Erm What Just Happened

Testing can be a comical affair!

For instance Katamari Damacy , the poor little pint sized prince kept on falling through the universe, even better is the King would keep apologizing for a Royal Warp and return the prince to a new location, only for it to happen again.

Metal Gear Solid 3 suffers(ed) from a similar problem, Snake would suddenly drop though an invisible hole, causing the classic "Snake, are you alright? snake? SNAKE!!!"

Final Fantasy X still suffers from characters getting placed the wrong way around, so they run away from the monster, smite it and somehow return to the same position. WipeOut Fusion also suffers from things going backwards, every ship gets placed the wrong way around, and the AI along with you have to turn around before they can race!

Tekken Tag has Squishy Head Syndrome , you kick a character in the face and your head goes perfectly flat, suddenly "anything but the face!!" takes on an entire new meaning!

Over the course of testing for PCSX2 the team has encountered thousands upon thousands of bugs, but despite popular belief that all bugs are graphical, many of these bugs are much more bizarre. In fact the PCSX2 project may have released many a fine video demonstrating progress, we could have released an epic film trilogy of bloopers by now.

Now admittedly finding a bug requires the tester to try hundreds of program combinations (plugins, recompilers settings, debug options etc), make long debug logs and attempt to find the bug in the debugger or trace the origin of the bug if it's a regression, but sometimes just watching the bug makes it all worthwhile!

I fondly remember the linuz.naked_bug(); , where characters in Street Fighter EX3 would be missing clothes - specifically the women missing skirts. Or how about every character in Final Fantasy X being Tidus, yes folks EVERY character, from enemies, to people walking around, nothing like hearing the pretty girl-boy with Yuna's voice!

Sometimes It's tempting to suggest we add an option to the emulator to "re-create" these bugs, from totally missing collision detection, AI going berserk, to people floating upside down, but alas we're here to emulate the PS2, not our goofs.

So next time you think of emulation bugs, do not assume they're always graphical, or some complex mind boggling bug that causes the game to do nothing - sometimes, just sometimes there's a poor unshaven tester in a darkened room, covered in coffee that they've just spat out because Lara Crofts boobs have just exploded, or Gran Turismo cars have just developed anti gravity drives!

So as a rare treat, and somewhat a prelude to current Work in Progress, here's a game with some of it's bugs intact!

Katamari Damacy - Status at time of writing: Ingame

List of testing notes:

• Floor Bug, seems the textures they use to do floor detail are layered? (zBuffer)
• Object clipping bugs (walls etc).
• Katamari Mask? (the circle around the katamari, perhaps used to cull objects under the outer layer of what you have collected?).
• Stuck on pillar, can't go anywhere bug! (Level 3).