere.
In Ocarina of Time, when you become an Adult, Zora's Domain gets turned to ice. How sad! I know. Anyway, there's a way to get underneath the ice from Lake Hylia. You have to stand directly beneath the gate that leads to the water temple in the center of the lake, against the wall to your right as you face away from the entrance. If you take off the iron boots, you'll start to float upwards, and if you time it right, you'll momentarily see through the wall. If you put your iron boots on at that moment, you'll be able to sink past that wall, underneath the lake. Woohoo.
So, after you do that, you have to swim towards the tunnel that connects the lake to zora's domain. While it's also frozen, since you're under the lake, you can just swim beneath it and still be transported to Zora's domain. When you get there, you'll be under the ice! It's pretty cool actually. There is a hidden cavern down there that looks like it was going to be something that wasn't included in the game. You can get out of the ice through the frozen waterfall -- just walk towards it long enough and you'll get through.
Here's a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_7UmsKh4Gk [youtube.com] . There are actually quite a few interesting glitches in that game. Ah, Ocarina of Time, how we loved thee... Still fun ten years later.
Re:Final Fantasy Bugs (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't forget about the psyco cyan glitch in ff6, a combination of remort, imp, death and life will make him unleash an infinite attack combo until the enemies are dead.
Pokemon (Score:2, Interesting)
How about an entire Glitch Pokemon? http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Missingno [bulbagarden.net]. In orderto figth it you have to go for the training of how to catch a pokemon, fly somewhere, and then surf.
And best of all is that it duplicates the item in your 6th slot 150 times. There is also a strange truck that you can use push on(???)
And a very strange bug to get mew(supposed to require going to a nintendo event)
Later games even had a very slow saving sequence, making Pokemon duplication easy
Online glitches (Score:2, Interesting)
They're the worst. Team fortress 2 and Left 4 dead are very fun games, at least the rare times people don't ruin it by using a glitch. See TFA for the example of team killing in left 4 dead through the elevator. Capture the point in TF2 also ruined many times by people going "under the map" and being unkillable.
I really don't understand it. If you want an empty victory, there are single player games with plenty of glitches, go masturbate by yourself.
I have little understanding of the computing/programming/whatever behind it, but Halo 3 and other games that seemed to have a central server didn't suffer from that, wheras TF2 (and TF1 before it) seem to connect you to other people hosting games rather than one centralized server, and they seem to have more glitch exploiting. I'd hazard a guess: it's easier to update your own servers to immediately sew up exploitable glitches than it is to force everyone to update theirs. I'm guessing the main reason not to have a centralized system like that is cost and speed. I'd be willing to pay more for TF2 or future sequels if it were more "managed" like Halo 3. I still occasionally play halo 3 even though it's not as much fun as TF2, simply because sometimes I don't want to start a game, then find someone doing shit like that and have to find another game, repeat.
I know that the team fortress... er... team isn't giving up, their blog (http://www.teamfortress.com/) indicates they are themselves extremely annoyed, and they seem to be coming up with new ways of trying to filter out the crap, scoring servers. And they also seem to constantly be taking out glitches. If TF2's servers are decentralized compared to Halo 3's, I wonder if they aren't regretting that decision, and if TF3 would have more centralized servers.
(One last reminder, I don't know anything concrete about the differences or similarities in connecting to games in Halo 3 versus TF2 other than one you click on some server name and often get glitching, and in the other you just hit play and there are much less glitches.)
Tribes (Score:1, Interesting)
IMHO by far the most important glitch in gamer history is the "skiing" bug in tribes. It completely changed the game, drastically increasing the speed of gameplay, and turned what could have been another boring first person shooter into a landmark game.
From wikipedia: "This was originally an unintended side effect of the physics system implementation that caused players to encounter less friction with the ground when going down hillsides than on level terrain. The reduced friction was put in to make it harder for snipers to take out enemies. The reduction of friction was proportional to the slope of the hill; this meant that the steeper the terrain, the faster players could travel. Skiing allowed players to traverse Tribes' massive game maps in under 15 seconds in some cases instead of minutes."
