
Breaking Madden: The Super Bowl, in which the machine bleeds to death - edavis
http://www.sbnation.com/2014/1/30/5351052/breaking-madden-super-bowl-broncos-seahawks?resub
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ChuckMcM
Oh god I laughed hard on that one. FWIW, and I am not making this up, this is
Don Knuth's[1] favorite way of playing video games. I had set up an experiment
with an xbox, a copy of Halo (fighting aliens game) and a copy of Dead or
Alive (fighting boobs game)[2], Don came by and wanted to see the games, he
dismissed DoA pretty quickly but Halo2 we played for about an hour and a half.
Don loved to have the character do things the developers probably had not
thought they would try to do (like fall through a crack in the geometry and
walkaround in "space" underneath the ship) He was really creative, we sat for
a while with six aliens who wanted desparately to kill us but would not cross
a door threshold which if we stepped through the door would close. It was very
entertaining. Much like this Madden game. The color commentary though was
really priceless.

[1] Yes the "Art of Programming" Don Knuth.

[2] It was a simple experiment at a conference, first half the console sat
there, play either game, mid conference announced that we were tracking hours
played on each game and compare second half ratio to first half ratio.

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anigbrowl
_Dead or Alive (fighting boobs game)_

Filed under 'things I wish I hadn't searched for.' WTF.

~~~
iconjack
Finally! A video game for women.

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jmduke
Wouldn't have expected this to show up on HN, but this entire 'season' is
hilarious if you have even a cursory interest in sports video games -- there's
a lot of (hilarious) frayed edges that get exposed when Jon pushes Madden to
its limits.

~~~
austinhutch
I was laughing the entire read and through the videos, the guy writing this is
talented.

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nostromo
This is my favorite thing about simulators: using them in unconventional ways.

It reminds me of being a kid and trying to build a city in SimCity without
roads.

~~~
Natsu
> It reminds me of being a kid and trying to build a city in SimCity without
> roads.

I thought you were _supposed_ to replace all roads with rails? :)

~~~
chipsy
Technically, you only need exactly one rail adjacent to a zone in the first
game to make it grow, so the entire traffic model can be essentially ignored.

Example: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEzzLXOs-
iU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEzzLXOs-iU)

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raldi
He wonders why the score shows up as 266 when it should be 262.

Well, 262 % 256 = 6. So if you have very old scoring code that expects the
score to fit in an unsigned byte, it's going to think the score is 6.

So that explains the 6 in the ones column. The 6 in the tens column, well,
that I can't explain.

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Tossrock
I can't possibly believe something like a game's score would be recorded in an
unsigned byte. The last time I saw an unsigned byte in use in a game was in
the original Starcraft, which tracked number of kills per unit with a single
byte, so if a unit killed more than 255 enemies, it stopped incrementing.

~~~
raldi
Don't miss this comment from a person who worked there:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7159513](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7159513)

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cllns
Jeez, firebug shows this site as being 64.7MB for me. And 'onload' occurred
after 36 seconds.

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schwap
55MB was the (large) GIFs. Maybe HTML5 video would've been better.
Disregarding that, 10MB is still pretty large, though.

~~~
aw3c2
That "maybe" is a definite "definitely". I would not be surprised it using
video would make it 5.5MB.

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dandelany
Not to mention, they could be lazy loaded since they only play when you mouse
over them...

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doktrin
> _I was pretty amused that a computer could attempt the most basic of tasks
> -- addition -- and come up with two kinds of wrong._

It's a bit ironic that addition is kinda the quintessential thing computers
get wrong. Admittedly, not much of an issue these days - but the comment was
amusing :)

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lmm
I know how whiny this sounds, but please deinterlace before you upload to
youtube. I get a headache just looking at this video.

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SixSigma
I don't think people understand interlacing. The really saddest part is when
news video is imported from a region with opposite interlacing and the fields
are reversed when broadcast. It means the editors are either only previewing
on non-interlaced or half-sized screens or they don't understand what they are
seeing.

I once made a similar mistake. Someone submitted a video to my film festival
and it was interlaced the wrong way. I swapped the fields and didn't do a full
preview. Half way through the submitted video had swapped field order and I'd
not noticed.

After the screening I explained the error and apologized. She hadn't even
noticed. Some people just can't see.

