Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by emmanueloga_ 1078 days ago
On one hand, hacking/speed-running/homebrew and other gaming niches should make it so older games like Mario N64 remains popular longer... On the other, I doubt niches make much of a difference for Nintendo's bottom line, and considering their track record, I assume they would kill all sorts of hacks around their platforms, if they could.

So, fuzzing tests [1] seem to be in order for Nintendo games... :-)

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_fuzzy_lop_(fuzzer)
1 comments
mmebane 1078 days ago
> I assume they would kill all sorts of hacks around their platforms, if they could

They've been doing exactly this with Tears of the Kingdom: patching pretty much every glitch that gets found, no matter how likely it is to affect casual players or whether it arguably makes the game more fun. I wouldn't be shocked if they had people lurking in the glitch hunting/speed running Discords just so they can learn about glitches and fix them ASAP.

link
hoten 1078 days ago
It's important to note that glitches that speedrunners utilize are often game breaking bugs that would give a normal player a really bad time. And it could be that the obvious utility of the glitch (like item duping) could also have a less useful manifestation from the same buggy code (crashing the game).

There is a video on YT with a speedrunner walking the Portal team through the speedrunning community's hacks, and there is a part where this is touched on.

link