In Might & Magic VIII there is a wishing well in the Land of the Giants. Activating it will either give you some very positive effects (like adding some free skill points, gold or XP) or on the contrary extremely negative effects (like petrification, death or erradication). Like with many other things pressing space while facing it will activate it super-fast with no pauses between your 'wishes'. Normally this would mean that you will see the death screen within seconds because one character after another will draw the death-card sooner or later and as soon as they are dead the game switches to the next character.

Now for the trick: Right clicking on things will pause the game more or less (it is used for looking at things). If you keep right clicking on the wishing well and then press space the character will not change and even dead ones can keep on wishing infinitely. Just do not forget to release the space bar first.

Not so much a glitch per se, but some very easy hacking: Volfied writes its scoring system in plain text into a file called VGA.PRG. Just open it up with a hex editor (or even a somewhat advanced normal editor) and keep looking for text in the vain of:

This is followed by the actual scores you gain for finishing the levels. Simply replace all of the numbers by 9 until you reach TODAYS GREAT WARRIORS! This should give you more than enough EXTRA SHIPS after finishing the first level (couldn't find out how many exactly, stopped counting after something like 40…).

And another one for Xenon 2: Megablast: Many players might know about the selection screen -> F7 -> in game i for invincibility cheat. But how about gaining a lot of money by killing the respawning enemies in the volcano level? Simply keep pushing down (backthrust) and kill those endless waves at at your heart's content.

In Sim Farm there is a lovely little exploit, that makes strawberries, the ultimate money machine: If you harvest a crop as soon as you planted it, and store it in a silo, it will get an X quality but after a very short time it turns into A grade quality.

Also keep in mind that the prices for your wares will always be at the average value after you restore a game. So if they drop too low, simply save and reload.

Virtually unlimited amounts of gold by repeated quest rewards is actually quite common in RPGs. I really liked the obelisk quest in the unpatched version of Might&Magic 6: There was a chest in the dragonsand desert that gave you a quarter of a million gold coins each time you opened it. Combine that with the XP for gold well in Kriegspire and the game almost instantly becomes a piece of cake!

Staying with RPGs: In Gothic all you need to break the economy of the prison colony is some raw meat and a frying pan. Stand in front of the pan, open the inventory and select the raw meat. Press Ctrl and tap up ever so slightly and the meat will be doubled. Keep doing that and you can get more meat than you will ever need. One more just for fun: If you die you can still move around, simply by pressing the map key (default 'M'). The hero will stand up and try to read the map and drop dead again, moving a little bit while falling back.

The VGA version of Quest for Glory had the speed bar to solve those problems. Of course you could always increase the speed to the maximum, making some time tight scenes much easier. But that can also be done on The Dagger of Amon Ra when you are being chased, and have just enough time to flee, to give you a better chance.

But a big oversight I remember was on Dragon Lore 2, when you received a reward in a point of the game, and if you kept talking to the guy he would keep giving you the reward, even after you were full of gold pieces.

Here is a classic, well-known bug in Mad TV: Rent a studio, cancel it again immediately and repeat until the variable storing your money overflows the negative minimum and therefore turns to the positive maximum.

Moving on to DSA2 - Sternenschweif (or Realms of Arkania - Startrail)

-) So how do you keep that huge amounts of money from the first part, when the game doesn't let you import your gold? Well simply buy lots of herbs (especially Thonnys) which weigh nothing, are worth a lot of cash, are quite usefull and can be imported to the second and third part.

-) A good fighting glitch: Forget spells like 'Ignifaxius' they have a very bad spellpoint/effectiveness rating. Instead cast lots of small 'Armatrutz' spells (with 1-2 points of protection each). They do stack and you can get almost invincible that way.

One of my favourites for Super Mario Land 3: Wario Land:

You will need a Jet-Helmet and access to the 5th level of Parsley Woods (course 35, second train level). When you enter the level move all the way to the right, don't enter the door but jump on the roof and step to the edge, face left. Now jump as high as possible and fire the jet engine and let wario fly until the flame dies out. He will cross the screen to the left border... which he will glitchically cross in order to come out on the right side again. Also he will lose height, but don't touch anything! After some time he will drop through the floor and enter a strange white oblivion filled with invisible blocks, the one or the other duck, secret entrances and random deathtraps. Keep moving around and try to stay alive as long as possible.