Starsiege Tribes at Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
Re:Under the ice in Zelda: OOT (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a hidden cavern down there that looks like it was going to be something that wasn't included in the game
Too bad the mods won't scroll this far, but there's a whole story behind that little cavern - it was rumored to be some kind of fountain, don't quote me on this but I believe a "unicorn fountain" (no BS) that was scrapped in the end. There were found to be little traces of graphics from this fountain buried here and there within the game cartridge, but no playable version of the fountain was uncovered.
This secret, alongside the Banjo-Kazooie Stop n' Swop [wikipedia.org] conspiracies, are amongst the Nintendo 64's greatest mysteries. I haven't seen the cavern myself personally (yet plenty of youtube videos), but I have seen evidence of the Stop n' Swap thing, which may be related to the unicorn fountain in that extra gameplay was to be accessible via an addon hard drive to the Nintendo 64 but was never sold in the US (yet the Japanese Zelda/BK never included any of these features despite briefly selling the hard drive).
The Banjo-Kazooie Stop n' Swap relied on early Nintendo 64 models having nvram retain data while you could swap cartridges, theoretically between Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie so as to access secrets in the sequel based on progress in the first, but the idea was never finished in the sequel to the end of the nvram feature in later N64 models. Whether or not the OOT cavern relied on the hard drive (or didn't at the last minute) remains a secret lost with time.
This led to new understanding of a game fundamenta (Score:5, Interesting)
This bug was interesting because of the actual cause. The spell deathgrip functioned the same as a jump, and because of this explot, we learned that the game engine did not recalculate your postition (in the case of a jump/deathgrip) untill you land.
I dont know if this function was known before this bug was discovered, if it was, it wasnt widely known. But ever since we're always being reminded, when moving out of 'fire', just move, dont jump, since the game wont recognize your position and youll keep taking damage untill you land.
Re:Online games still not validating input (Score:5, Interesting)
So cheaters fly around invincibly doing whatever they want. About half an hour later, the rest of the players finally begin to finish putting 2+2 together, but they never goddamn vote to ban cheaters despite everyone agreeing.
Bit of a shame, because it's a good engine to build off of...
Some funny ones from the top of my mind (Score:5, Interesting)
Operation Flashpoint: The game allows you to save once during the mission. For some reasons I couldn't quite comprehend, very rarely, the wrecked stuff from the game before I loaded the saved game carried over to the loaded game - I suppose the game just didn't clear up some data it was supposed to clear. Anyway, there was this one mission in which you're supposed to destroy the first tank in the advancing tank column using mines and a LAW to block the road, then go kill the rest of the people or flee, failing that.
I lay the mines on the road, then picked up the LAW and went to the roadside bushes, and saved. I destroyed the first tank, then got killed. Loaded up the saved game.
The destroyed tank was there, blocking the road.
And there came the Russian commander who was driving there ahead of the tank column. Finding the road blocked by the destroyed tank, he stops the car... gets out of the car... and scratches his head.
From that point onward, I never ever doubted the ability of the AI programmers to create believable character behaviour.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: Wolves are the heraldic symbol of the city of Kvatch. I like wolves, and tried to avoid killing them in the game - yet, at one time, a wolf was following my horse. When I arrived to the camp near the city, the citizens unfortunately killed the wolf on their own. Very sad! But when I came back to the area later, I noticed that the citizens of Kvatch, bored as they were in the camp, had apparently stuffed the wolf. In other words, the corpse was in the standing position (undoubtedly the neutral position for the 3D model, and the game forgot to restore the dead posture).
Tomb Raider: Anniversary: Not a big glitch, but amused me anyway. In the lost valley, there's one spot where you can land - barely enough leg space. Lara stuck in the leaping position and was pushed by the game upward, up, up, up, and I couldn't do anything. I opened the menu. Closed it. Then, Lara suddenly remembered a few not-so-obscure theorems by good ol' Sir Isaac. *splat*.
