Score caps. Curiously, in Brazilian Portuguese, reaching the maximum score is called, in a rough translation, "zeroing" the game, probably because it was assumed the game score would wrap around to zero. The term extended to simply finishing a game, when there is no score to track in a game that has an Ending. In GTA Five, for example, it is assumed you "zeroed" it when you get the Roll Credits scene.
The game Truxton is odd in this regard, because you have to, in theory, "zero" it five times to see all the cutscenes, but each one is tracked as a Round in the game. The whole game just repeats itself in a harder difficulty every Round, so it is not considered you have to play through all the maps five times to "zero" it once, but you "zero" it five times. The score itself (into billions at this point) doesn't even get close to wrapping around into 0's or capping in all 9's.
The same problem of Truxton happens in Ghouls N' Ghosts, where you are thrown back to Stage 2, after you "zeroed" it, fight through the entire thing again to see the actual Golden Ending.
If you hear a Brazilian saying he "zeroed" a game, he just meant he finished it. The name stuck, specially with gamers aged over 30. Even youtube automatic translation can potentially gloss over it and go straight to the meaning, making anybody learning the Language a bit confused, Lost in Translation ensues.
Diablo 2, 3 and probably 4 are considered either Never Ending, or "zeroed" after you defeated Diablo itself in 2 without the expansion, Baal in the Expansion, and again the Angel of Death as Nehalem in D3. When you just repeat the whole game in harder mode, you zeroed it and got a New Game Plus.
I don't think I have ever seen a game that wraps around the score to zero and freezes. River Raid for Atari crashes right away when you go from 999,999 to 1 million, but it doesn't show zeroes on the screen (the video ram IS the game ram, ATARI has crazy cutting-corner features, search ATARI VDP to see how it works) and KILLS the player, as in, it removes one life, and then all of them if you try to keep playing, one at a time...
Not even the NES Tetris, (in recent events a Human finally crashed the game and actually, oficially, FINISHED it), does that. It clocks all 9's on the score, it freezes, but the game itself keeps going until it eventually crashes when it reads random values thrown into the instruction memory space due to the memory overflow...
Edited by Gonemad
Linking to a past Trope Repair Shop thread that dealt with this page: Split, as it covers several kinds.
, started by DragonQuestZ on Feb 14th 2011 at 11:22:20 PM
I was wondering, the glitch in Civ 1 that causes Ghandi's non-agression value to roll over to -255, does that count?
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Seems like. I dunno what "Civ 1" is.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Cap generally refers to something that can increment.
If you're referring to Sid Meyer's: Civilization, that's more like something hardcoded rather than something that can increment. If anything, it's a programming mistake by setting something too low (e.g. to 1), and not realizing that it gets a temporary modifier later.
This article is ridiculously long — 35 pages, according to Firefox's Print Preview. The RPG section's length is especially Egregious, and it's not even NEAR complete. (And probably never can be.)
Perhaps the sections should be converted into folders? I don't know that it's so long as to require subpages, yet — although if that's done, I'd suggest putting the Final Fantasy games in a folder of their own.
Thoughts?
Edited by benenator
Cap, as in lid of or covering of— More of a stretch to associate it as an abbreviation of capacity.
And yes, the word for a hat that is a cap is related to the fact that as staying more true to the word it simply form fits the head rather than expressing a style of any specific fashion.
"Word Origin & History
Cap
O.E. cæppe "hood, head-covering," from L.L. cappa "a cape, hooded cloak,"... late 14c. Of cap-like coverings on the ends of anything (e.g. hub-cap ) from mid-15c..."
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cap
Also the root word of capital (head of state).
It all apparently comes from the proto indo european word kaput(implied head).
http://www.myetymology.com/french/cap.html
"Cap" already has the definition of "an artificial upper limit or ceiling," so I edited the strange conjecture.
What's also worrying is that at the beginning of the explanation we have
- Nor [is cap] the shorthand for "capture"
- In gaming, 'cap' can also stand for 'capture' or 'capturing'. But that's not important right now.
Skyrim is one broken summer child of a game. With the alchemy loop, you can make increasingly powerful potions... one in particular that lets you make more powerful potions themselves for 60 seconds (and you wanna tell me nobody saw that coming?), with a Random Number saying how strong it will be. If the game doesn't crash, you can save it, and do it again. Then, you can enchant a piece of armor to make this effect permanent so you can craft anything else.
And then, you can make anything you want. Anything that can be enchanted as effect on a piece of armor, will be multiplied by the number you achieved on that. 2 billion percent (observe the 32-bit and 64-bit integers on the page) of increased damage of fire, ice, health regeneration, whatever. A youtuber called Spiffing Brit detailed the whole process, and it works on any platform, be it Console or PC.
In Skyrim, you just want to remind yourself of the 32-bit/64-bit integer caps so you don't crash the game with your own Alchemy.
Edited by Gonemad