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