Tomb Raider: Underworld: Not played this game too far yet, but the Mexico level had a really weird bug - I drove around with the motorcycle, but there was this one spot where Lara froze in air, while the motorcycle kept going and finally hit the wall. Pretty weird.
Could probably remember more, but I need to get going.
Sim City (Score:4, Interesting)
This is probably the very first glitch I came across. My age must have been in single digits then.
In the original Sim City, you could set taxes to 0% for the whole year and then jack it up to 20% just before the end of the year. Not only did you get the full 20% tax rate but your citizens remained happy because of low taxes.
Re:Quake (Score:3, Interesting)
yes, these are truly awesome things, i remember when bunnyhopping in counter-strike actually worked, oh man that was great for the ramp in dust...
and of course the original Tribes, which changed the bunnyhop into skiing, and also combined it with rocket(disc) jumping, or maybe a heavy nuke jump... :-D that was some crazy awesomeness.
along with that i really love the quake done quick videos.
http://speeddemosarchive.com/quake/qdq/movies/ [speeddemosarchive.com]
my favorite is still "the rabbit run" going thru easy mode in just under 11 minutes, freakin amazing.
Dwarf Fortress (Score:2, Interesting)
Dwarf Fortress is an old-school-style 2D game in the same style as Dungeon Keeper 2 (minus the creature control features, and with 100x more content). You control a team of dwarves who have set out to build a fortress, and you must find a way to feed them and keep them safe without having any direct control of them at all. It's loaded to the brim with all kinds of crazy things happening every moment of the game, some intended and some not. Just a few examples:
A kitten attacks a dragon, and the dragon dodges itself right off a cliff and dies.
An old dwarven king shows up on the map who was supposed to have died 20 years ago. The new year ticks by and the king suddenly remembers his past death and keels over.
A waterfall (which are frequently used to produce happy thoughts in dwarves since they like the mist) can potentially suck puppies in and drown them, even if you use a proper drain with a grate.
Cats reproduce at a ridiculous rate and kittens are widely regarded as a valid source of food.
These are just a few and I find dozens more every time I play. It's a fascinating game, check it out if you can.
Commander Keen 6 (Score:4, Interesting)
In Commander Keen 6: Aliens Ate My Babysitter, there is a bug where the player shots are marked as rideable (like a platform). So, you can jump up in the air, shoot down at the right point, and ride the bullet down. When the bullet hits the ground, it's removed from the game, but the pointer to the current platform (the bullet) doesn't get cleared (since real platforms never get removed), so you are left standing on a "ghost" of the bullet. If you immediately fire another bullet, it will occupy the same location in memory, so you will now be riding the new bullet. If you fire sideways, you will fall off, but if you fire upwards, you can ride all the way up to the ceiling -- in other words, an unlimited jump.
There are several other bugs which allow you to jump through walls and floors, like in "BloogFoods, Inc."
Also, any unused keys stay in your inventory when you exit a level.
Re:Commander Keen 6 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:C & C glitches (Score:1, Interesting)
C&C & RA: Sandbag walls all the way to the enemy base with a couple turrets at the end. That should have been a bug.
In Red Alert you could make cruisers move as fast as transports by grouping them and doing a formation move.
Re:Stunts (Score:3, Interesting)
That game was awesome! Turned into TrackMania [trackmania.com], I think (or at least that's a very very similar, modernised game).
While TrackMania is at most a spiritual successor to Stunts everyone really should check out at least TrackMania Nations Forever [trackmania.com], the free version that contains just one of the seven environments of TrackMania United Forever... :)
Whacked Out Ultima IX (Score:4, Interesting)
The fiasco that was Ultima IX: Ascension had so many bugs on its release in 1999 it's not even funny. Or is it? [it-he.org]. Someone actually played the game in such a twisted way taking advantage of these bugs to hilarious effect.
