Evil Genius is one of the few games I’ll dust off every couple of years and play again. There aren’t very many games where you can play the bad guy, and I love base building type games. I remember when it was first announced on Gamespot, and I anxiously followed its development over the years. It’s by no means fully polished, there are a few errors and glitches, but that rarely detracts from the experience. However, they can screw up your gameplay occasionally.
In Evil Genius, you play as a Bond-esque bad guy, intent on world domination. The world is divided into 5 Get Smart inspired regions, each with their own acronym and super agent, and each super agent has a weakness to exploit in order to get rid of them for good. The super agent for the greater China/SE Asia region is a martial artist, and in order to get rid of him you need to interrogate his master to find out what his weakness is.
In order to interrogate the master, you send out your minions into the world and have them do a mission to kidnap the master. They will then bring him back to your island and place him in the depot, waiting for your other minions to pick him up and move him to a jail cell. However, in my game the minion tasked with picking him up glitched and just sat there stuttering. Like any good evil genius, I executed him for his insubordination, expecting another minion to carry out those instructions. I guess the game engine never expected the minion tasked with picking up the master would ever get killed or executed or be otherwise occupied.
So what do I do now? Like any good geek, I hacked the save game file. An 87,000 line behemoth of a text file. Finding the area of the file that describes the object for the master was trivial, he was the only object with “master” in its name. But is the location line above the name or below it the proper location? I did a search on each location to see what I could see, and boom, the location line above matched the location of an object called “depot”. Now the question is where to put him… I could easily beam him into a wall like that one episode of ST:TNG (“The Pegasus”, S07E12 in case you want to look for it). The solution? Look up the location of one of my henchmen (which was easy to search for) and put him down in the same spot. Viola, I’m back in business.
As an aside, I would have posted this on the Evil Genius Chat forums, but phpBB doesn’t make it easy to retrieve a forgotten account (you have to remember your login as well as your email address), and the registration process is a little bit of a pain when you’re spoiled by “Log in with FB/Twitter/G+”.