Another example - a single field glitch. me : what's that glitch? person :
what glitch? me (touching the screen next to the glicth) : here person : what
glitch?

I just couldn't get them to see it.

~~~
derekp7
I can't tell you how many times I've sat down at someone elses computer back
in the CRT monitor days, and had to up their refresh rate to something
tolerable (it was always defaulted at 60Hz). Almost no one noticed the flicker
at 60. This used to not be so bad, until most interfaces switched to black
text on a white background. Argh, my eyes bled.

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davidw
Interesting how the game score counter can't go over 255. Sounds like
premature optimization at work.

~~~
mjmahone17
Or it's from back in the day when Madden used an 8-bit processor, and the code
for scoring has just never been updated to use something other than char.

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BlackDeath3
Wasn't Madden 25 recently released? And score is still kept in eight-bit
storage?

And the Innovative Title of the Year award goes to...

~~~
munificent
When I worked on Madden around 2007 or so, you could still find the original
code for updating the score on a touchdown. It had Steve Chiang's[1] initials
by it. It's not like the rules for that have changed much over the years, so
there's little reason to touch the code.

[1] [http://company.zynga.com/about/leadership-team/zynga-
leaders...](http://company.zynga.com/about/leadership-team/zynga-leadership-
team)

~~~
BlackDeath3
No, I get that football doesn't change all that much, and therefore the games
don't need to change all that much (so why it's become an _annual_ new release
sort of situation is beyond me) so I could understand not redoing all of the
game logic, but... eight-bit score storage?

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cube13
Assuming a 15 minute quarter(though most Madden games have shorter quarters,
especially if they're multiplayer), to get 255 points in a quarter, a team
would need to score a touchdown + 2 point conversion every 30 seconds. For a
full game, that's every 2 minutes.

Any given play generally takes 10-20 seconds, and you're going to be running,
bare minimum, 2 plays per 8 points(1 for touchdown, 1 for 2 point conversion).
So that's about 25 seconds per score.

If the teams are remotely well matched(i.e. aren't a Breaking Madden team),
they'll take at least 2-3 minutes per possession, since you're most likely
going to have 4 downs, which have a play clock of 40 seconds(most teams use
around 30/play), so the "average" shortest possession is something like 2
minutes.

The point of all this? The Breaking Madden games are really an outlier that
you'd have to specifically code for.

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scott_karana
I think BlackDeath's point is just...

Who wouldn't just use "int" for all of this logic? It's so simple that you
could do it on autopilot. You'd have to specifically _try_ to limit to 8-bits.

~~~
BlackDeath3
If 'char' in-place of 'int' is a legacy quirk, then I get it. I just find it
odd that over the course of twenty-five years the required expense couldn't be
made to update the data type. It just makes more sense.

~~~
gfodor
If you find it odd you haven't worked on any large projects that have enormous
backlogs of bugs and features to build which need to be prioritized. Bugs that
will never actually manifest in normal usage should be far down the list of
things to fix, particularly if they are in 25 year old code that is battle
hardened and in the critical path.

~~~
BlackDeath3
So all that they could manage, over the course of twenty-five years, is to
grow (or keep unchanged) the size of their bug list?

OK...

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mistermcgruff
This had me crying I was laughing so hard. In an airport bar. People were
staring.

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blinktink
To those who suspect old code or premature optimization, if you read the
comments all EA sports games apparent cap out at 255 points. It's an
intentional throwback. When he did it in one quarter he triggered an Easter
egg, a "false start".

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jpace121
I'm not sure I would call a false start an easter egg. It is a fairly standard
penalty called all the time in real life games. The reason it was special
enough to mention in the article is that he had specifically turned off
penalties for the game.

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grosbs
Lol, moron...

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habosa
Damn that was too funny. I would love to see something similar with other
games.

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jboggan
I love these kinds of glitches, always makes me laugh until I cry.

Reminds me of the best one:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zs4yxkRI6U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zs4yxkRI6U)

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giantrobothead
Tremendous. I love how the simulation threw its hands up at the end and gave
up in such spectacular fashion.

Mathematical abomination, indeed.

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chris_wot
This website has an irritating bug. It's got a scrollbar next to the main
scrollbar. Firefox 26.

