So BSonirachi just added an interesting entry to NBA Jam: Tournament Edition's Bugs page, and it's one of those "we shipped a bug so we have to include a slip of paper explaining the bug in the packaging" cases. Check it out, the developer quote he added is really insightful. Situations like these have always fascinated me. Sometimes it's a little piece of paper, sometimes its a note in the manual, but whenever this happens its always made me really curious. Maybe it's something in the rarity of these cases; that the bug is so severe, the company cannot avoid acknowledging it. I remember a few more notable cases, like that Final Fantasy one where entering and exiting the same door 255 times crashed the game (and how it was explained as an in-game "curse" in the manual), but I really don't know of too many others and would love to learn more. Any other interesting examples?
Well, this immediately springs to mind... For a more obscure one I happened to bump into recently, the notoriously buggy PC-Engine RPG Monster Maker: Yami no Ryuukishi shipped with a note warning players not to leave one of the dungeons before completing it, as this results in the game becoming unwinnable. Companies may have tried a bit harder to ship playable products in the days before online patches, but sometimes this was all you got.
Not really a Sega game at all, but Kang Fu for the Amiga came with a warning when played on the CD32:
Nothing to do with Sega, but Little Big Adventure's manual warns you about a nasty sequence breaking bug where you can get into a building before you have the keycard you're supposed to use to do it properly. This effectively ends your game as the puzzles stop progressing. It's a pity it never had a Saturn port, I'd happily fill the wiki with far too much info about it, it's one of my favourite old PC games.
I actually know about this one because I've spent so much time reading the TV Tropes page for both games. Legendary series.
The note right above the "diabolical speed traps" tends to get overlooked, but it's also an example of this: There's a scrolling bug in Tails' Ice Cap in vanilla Sonic 3 where he'll immediately die in the first vertical looping section, unless he's gone into a special stage/bonus stage first (which resets the coordinates or some gobbledygook I couldn't possibly explain). It's fixed in S3K and more situational so I don't think it got nearly as much attention, but it's still funny that the manual had to warn you about it.
In PAL regions, Croc on the Saturn, which only renders correctly if you insert the disc after you've turned on the console (i.e. you have to through the BIOS menu). There was an addendum included in the box. Early versions of Metropolis Street Racer have issues but I'm not sure if they were mentioned in writing or if Sega just recalled all the discs.
An addendum to the NBA Jam TE leaflet is that a picture of the leaflet can be found here (it even links back to us regarding there being two revisions in the ROM table): https://twitter.com/mistydemeo/status/1454944712628965382 So far this is the cleanest image of the leaflet I can find, but I'm sure someone would have one of the defective copies which include the leaflet and get a better scan of it.
Croc on Saturn had a note to boot up the game in a certain way included in the box, otherwise his head didn't load... EDIT: Goddamn it, ninja'd =P
See now I really want to know if the game is otherwise fully playable with headless croc? New speed run category? :-D
It's just a rendering bug, with non-textured polygons being invisible - the rest of the game is fine. Although slightly more difficult because it's harder to see some enemies and objects. You can even emulate the problems in Mednafen, which is impressive
there was a DS game (i forgot its name) where if you do something as simple as naming your player 3 characters or less the save will get so bricked you won't even be able to play sometimes edit: there was a slip of paper warning ppl about this after some releases and ppl complained
This kind of stuff probably seems weird to people without a lot of experience with the Amiga and especially the Amiga CD32, but it's actually pretty normal Amiga behavior. The CDROM addition to the Amiga is basically a giant hack, it eats up memory when present because it has to load various parts of the driver into memory in stages. On a normal A1200, you can edit the S startup script to pick and choose which parts of the system are loaded into memory at boot up (kind of like the old Config.sys days of MS-DOS) but that's not possible on the CD32. Kang Fu in this instance, for whatever reason, needs the total amount of memory available to the CD32 to boot, and the boot sequence for the CD32 will allocate different parts of memory to the intro animation. By closing the lid at a certain point, you force it to skip parts of the boot script, which keeps some memory free. You can see the exact same kind of problem if you use an Analogic floppy drive on your CD32. Many floppy games will not boot unless you do the same trick, because otherwise a portion of the memory will be eaten up in the boot sequence. What all this means, ultimately, is that Kang Fu was developed primary for the A1200, not the CD32. The CD32 "port" is little more than the A1200 version running the commodore boot script that came with the CDTV kit that has been available on amiweb since the mid 90's when Kang Fu first released. You can turn any normal amiga game into a "CD32" game this way in about 5 minutes, provided they aren't expecting the full amount of RAM to be available at boot. Croc doesn't tell you how to fix this in the manual or case, though. But if we're going to include bugs like this, In The Hunt has a similar bug, where if a controller is plugged in, it won't get passed the developer logo at boot. This causes major headaches if you are using, for example, a JPN saturn with a PAR cart to play the game, as you need the controller to press start to launch the game from the menu (guess how I figured *that* out).
