this feels so wrong
1+
pastarasta1 is quick-talking and often scheming
This is how you do a spooky video game correctly. +1
I don't usually like the spooky whole 'haunted game' thing but you really pulled it off! Congrats +1
Ah, yes. I remember the "carabao eating grass from a field" part from my pirated copy of Sonic Adventure. Good times.
Jokes aside, I really liked how coldly the effects of the object were described. It hits that sweetspot of being reminiscent of both a Series I article and an old video game creepypasta from a decade ago.
+1
I really like this. I love how what the sega team made is non-anomalous on paper, no one was trying to use magic or summon a demon or whatever to prevent piracy. They just had an idea, made it, realized it wasn't practical, and moved on. The bizarre anomaly is somehow an emergent phenomenon arising from something totally understandable. I find that really brilliant.
Ssssssooooo…. what's the anomaly? "Our DRM doesn't work right?"
the way i imagined it was that there are many Foundation-contained items that toe the line between magic and sufficiently-esoteric universe mechanics (in this case, some unexpected result of applying chaos theory to materials engineering). this is one of them. by all means there is no way that a digital disc that skips across itself recursively/chaotically should result in anything other than incomprehensible input — but somehow, the sega discs are producing junk data that the Dreamcasts are reading as a legible 3D drug trip. perhaps a coincidence of optics and the Dreamcast's circuits allowed this to happen. perhaps something beyond the rules of science is going on, and Matsuda's death wasn't an accident. The Foundation doesn't care. It's got bigger fish to fry than a bunch of self-contained dreaming disks.
tl;dr i don't know what the anomaly is either but the universe is a pretty weird place right? haha
Well, it's just… buffer overflows are a real thing. Hackers can cause buffer overflows on purpose, and bad programming can cause buffer overflows by accident. Some buffer overflows cause a program to freeze or crash or lock up or display an error message, but other buffer overflows simply alter what's stored in memory and the program keeps running.
(This is roughly how the Game Genie worked, BTW, by altering the cartridge's code before it hit the NES's motherboard. I remember in Megaman 2, any Game Genie Code would also scramble the music, on account of how Capcom just happened to store the music data in the cartridge. It was pretty trippy.)
Programmers have deliberately made nigh-infinite procedurally-generated content that is physically stored in only a few kilobytes of memory. (Google "the demoscene" for some amazing examples on PC.) There are totally Screen Savers that exist that just mutate whatever image is fed to them into a kaleidoscope of trippy noise.
Take all of the previous facts into consideration, and it's probably the case that a poorly-implemented DRM scheme (or a bad patch. Or a bad game genie code. Or maybe even a scratch on a disc in just the right spot…) could cause a video game to modify its own logic and/or content on-the-fly, in such a way that it essentially becomes a trippy screensaver that perpetually mutates its own content without ever actually crashing.
This could totally exist. MTF Mu-4 ("Debuggers") would have this Explained in a weekend as-written.
Unless it also, like, makes peoples heads explode or something.
(Note that if instead it were just a trippy playstation disc that makes people have seizures and maybe die a small percentage of the time, that could still be a real thing because epilepsy!)
o ya i totally agree with this! demoscenes are basically fucking magic, and this is totally plausible. but i would have to humbly disagree on the direction of the comment here.
maybe this is 2020 me thinking like, do we really need to dream up magic mind explodey things that can't happen in this world, just to get that sweet sweet liminal-zone high? part of what drew me to this site in the first place wasn't the big scary killy things, but the small things that maybe (just under the right conditions) can create a little spark of magic. or rip your skin off, or whatever. read enough of those things and maybe you start to get a sense that there is magic in this world after all. reality may not be any better for, but it'd certainly be prettier! (or cooler!)
part of this is why i feel a lot of skipfuel efforts don't really quite work — there's that same nebulous spark of poetic logic at work in a good skipfuel, crystallised in whatever real-world glitch in the matrix that birthed it, that any artificial recreation just fails to fully capture because it lacks the specific complexity of contexts as the skipfuel's initial conditions. it's not the lack of backstory or context that makes those attempts fail. it's a certain disrespect for that initial just-barely-plausible spark of the fuel, that indescribable sublime+uncanny flavour, that dooms those poor attempts to failure (or worse, mediocrity!). sometimes you add too much to the fire in the eagerness to overexplain, and you smother it, much like adding rhyming couplets to a haiku.
on the flipside, i feel it's entirely possible to pull it off if you respect those initial conditions, and leave that uncanny spark of skipfuel smouldering where you found it. maybe, if you are good, you might nurture it, and nourish it, and bring in a little bit of it into your own world. that's where you get good shit like Kalinin's fake creepy movie skips, or pretty much all of Hippo's parawatch stuff. if given a choice between in-universe sensibilities and the skipfuel's raw poetic energy? i'll go for the latter every time.
tl;dr respect the skipfuel. respect the uncanny energy of the form. yeah, there's nothing magical about this sega disc and maybe that's ok.
Seconding all of this, and only posting to add: The most interesting anomalies to me are the ones where you can't even tell what's anomalous about it.
In a sense, these are the most 'anomalous' of anomalies. They even defy the system we might use to categorize them — by obstinately lingering on that strange, intriguing edge between what is and isn't possible.
The idea of all seven games producing this effect through this particular glitch (and having the output produce media that has content discernible as something other than just random noise) is all but literally impossible. Since it's not literally impossible, it's not technically anomalous… but there must be something going on, here; reality doesn't work that way.
This subtle tugging-at-the-edge of reality — and the potent effect it can have on a reader — is pretty much the main reason I write here.
That, and because I really like poopy murder statue fanfiction.