Re:C & C glitches (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:An annoying "glitch/bug" (Score:3, Interesting)
Speaking of UT99, there was a great glitch involving the impact hammer and perhaps also the RL. Mostly useful in assault maps, but also to a lesser degree in CTF and other team games, it allowed a player or two to launch their teammate a great distance, much further than the teleporter would normally allow.
First, you could place the teleport beacon on the ground, and then use the impact hammer to launch it to the opposite side of the map. For instance, on CTF-Face you could climb to the top of your tower and then launch the beacon into the other team's base. If done properly, IIRC, it would land in one of the balconies mid-way up the tower, saving you the dangerous run.
Next, you could use the impact hammer to launch a teammate directly. Either by yourself or with another player, you could crouch on the ground with a charged-up hammer and have another player run into you. What made this really glitchy though was that you first aimed and fired the hammer in the direction you want the player to fly in its primary mode, and only then charged it up. This way the player flew off in the exact direction you aimed, and you could have another player crouch right by you to increase the launch distance. Of the default assault maps, this could be used to launch players into the cannon on AS-Overlord, leaving the players just a short run up to the final objective.
Finally, as many knew the RL loaded with 6 rockets was ridiculously powerful, and this could also be used in games with disabled team damage. On AS-Guardia Fortress, you'd have a player stand in the corner right near the initial spawn point, load up 6 rockets , and fire them into the player's feet in a close pattern. The resulting explosion launched the player in the direction you were aiming, with the mountain slopes guiding the player right on the roof of the enemy base. You could also try to launch more than one player at a time, or have more than one player do the launching, but the results were often unpredictable.
At first, I was mostly pissed off about the whole thing with the usual "you're exploiting the game!" whining as I felt it bypassed the intended combat and progression through the objectives, but in reality it just shifted it around a bit and added some variety to the tactics and gameplay. No longer would you have all of the defending team camp by a chokepoint, and instead the defense would have to spread around a bit. It was great fun, and when AS was revived with these glitches missing, I could never get into the game as much as I did with UT99.
Re:Jet Fighter III (Score:2, Interesting)
Worked also on F/A-18 Interceptor on Amiga. Also you could fly indefinitely after shutting down engines. Just build up speed by nosediving and you can glide back up higher than your original altitude.
- P
Re:Ummm.... KOTOR II (Score:2, Interesting)
how about these:
1.A character tells you their name, then forgets they told you it and refuse to tell you their name.
2.Little robot agrees to destroy something after you leave, big robot says he wont let it, and destroys the little robot. The object is still destroyed.
3. Many of your party can be turned into jedi, but it only happen really late in the game where they end up with like 18 force points, not enough to string together 2 attacks
4. Near the middle you have to rescue or kill 4 people who will mend the jedi temple. Kill them all and the temple rebuilds itself
5.The boxart - there are at least 2 pictures on the box which are wrong - one with your character with a lightsaber before you get one, and another with a female character and a male character only NPC
6.Near the beginning there is an area of mist, walk into it and your character freezes(mid step) the only way through is to use a speed boost, or target an enemy on the other side
7. Unnamed villain - the guy on the box is never named until after you kill him
8. One character keeps talking about a sith either them self or someone else, in the third person. It is never revealed who it is
There are MANY more, but I don't want to bore you
And in the original Kotor - you can kill members of your party, but at the end they are all there cheering with you
Dark Age of Camelot / Return to Zork (Score:2, Interesting)
No-one is gonna read this far down, but what the hell :)
The Return To Zork one might not be a glitch so much as just evil designers, but if you made a slight mistake on the FIRST SCREEN (cut instead of dig the plant) then you're blocked from completion of the game, but you don't find out until much (much) later!
Dark Age of Camelot is a still-breathing MMO that got roundly whooped by WoW despite having probably the best PvP of any MMO to date. The bane of this game was the sheer number and scale of Line-Of-Sight and NPC-pathing problems. It made certain situations in the game almost unplayable.
