Pokemon (Red or Gold) Secret pokemon

Question

I was trying to remember back to when I played pokemon Red or Gold edition and there was a secret "cheat" where you went down to the edge of an island in the ocean and you would move in the water up and down the edge of the island and you could find a weird pokemon that would mess up your game if you saved your game after catching.

Any ideas?

Answer

You were playing Pokemon Red or Blue, and this is known as the Missingno glitch. This glitch is rather interesting, so I'll include some details on how it works.

Essentially, there was an oversight in the code that made the right edge of Cinnibar Island (where there's the black-ish border) have some unique properties. It counts as a zone where wild Pokemon can spawn, but it also does not specify which Pokemon should spawn there. Because of this, it always uses the Pokemon that were in the last zone that you visited. Thus, it's useful for catching rare Safari Zone Pokemon, because you can battle them for real, putting them to sleep and damaging them, rather than relying on the luck of the Safari Ball.

But that's not enough to explain how Missingno came about. There's more to it. Here's where talking to the Weedle Man comes into play.

When you talk to the man in Viridian City who teaches you how to catch Pokemon by demonstrating on a Weedle, there are some interesting things done with the game's memory state. Pokemon uses all the memory available on the old Game Boy cartridges already. But at this point in the game, it wants the player's name to show as "OLD MAN" rather than whatever the player chose.

In order to do this, it must copy the player's name to an unused portion of memory. Namely: The area where the Pokemon spawn rates for the current zone are stored. Usually this hardly matters, because when you enter a new zone, those values will be overwritten by the ones for the new zone. But if you go straight to Cinnibar Island and ride up and down the coast, some weird things start happening.

Since it doesn't reset which wild Pokemon can spawn, and the last thing in that area of memory was your character's name, not a real spawn table, there are a whole variety of possible outcomes. Pokemon spawn higher than level 100. The Pokemon that spawn are random, depending on the characters in the player's name. And Missingno appears, when there is no real Pokemon corresponding to the data in the table.

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How can I get out of the lava without dying?

Question

In Minecraft beta, I've just blundered into some deep lava and am on fire, but I hit escape to pause the game before I died. What can I do while the game is in this paused state to get out of the lava?

I'm on Mac OSX.

Answer

First of all, backup your world directory so you can try things over and over again. (Although you should remember that you might spent more time trying to rescue yourself than you'd need to get your stuff again)

Then set the difficulty to peaceful which slows your dying (but doesn't prevent it!). Now if you have some blocks in your inventory on a hotkey, after unpausing immediately look down, switch to the blocks and hold SPACE (jump) and hold right click. If you're lucky this is fast enough to build a tower out of the lava (which is hopefully not too deep). You'll still be burning, which doesn't kill you on peaceful, but if you have a bucket of water put that on the side of your tower to get a small waterfall which also obsidianizes the lava below. Good look!

Alternatively you can use a map tool to change the lava pool you're in into water, but that would really be cheating.

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Does item duping still work in Diablo 2 with the latest patches (for single player use)?

Question

Once upon a merry time ago I was the first kid on my block to beat Diablo 2 with a Paladin. One thing that I hated was farming for runes and gems.

We discovered pretty quickly how to use multiplayer mode and a back up of the player file to dupe gems and runes so we could create things like our triple socketed perfect diamond great shield in a lot less than the forever that farming offered.

Has this bug been patched over in the latest patches? (I will follow up with a question about the best way to farm runes/gems that I can use on battle.net)

Answer

There is no reason to dupe in Diablo 2 on multiplayer LAN or open battlenet since the characters are saved on your local hard drive and you can download an diablo 2 character editor (there are many) to give yourself whatever you want, even change attributes on items to make them super overpowered.

As for closed battlenet, duping still exists, in particular, high end runes are still often duped on the ladder where they can be used in powerful ladder only rune words. The reason why runes are the choice for duping is because they cannot 'poof' if they are immediately used in an item for a runeword as they take on the UID of the item they are put in, but if two duped items with the same UID enters a game, they will dissapear.

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How do I determine if someone is cheating in Call of Duty: Black Ops?

