The Esc key bug in games with the CJK IMEs

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2024-11-20 03:30:04

Recently, I’ve been playing through a really old shooter game named “Spec Ops: The Line”. Being a very old game, it has a bunch of weird quirks, such as some parts of the game being tied to the frame rate and being impossible to beat if you have a high refresh rate monitor, or the fullscreen mode completely screwing up the resolutions of the secondary monitors, etc.

But one bug that has seriously nagged me is that I can’t pause the game. Whenever I press the Esc key to bring up the pause menu, the pause menu flashes for a quarter of a second and then blinks out again. The only workaround I found was to Alt-Tab out of the game, then Alt-Tab back in, then quickly hit the Esc key twice while the game redrew onto the screen.

Unfortunately, you can’t really save and quit the game without going through the pause menu, so I tried to figure out what was going on. For some reason, I couldn’t find much information about it online. Given that SOTL had a recent surge of eyeballs on it when it was delisted from Steam, I knew that if it was a widespread issue then people must have posted about it online. The fact that there wasn’t any coverage about it, as far as I could tell, told me that it was a quirk with how the game interacted with my environment and system.