rmpinchback@watmum.waterloo.edu (Reid M. Pinchback) (09/11/88)
Having played around with OMEGA for a couple of weeks, here is a list of the bugs I've found. The game was running on an AT compatable, MSDOS 3.2, with nothing but a keyboard speed-up memory resident. (1) Using a two-handed weapon. If you save and restore the game, you will suddenly have two weapons in your hands, neither of them 'ready for battle'. If you save when holding 4 great-axes, you will have 8 of them on restoration. (2) If you are in the arena and are holding a two-handed weapon, and try to pick up the box with the button and put it in the 'ready' hand, you will drop your weapon AND still have a weapon in your other hand, thus 'creating' a new weapon. The proper bug-free action is to drop the weapon from the 'ready' hand, so that you are effectively just dragging it around with the other. (3) Names of objects in the inventory will sometimes be lost, ending up with a garbage name. So a 'battle-axe +1' will end up a'^k ZXXXy$% +1' or something like that. On rare occassions the problem will go away on a save-and-restore, but I've only had that happen once or twice. The same name-loss problem happens both to worn objects, and things in the pack. It also happens to things for sale at the pawn shop that you have sold to it. (4) If you sell collections of some objects (great-axes, for instance) to the pawn shop, they will be re-named as 'copper piecess +0'. Also, if you sell a collection, and later find you would like to buy one of the items back, you have to buy the whole collection back. You can't buy a single item. (5) The last few characters of an object name are often munged when you move it around in inventory. (6) Quite often the game 'forgets' to let the character have a chance to fight back, particularly in the sewers and in the open country 'tactical screen' settings. It will let a monster continue hitting you 40 or 50 times straight until you are wiped out. (7) For some reason, in the sewers, if you step into a doorway it will drown you. It only tells you there is a door there if you look, there is no trap detected, and no water mentioned. You just suddenly drown. (8) If you go to visit the sorcerers with an alignment of 'neutral' or any more lawful than that, they virtually destroy you. I'm still not sure if this is supposed to be a 'bug' or a 'feature'. (9) If you are wearing a cursed item that ISN'T stuck to your body (i've had this happen with a +2 tower shield that was cursed in a fight), and save the game, SOMETIMES when you restore the game it IS stuck to your body. (10) If you do something in a town that changes it permanently, like casting a sanctification spell (which creates an altar), this change isn't stored. When you leave and come back to the town, the altar is gone. This doesn't happen witht he main city, Rampart. There changes are stored permanently. (11) Though this isn't a bug, it definitely is a problem. Even on an 8 mhz AT with a hard-drive this game is SLOW as death as soon as you begin to move between levels of the sewers, levels of the dungeon, in and out of surrounding towns. The amount of file-access constantly occurring is ridiculous. It surprising that the game seems such a run-time memory hog, since so much is kept on and constantly retrieved from disk. Ok, there is my current bug list. Overall, I find 'OMEGA' to be an interesting type of game. It just seems that the release of the PC port was a little premature. Reid M. Pinchback