There were also a lot of questionable decisions made by the design team that led to some interesting game dynamics. Anyone who's played will remember the MoC3/RR5 Sorc combo, the Large Shield blockrate against Dual-Wield and various other fun bits and pieces.
Still loved that game though...
Re:Tribes (Score:3, Interesting)
Want old-school? Here you go: (Score:1, Interesting)
The original Blackjack for the TRS-80 Model I, on audio-cassette, would let you bet negative dollars. Do that, intentionally lose the hand, profit.
Santa Paravia en Fumaccio had a bankruptcy bug that left you with all your grain if you declared you were broke. Buy a buttload of grain, default, profit.
Madden 96 (Score:1, Interesting)
I noticed in Madden 96 that the AI could audible into any defensive set they wished (the player could only audible 6-8 plays...not fair). So I would come out in punt formation on first down, the AI would audible into punt return. Then, I would audible into a pass play and throw to an uncovered receiver. Touchdown!! I loved beating the AI in older games.
Re:Final Fantasy Bugs (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Under the ice in Zelda: OOT (Score:3, Interesting)
Speaking of Zelda Ocarina of Time, what about Swordless Link (this very well may be talked about in TFA but I'm not going to click through 10 pages to find out)?
During the game, your character Link had his sword essentially the entire game, especially as an adult. But during the final battle against Gannon (ban), he would knock your sword out of your hands to force you to use another weapon in your inventory to fight back. Now if you came prepared, you could just equip the Biggoran sword and whallop away, but that's not fun.
So in the middle of the fight, you don't have a sword, so what do you do? Save and reset! The game retains what you have equipped and when you come back, you'll be hanging out without any sword equipped (impossible to do manually in the game). So now that you don't have a sword, you can do some crazy stuff that the game doesn't anticipate. Most of the coolest stuff involves getting on your horse Epona and using any item you want while riding around. The game typically limits you to just your bow and arrow, so all of a sudden your options are huge.
Fun stuff.
Also in the Zelda Universe, we have Link's Awakening for the original Game Boy. The game was grid based like the classic Legend of Zelda. In Link's Awakening, pressing Select would bring up the overworld map. If you pressed Select just as you were moving from one screen to another, you would warp to the far side of the screen in the same position you were just standing in. You could do some crazy sequence breaking using this glitch, or get yourself stuck in a tree.
Dying twice in Sinistar (Score:3, Interesting)
If you were able to get shot by a warrior while the Sinistar was eating your last ship, you'd die twice. This would leave you with -1 lives, which the game would interpret as 255.
Old School Glitches (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's a couple from the Intellivision [wikipedia.org] that my brother and I discovered:
Also, the Sega Genesis [wikipedia.org] game Phantasy Star II, [wikipedia.org] one of the best games I've ever played on the system, had a few bugs, some of them useful. My brother and I had catalogued 10 or so. Here's a couple:
StarCraft (Score:4, Interesting)
You can do some interesting things in StarCraft as well.
A well-known trick is having 11 mutalisks and some slow unit (overlord, larva) in a control group; moving them around makes the mutalisks group together in a single spot, which makes them more effective (hit-and-run attacks all target the same unit).
I saw a video called "Pimpest plays of 200n" (n=5?), where a Terran lifts a barrack (that's placed next to a mineral patch which blocks a pathway), then lands the barrack again and while the barrack is landing, moves some marines down under the barrack. When the barrack lands, the marines try to scatter and move out from under the barracks and walk through the minerals -- and are thus able to shoot the overlord on the other side.
Re:Ultima I on the C64 (Score:2, Interesting)
Old School (Score:2, Interesting)
Eat the pie until a "fire" glows, then go up until it stops, touch a star and you'll see the Secret Menu!!!
