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Gaming Glitches Add Character
jasoncart writes "Glitches in videogames are always a bad thing, right? Wrong, argues columnist Rob Wilson - citing developer oversights in titles like Halo, Pro Evolution Soccer, Vice City and Quake as adding welcome 'character' to our gameplaying experiences." From the article: "Then, in the distance, something astonishing happened. The car I was chasing sunk into the road as if it were careering off a cliff. The car vanished and a welcoming sight flashed up on the screen. 'Mission Passed - $1000'."
Glitches obviously can also be the ruination of a game, but they're not all bad.
Sort of like real life...We don't like our friends to be perfect. We don't like anyone to be perfect, because that's just wrong. Things begin to feel unnatural and ugly. I mean, virtually anyone who has a best friend who's near-perfect absolutely despises him/her. Granted, for different reasons, but it all stems from the same concept.
/., we don't have kids) to grow up expecting their real lives to be as "perfect" as their video games. Or is this already happening?
And it's not like video games are an essential part of our functioning society (except for perhaps intensely helping the economy through the millions of dollars that travel around pointlessly) like other software is. That is, you don't want your Bank or your Hospital software to have "personality", now do you?
So I say this is a good thing. Let the games be imperfect. Let them have flaws. Not because it builds "character" or anything, but becase it more closely relates to reality. Okay, okay, this isn't always a good thing. But we don't want our kids (wait, sorry, this is
In the old Mac game, Avara, you pilot your flat shaded mech around blasting things, and you could launch a tiny helicopter remote to give you a better view. If you time things right, you could jump on top of the remote and ride it into the heavens. Then in Myth: the Fallen Lords, there's the highly controversial practice of Carpet Bombing, or using lighting to hurl molotov cocktails across the map.
I /still/ diagonal run in every FPS I play. I have no idea if it helps or not, but Doom taught me that it was the "right" way to do it, so I always will.
By the way, is this not the fluffiest fluff piece we've ever seen? 3 examples of cheating and he's done?
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
The game with the most "giving it charactor" glitches in my opinion was the gold cart version of Zelda 64. That had so many weird things you could do in it, the most famous of which is the Swordless Link trick. Just look up any of these circa 1998 geocities websites that have Zelda glitches, it was full of them.
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
Some people think imbalances are fun because if you find them early, you can advance your character faster, or inflate your ranking vs other players. But in the long run, everyone uses the same imbalances, which results in people not using other parts of the game.
Glitches are sometimes fun. For example,"In Stunts, the old racing game, you could get a car to go flying." Or in Super Mario bros, there was the minus world, where you could go swimming forever.
For the most part, glitches suck, but sometimes they're amusing. If you want your game to be amusing, its best to design for it, not hope for glitches.
God spoke to me.
That games predecessor was Internation Superstar Soccer on N64 where you knew you got away without punishment if you heard the commentator say "Oh a definite foul there". The soundbyte was only played if you made a dirty tackle and got away with it.
Last note on commentary, the worst ever is NHL 2002 on PS2. You can turn the colour commentary off thank god, but when on it's a never ending deluge of vacuous crap. When off, it's dry, boring factual mush. The most the earlier versions of this series (EA Hockey, NHLPA '93 etcetera) had were the organs and crowd noises. This was enough IMHO.
I agree glitches can be fun, as long as my screen doesn't freeze while one sound effect starts playing over and over.
http://www.sierra.com/product.do?gamePlatformId=41 5
oxymoron of the day - Xbox gamer
It's not a bug, it's a feature.
I remember seeing a video of someone beating Super Mario 64 with (I think) 16 stars, when you normally need 70, due to a whole series of glitches. Going through doors you shouldn't be able to go into, reaching the top of the endless stairs. To think, I wasted all that time trying to get on top of that damn snowman...
This sig is only here so people stop skipping the last lines of my posts.
http://speeddemosarchive.com/
Bending the rules is pretty much the entire premise behind speed runs. They are very entertaining as well. The origional inspiration for the site was Quake done Quick, a full play-through of the origional Quake in 19:49, which culminated in a 12:23 run through Quake on Nightmare skill. (not that they aren't trying to improve on that time).
At the speed demos archive, you can watch Super Mario Brothers 3 completed in 11:11,Super Metroid in 36 minutes flat and The Legend of Zelda in 35:50. On the PC Game front there is Half-Life in 45:45, Fallout2 in 17:51 and Jedi Knight in 34:03. I find these very entertaining, and sometimes informative. Check out the Game List and see if any of your old favorites are there!
Just rationalize it. Weird things can happen in the game world just as easily as they can happen in real life. In the example in the article, maybe while he was pursuing the other criminal, the other criminal had a heart attack and died! Just as there is always that random element in the real world, we can expect there always to be a random element in the gaming world as well.
When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
Metroid is probably a good example of this. I don't know how long I spent falling down the blue vertical areas trying to get them to draw brown by mistake or doing the roll-up-in-the-door trick to find unfinished areas.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
The article claims that, since his graphics card was failing, the road disappeared and the other car carrened through the level. Last time I looked at a game engine, the video card's inability to display the ground doesn't affect the internal game engine's dealing with it.