A definite bug, but I could never reproduce it reliably: Shadow of the Comet would sometimes let me skip most of the annoying tomb sequence. By going back and forth between two rooms, I would suddenly be teleported straight to the inner sanctum where the bad guy waited, bypassing all the deadly rooms in between.

Some "hints" for DSA1 Die Schicksalsklinge (or Realms of Arkania : Blade of Destiny):

-) In a dungeon on the small island of Runin there is a shrine with an offering box which is meant to be used to donate some money. If you spent the maximum amount of money (99999 or somehting like that) you actually get this amount of coins instead of giving it away! Keep doing this and you should get rich in almost no time. Funny thing: You still can't buy one of the ships in Thorwal, even if you gather the 20.000 (or so) Dukaten the game asks for.

-) If you are in need of some XP: enter and leave the mines in Prem. You get ~8 XP every time you this. Not that much, but it is an unlimited supply.

Well concerning bad AI: RTS games tend to have very weak ones (often of the simple "build - move - attack the same spot" varieties), often "balanced" by extra starting troops for the CPU players.

One of the worst AI failures I can think of must be in the original Command&Conquer, where the computer never attacks sand bag walls. He just keeps lining up his units in front of them...

The last time I played Master of Magic, it nearly made me revise my complete old review and give it a bad rating. Not because of the major bugs which make every second game unfinishable, because it just crashes in some battle, but because of the major AI and rule bugs which can very well spoil the fun in spite of the excellent foundations.

Why doesn't the AI ever move out of a fortified position even if the attacker is using the opportunity to get his ranged units close? Why does the AI always keep attacking the very same enemy unit, even if it has been souped up by the player to passively withstand any such attack while the other units rain down death on the AI (i.e. give one single unit Invulnerability and you have won the battle)? Why are the heroes so ridiculously overpowered that they can single-handedly destroy whole empires? Why does the AI have no concept of defending its capital cities?

As I said, only part of these major annoyances are actually technical bugs, but it's just the rules of this game which are buggy, too!

Almost every Sierra SCI game had timing issues: On faster machines certain actions tended to happen so fast, you had no chance to react.

Most of the time this was annoying, but for the Quest for Glory games this could be used to train your hero a lot faster. Especially the EGA version of the first one (So you want to be a hero) comes to my mind, where your hero dodged lightning fast, so the enemy could never hit you. Great for raising Agility, Dodge and Luck. Or even better in the fourth game (Shadows of Darkness), where your stamina regenerated during a fight: On a slower machine it took ages to regain the full amount, on faster ones it is a matter of seconds.

What about the enemy soldiers readily walking into the chasm/the river in the battles of North & South if place your own soldiers right on the other side? If that's not worth being called a bug…

Some tricks I learned over the years for Master of Orion II

-) When you have a planet with maximum population build androids and keep producing them (ignore all warnings). On some planets this will lead to a severe overpopulation which through a bug somehow creates space for new colonists. This way you can have planets with up to 60 colonists (even without the subterranean advantage).
-) Normally the cheats warn the other players and prevent you from entering the hall of fame. Except for the build cheat (alt-crunch) which doesn't.
-) Oldie but goodie: Build a ship with Time Warp Facilitator and Phasing Cloak: The extra turn you get for the time warp will let you recloak your ships before your enemy can fire back.
-) Not actually a bug, but I almost found it kind of disappointing, that the following startegy worked ridiculously well: As soon as you can build colony ships in a matter of 3-4 turns keep spamming them and crowd the whole galaxy. While this does take a lot of micromanagement, it almost always leads to an unstoppable empire. That's also why feudal isn't the worst goverment type (since it does reduce ship cost).
-) Also I liked how the Blackhole Generator immobilized enemy ships, which made for some great boarding opportunities.

Exactly. There is a bowl of figs which, programming-wise, is a bit of a problem, because it's basically a container filled with an unlimited amount of the same object. Not trivial to program. If you repeat getting a fig and giving it to the Sultan, the game will first simply repeat the same response about him eating it as expected. Until… that happens

Oh my God! What was that action? Feed him 30 figs?

This one's actually the opposite of a bug, but I loved it anyway in a closely related sense. Look at the first screenshot of Timequest on this page. This happens after repeating the same action thirty times or so in this particular scene. That's the sort of thing which actually does usually trigger bugs in games!

Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine + Jeep = some creative parking

Well, it could be intended as a cheat… it would be a fairly obvious one, though, so I always considered it a bug. The 'regular' way to enter the mansion, I'd say, is going through the hedge maze and enter the cellar from there.