Battlefield:1942 stunts (Score:3, Interesting)
EA went nuts in their effort to make the physics work in the game. But all they managed to do is turn it into a stuntman's heaven. Videos abound of jeep jumps, inverse jumping (you get blown UPWARDS and land on a bridge or building above you) wing walking (I think the current record for most on a B-17 was like 25) and my favorite, plane switching in mid-air.
One nut managed to take a panzer and make it break dance for a few minutes.
Re:Quake (Score:3, Interesting)
Rocket jump
That's intentional. One of the secrets requires you to do that (but with the grenade launcher).
The only real issue was that most of the maps weren't designed to block rocket-jumpers - for example, you could use a Quad-damage rocket jump to reach the exit in the final map and return to the episode select map.
Re:Final Fantasy Bugs (Score:4, Interesting)
Bah, that's the lousy version of the tactics cloning bug ;) There's one version you can do that lets you clone any shield or weapon, 100% free. I don't remember the exact mechanism offhand (although I remember that you do *not* buy at any point and time; it's all done within the fitting screen). It's something along the lines of using Equip Shield in a job class that allows you to use the weapon you want to clone, then go into the fitting room, try to put a shield in the left hand, and then best fit, and then manually revert back to your original eq. Something like that. I'd have to mess around to figure it out again, and I recall it varies a bit depending on what you want to clone. In my best savegame, I had 99 of all of the best weapons and shields.
Want some more tactics glitches? That game was glitch city ;) Two of my favorites:
1) Learn abilities for free. Doesn't work in every class, and like most tactics bugs, there's a bit of finesse to exploiting it. It only works for job classes where you can scroll down the page, and not all of them -- but it's great for some of the big-ticket ones, like summoner, priest, black mage, time mage, etc. You get enough JP to buy at least one skill, but not all skills. You save, because the results can be unpredictable, and you may need to reload. You click to buy the skill, and a yes/no confirmation dialog comes up. While the dialog is up, you scroll the page up and down -- I forget which button it is that turns the up and down buttons into pageup/pagedown, but they erroneously let it still work while the confirmation dialog is up. So, you scroll down to a job that you *can't* afford and buy it. Depending on which job you can't afford that you left off on, it'll have a predictable effect for that job. There's no way to know in advance, however, what that effect will be. It may bring you to extremely negative JP, wherein when you exit and re-enter, you'll have 9999 JP to spend. It may bring you to maxint JP, where you can buy everything and still be over the top. It may increase your JP by a fixed amount or decrease it by a fixed amount. There's a bit of practice needed to figure out how to do this right because it can be hard to get just the right amount of JP to spend and to land on just the right, too expensive, entries. But once you get it, you can learn all skills in that class :) It's funny having a level 1 master Priest or whatnot. ;) Sadly, one of the jobs that this doesn't work for is the dreaded Calculator.
2) Level up/level down super-stats. This one is more widely known. Your base stats, like speed, magic power, attack, etc go up relative to your job class when you gain a level. When you lose a level from a degenerator trap, they go down relative to your job class. So, if you go up as one class and down as another, you can get different stats. *And*, some classes give very little for gaining/losing levels, while some give a lot. So, for most males, it's best to go up as a ninja and down as a bard, and for most females, up as a ninja and down as a chemist or dancer (it's best to alternate). However, Reis and Orlandu are best to level up in their base class rather than ninja. It's a slow process to go up and down 99 levels, so you have to work for it, but ultimately, you can have god-like stats. To speed up the process, there are a number of tricks. Normally to hit a degenerator, you have to move on and off it -- i.e., two turns per level. But if you equip the person with teleport, and then try to teleport to the opposite end of the screen, the teleport fails, and you land back on the trap, every turn. To level up, bave Steal as a secondary ability. The most exp any action can give you is 99 (i.e., a level every other turn), but if you use steal exp on a high level player or monster, you can get that 99 exp plus what you steal, and gain a level every turn, all the way up to about level 70 or so.
Tactics, of course, also had quite a few fun