Question

I've played games with some friends and they claimed that so-and-so was cheating. I honestly just thought that he was a really good player.

What are some indications that someone is actually cheating?

Answer

It is very hard to tell nowadays, where you can rack up kills on tight maps like NukeTown by using Hardline and getting a mass destruction weapon like the Gunship or the Chopper Gunner.

Speed hacks (he moves much faster than anyone ever can) and health cheats (he just does not die) are more obvious, so I am not going to mention them

Wall hacking is the most commonly used type of cheat where one can see through walls and track enemies from very far distances.

Some indications are:

1. He has a ridiculously high kill-death-ratio. Especially when deaths are less than five.
2. He plays with a sniper rifle the whole time, and can kill from the other end of the map before you see him.
3. He is prematurely firing before you actually show yourself around corners.
4. Shoots through walls/doors where you know it's impossible to detect you there.

There are some caveats to the last one, though. He might know you're there because:

• There is a spy plane in the air and you don't have Ghost.
• There is an SR71 in the air (Ghost Pro won't protect you here).
• He has a motion sensor installed in your proximity (Ghost Pro won't protect you here, either. Only Hacker Pro makes you invisible to motion sensors).
• He has previously thrown in a nade (flash/nade) and saw it "connected" someone and he tried his chance by spraying in the possible places (it's obvious a lot of people camp the wooden rooms and the caravan wagon on the map Firing Range)
• He has Ninja Pro and heard your footsteps from further away.
• He is on a lucky day.

There is one test to almost exactly tell if he can see through walls: the step-ahead-step-back technique, in which you need to know the place the player in question is before hand. As you are coming out of a closed space or round a corner, just run to the corner and before you really show yourself, back up a step. If he fired before you appeared chances are high he was tracking you through the walls.

As you can see, finding out whether someone is cheating is not an easy task. He might just be a good player, having a strong intuition or excellent knowledge of the map, and a good timing. I would really not take this as a rule set to say yes or no, but as a checklist of questions you ask yourself before accusing someone.

For sake of completeness, check out Toastandjam18's interesting answer below about boosting.

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Black Ops: How to determine if someone is cheating?

Question

I've played games with some friends and they claimed that so-and-so was cheating. I honestly just thought that he was a really good player.

What are some indications that someone is actually cheating?

Answer

It is very hard to tell nowadays, where you can rack up kills on tight maps like NukeTown by using Hardline and getting a mass destruction weapon like the Gunship or the Chopper Gunner.

Speed hacks (he moves much faster than anyone ever can) and health cheats (he just does not die) are more obvious, so I am not going to mention them

Wall hacking is the most commonly used type of cheat where one can see through walls and track enemies from very far distances.

Some indications are:

1. He has a ridiculously high kill-death-ratio. Especially when deaths are less than five.
2. He plays with a sniper rifle the whole time, and can kill from the other end of the map before you see him.
3. He is prematurely firing before you actually show yourself around corners.
4. Shoots through walls/doors where you know it's impossible to detect you there.

There are some caveats to the last one, though. He might know you're there because:

• There is a spy plane in the air and you don't have Ghost.
• There is an SR71 in the air (Ghost Pro won't protect you here).
• He has a motion sensor installed in your proximity (Ghost Pro won't protect you here, either. Only Hacker Pro makes you invisible to motion sensors).
• He has previously thrown in a nade (flash/nade) and saw it "connected" someone and he tried his chance by spraying in the possible places (it's obvious a lot of people camp the wooden rooms and the caravan wagon on the map Firing Range)
• He has Ninja Pro and heard your footsteps from further away.
• He is on a lucky day.

There is one test to almost exactly tell if he can see through walls: the step-ahead-step-back technique, in which you need to know the place the player in question is before hand. As you are coming out of a closed space or round a corner, just run to the corner and before you really show yourself, back up a step. If he fired before you appeared chances are high he was tracking you through the walls.

As you can see, finding out whether someone is cheating is not an easy task. He might just be a good player, having a strong intuition or excellent knowledge of the map, and a good timing. I would really not take this as a rule set to say yes or no, but as a checklist of questions you ask yourself before accusing someone.

Check more discussion of this question.