With careful manipulation of a game's code, unscrupulous types can purposely create glitches know as hacks.
Say WHAT?
Tell me how an aimbot is a "glitch". You make it seem like it's the developer's fault that aimbots exist. No, that's the server admin's fault for not banning the fucker.
For that matter, exploiting any glitches in any Internet game with any king of subscription can get you banned.
I agree that not all glitches are bad -- in fact, most of the Halo glitches are actually quite fun, like the sword glitches and warthog jumps. Unfortunately, the sword glitch seems to be gone now, but the point is...
"Glitches" are the fault of the developer. "Hacks" are the fault of the user, or the server admin for not banning the user. Both, if exploited in order to win a (multiplayer) game, are cheating.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Old: It's not a bug it's a feature!
New: It's not a bug it's a bit a character!
E = m c^3 Don't drink and derive E = m c^3
In a particular dungeon (dont remember the name) in Dark Age of Camelot there was a tiny area of the floor in the lowest level near several dangerous monsters. To escape the trains of critters triggered by our combat, we would run over this one triangle and fall through the planet and get tossed back out of the dungeon without dying. It was like a fast teleport. This wormhole saved us numerous times. Glitch saved our XP.
I seem to remember in SS that several of the boss levels were simple to finish if the big boss got stuck between two objects that were close together. Bossman would stop firing weapons and concentrate on escaping by vibrating back and forth perpendicular to the actual way out. A volley of shots from any weapons would cause his death.
I don't think I could have finished the game without this glitch.
It's been known for a long time that glitches and otherwise "wrong" aspects of a game can actually make it more fun. My example: an old CounterStrike map (I think) called "Boat Season," which my friends and I used to play at LANs. The idea behind the map was that the Terrorists and Counterterrorists were on opposite sides of a lake, with "boats" to navigate in between. The first Half-Life's physics engine was laughably terrible, though; the "boats" had the same characteristics as the railway cars in Half-life, and were very cumbersome and handled unrealistically. What would end up happening was that we would play the map by driving the boats around, getting them stuck in various walls or towers throughout the map, getting them stuck to each other in midair (where they'd stay suspended instead of fall down), etc. I think there was an objective somewhere for the Terrorists to bomb, but none of us ever thought about it, we were too busy having fun with all the glitches in that map.
After some Googling around, this appears to be a version of that map: http://cs.counter-strike.nl/ShowMap.php?id=7
One of the things that makes GTA so fun is that it is full of awesome glitches. My favorite is in Vice City. Grab a motorcycle and go searching for new clothes. When you find the little floating clothing icon, drive the motorcycle so it is on top of it and get off. Then get back on so when you get on you also activate the icon. Next thing you know you have new clothes and are morphed with the motorcycle. You get crazy speed and agility with the motorcycle, but you can't fall off. You just spin around and keep going. Makes you super man! Almost . . .
if you were to go to a speed run/time attack website, you'd see that pretty much every game abuses some sort of glitch. Without glitches, people wouldn't discover ways to move 3% faster, float infinetly or other such things and the time attack scene would be dead because there wouldn't ever be much improvement.
I remember playing MDK (which, I'm convinced, is a reference to Mekanik Destuktiv Kommando, an album by the group Magma), years and years ago. There was one room where there were several pillars, with a monster on each pillar. (They were also all carrying giant targets and pointing at them.) The premise was to shoot them, and work your way up each pillar, to get to the top then to the next room. The problem was that after x seconds, another one would take its place.
I was stumped as to how to get past it. I turned off my monitor and came back several hours later.
To my surprise, all the monsters (apparently to make sure I could hit them) had all come within 5 feet of my character. All sitting there, pointing at their signs. With none on the pillars. I jumped on each pillar and away. The oddest thing, but I still remember it all these years later.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
the only thing I could think of that fit was overpaying the money lender in tai-pan...
Lookitup ya damn whippersnappers!
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Those who've played it know of that which I speak of. Skiing was the result a bug in their physics engine that turned into such a popular feature, they've gone out of their way to put it into the sequels.
Too bad none of the sequels live up to the original.
Your Sig Here ($10)
I had the exact same problem with Vice City that he described in the article. The difference in my case was that, during a race, the opponent's car kept falling through the same bridge, and it made it impossible for me to win. I could get to the finish line but it wouldn't count since it thought that I had cheated and taken the other car out. I had to play it over and over until the opponent's car didn't fall through the bridge.
Exploits are bad. Being able to get glitches to work consistently in your favour is exploiting.
However, glitches can offer some of the best moments in a game. Whenever a big glitch happens, whether it results in Game Over or lets you skip a level, you remember it. They give you a story if it's the type of glitch that can't be recreated by others.
For example, on in GTA: San Andreas, we finished some tricky level with lots of shooting and just had to drive a safe truck with a bunch of drugs or money in it (I forget which) back to our territory. Well, this safe truck is unstable and someone starts shooting at us and we didn't want to lose. We tried to turn, but the truck rolled over and starting sliding on it's side.
