Elly's Hallway

i've done something lately that i haven't done in a long time: beat a game. God of War is one of the best games i've played, and i was totally hooked the moment i fired it up. although there was one particular room in the game that had me thinking of hoss lying down in front of toma's tv with that one pillow saying, "it's elly's hallway, gotta beat elly's hallway, gotta save elly".

in Xenogears there is a very tough stretch where you have to fight a couple bosses in a row without the opportunity to save. during one of the cutscenes during that stretch, you see Elly running through a hallway. many people had to replay this part over and over, watching Elly in her hallway multiple times. thus the term "Elly's Hallway" to refer to a part of a game where you are too pissed to give up, usually giving the screen the finger after you beat it.

other famous "Elly's Hallway" moments:

Super Mario Bros - the Ice World on star road
Final Fantasy 4 - the cave where you can't cast magic
Final Fantasy 6 (has 2) - climbing up the tower and that one raining town with the clock
Final Fantasy 10 - Tidus' Chocobo race to get Excalibur
Final Fantasy 11 - CoP mission against the 3 Mammets
NBA2K7 - playing against the Miami Heat (if you even LOOK at dwayne wade's sprites they call a foul)
Hoyle Casino 2004 - any poker table
Contra Shattered Soldier - the ENTIRE game
Monkey Spank - any time you have to play against hoss

there are many more games with "Elly's Hallway" moments in them but these are the only ones that come to mind at the moment.

which brings us to back God of War. thank you God of War for bringing me "the room with the spikes". see that gate? it looks like death. hear that clicking sound? it's the sound of death. see that box? it won't stop death. see those spikes? you're dead. "room with the spikes" you win the "Elly's Hallway" award.


the blood is not graphics, it's blood from my eyes

Negative Money, the REVENGE!!!

i wanted revenge on getting Negative Monied last week playing madden, so i did some research. apparently 1024 yards is the magic number, and it affects recieving yards and rushing yards, but doesn't affect passing yards. so i came up with a mission to use it's own power against it. the mission is to rush for less then -1023 yards, REVERSING the Negative Money glitch, and thus ending up getting 1023 rushing. i also wanted to pass for more then 1000 yards and also gain 1000+ yards recieving with 1 player, ALL IN THE SAME GAME.

the original plan was to get to the 1 yard line via passing, then run all the way back with vick and step out of bounds to get -98 yards. this would be tough since i'd have to do this some 10-11 or so times. so i came up with another plan:

1) starting at own 1, get just past the 11 via passing to jenkins to get a 1st down
2) on first down, take vick, run back to the 1 to lose yards (which would lose about 10 yards)
3) spend the next 3 downs passing to jenkins to try to get another 1st down (which would now be on the 21)
4) on first down, take vick, run back to the 1 to lose yards (which would now lose about 20 yards)
5) rinse and repeat

eventually things got pretty tough cause i'd end up with something like 2nd down and 80 yards to go. plus i still wanted to win the game, AND i had to avoid getting Negative Monied recieving for 1023+ yards. at the end, i got my REVENGE!

(click for larger evidence!)

i got jenkins over 1000 yards recieving, then i ran another play, got negative monied, and then ran a play where i made him lose yards so he ended up in the positive.

 

i rushed for -1023, then rushed for another -2 yards and flipped it yo. i also got my 1276 passing yards.

take THAT EA and your LAME integer storing ways!

Negative Money

"Negative Money" is the term i use when you do so well in a game (or anything else), your stats go full circle from infinitely good to infinitely bad. i'm sure many games have this kind of a glitch, but for me, the origin of the term comes from a little PC game called Baseball Mogul.

in Baseball Mogul you manage a baseball team's finances/players/draft/etc for as many years as you want. after playing the game for a while, i built a huge fortune, around $2.1 billion dollars by year 70-ish. the off-season came, i sold off a couple players for profit, and noticed that my money went from $2.1 billion to -$2.1 billion. i had SOOOOO much money that it crossed some crazy space/time-continuum and became "Negative Money". *if you want to know the programatic reason of this glitch, read the bottom.

when it comes to sports games, the fun for me is not beating the computer on All-Star mode. my fun comes from keeping it on Rookie and trying to rack up crazy stats. yeah, it's kinda lame as i probably can't beat anyone...but having kobe average 100 points a game for a full season is just too cool. anyways, i'm playing madden '07 for the 360 and i wanted Michael Vick to be the first person to rush for over 1000 yards in 1 game. with 35 seconds left, i had 997 yards and had to gain at least 3 more yards to accomplish my goal. i ended breaking a 50-yard run for a TD with 2 seconds left in the game. i went through the kick-off and the game ended. afterwards i excitedly went to the "stats" menu and found this (click for larger picture):

what the fuck, -955 yards? man, i got Negative Monied BIG TIME! on top of that, as i tried to save the game i got a "disc read error" and the 360 crashed (which now that i think of it, is actually good since it didn't jack up Vick's season stats). you really CAN be so good, that you become so bad.


*being the programmers that we are, toma and i knew this Baseball Mogul glitch had to do with a variable in the program being declared as Integer instead of Long Integer. toma eventually tracked down the exact answer and found that largest representable plain integer is 2,147,483,647 when using 32-bit arithmetic. when the money got that high, the program didn't know how to handle it.