But it didn't catch on fire, it just kept sliding across the road, frictionless, for about a minute, and then all of a sudden, it turned back upright and we drove it to the goal. It was hilarious at the time, and no one could stop laughing at this crazy truck disobeying physics while cops are swarming it and mission completion was on the line.
Also, once on NHLPA '93, I remember shooting a puck, and it landed on the crossbar at the top of the goal, and got stuck there and started spinning for about 15 seconds. The goalie kind of backs away from it, and then the puck drops and rolls into the net.
As long as they aren't consistant, glitches are good.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
The best all time glitch is from the dreamcast in a game called Sword of the Berzerk.
Basically the models all rotate in random directions. I kid you not... And on top of this it's a rather bizzare Japanese storyline.
Imagine a cart with some horses...
Now imagine the horse on the right rigidly rotating it's head down down down... into the ground.
Meanwhile the horse on the left is spinning at about 45 rpm...
And the guy on the cart is sitting with a riding crop but he's rotating sideways....
AND THAT'S JUST THE FIRST SCENE!
You don't have to be stoned you will laugh for about 4 hours straight playing this game... It's increadible...
If you try it stoned you'll probably die... be warned.
The classic game elite on the spectrum had a great trick. If you docked while in the middle of jumping you would arrive straight at the target station. This was great fro trading but did you status no good at all.
Server Error in '/' Application.
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That's too bad. Imagine popping an old Riva TNT2 card into your PC, logging on to World of Warcraft, and obliterating Azeroth! Talk about griefing...
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This isn't the sig you're looking for. Move along.
I had this happen once with super mario bros on the original nes.
Popped in the cart, must have been dusty or something, some of the graphics on the start were a little messed up but i didn't think anything of it.
When I started 1-1 there were enemies that shouldn't be there, those floating platforms and pully platforms, vines, etc, all over the place.
It was fun but only happened on that level, I reset to try it again but it worked normally this time.
If you want to see some entertaining clitches/bugs play this game for 30 mins. I can't even configure the graphics option without it crashing out. Shame, because it would be an amazing game if it wasn't so broken.
9 379
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=5
I don't need a compass to tell me which way the wind shines.
The other day I turned a corner in San Andreas and found an intact police car buried at a 45 degree angle in the road. It was like it had been teleported and ended up half in solid ground.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
This fighting game is choc full o' bugs, and many players think it's the bugs that make the game so great. Most of the higher level play revolved around glitches. If anyone's played this before and experienced an unfly mode combo... then yeah... Fun game, though. Once you learn the glitches.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
City of Heroes had some fun glitches.
There was a spot in the King's Row map, a sewer access door set at a 45 degree angle, right near the tram station, where the pedestrians would get stuck in an endless run/jump loop. They would basically run full speed up the door and when they reached the top they'd do a 180 and jump. When they hit the ground they would do another 180 and run at the door again, repeating ad infinitum. When the developers finally fixed the bug they put a plaque on the door that said something to the effect of "Unbeknownst to Paragon City's top mages, a powerful sorceror attempted to control the minds of the entire city. The effects of this mind control were at their strongest at this point, resulting in the citizens acting most peculiar."
Another thing you used to be able to do was get a crowd to follow you as you fly. It only worked if you could hover/fly out of their reach. You had to look for people being mugged or otherwise endangered and take out their assailants, repeat without touching the ground. The code wouldn't let them leave without thanking you, but they couldn't reach you if you were too high up so they would follow you for as long as you stayed up there. They eventually fixed this bug as people were using it to be a nuisance and cause lag in heavily popllated areas.
If whales learn how to use weapons we're all screwed!
It just so happened that I did all the stuff to cause it, completely unitentionally. It was only after I went online that I discovered that I had just stumbled on something that others were working hard to recreate.
I still have the game save on it, so I can go back and show doubters that it is real and the neat stuff you can do with it (like returning to Dantooine and Tartus after you're not supposed to).
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I do remember one very frustrating glitch in Street Fighter 2. I grew up in the arcades and I remember playing at a Putt-Putt not far from my grandparents house. I was 12, playing against this guy on one of the big screen versions so everyone could watch the action without huddling around the regular monitor and he got me with that Guile handcuff-freeze thing. I never saw it again and never figured out what caused it until we finally got the internet and I was able to look up the move. It was a glitch and not a real move at all.
You could also do the following on the Street Fighter 2 machine during the demo to see how many credits where used for each character (see who was being played the most): "On the player 2 side press Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, MP, LP" which always got an "ohh" out of my friends since you could make the machine do something without actually putting money in.
Finally, when Mortal Kombat II came out, my love for glitches came out. Since Midway decided to release rom upgrades to the game you could always hunt down the specific version of the game you wanted. My favorite was the V2 (I think) that allowed you to do multiple babalities over and over. It sounded so sweet on those arcade speakers with explosions over and over. I would finish it off with a friendship on top of the babality. Super sweet.
My Xbox Live Gamer Card