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Strange Glitches In Games
Parz writes "Even the best of game developers can leave a big dirty glitch buried within its products that can turn a gameplay experience on its head (sometimes literally). Gameplayer has trawled through the web to locate video footage of some of the more amazing and hilarious examples of glitches in games. It acts as an interesting insight into the bugs that some games — especially today — ship with. What interesting bugs have you encountered?"
They only have one image.
There was once this minigame...er..um glitch
Two off the top of my head:
In Final Fantasy 7, you can cast a spell like regen (which gives health over time) during a battle then you can pop open the playstation cd lid. The fight pauses, but you keep on getting healed.
In both Final Fantasy 2 (4j) and Final Fantasy 3 (6j) there were bugs which allowed you to duplicate items thanks to programming errors.
This can lead to some very, very unusual bugs.
Some amusing, others that'll kill your save game and worse.
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
Most of these were discovered and put to normal use in the game as the community adapted:
Rocket jump
Wall strafing
Bunnyhop
And if you count things with strange but intentionally designed behaviour, then telefrag.
In the witcher there are several times where the game glitches and you are unable to progress if you go certain places before you are supposed to yet, one of them is the cave where you the witch is in the first town.
It was one of the first places i went and i was rather surprised when i met her, she knew who i was and talked about some mob right outside that was going to get her and that i was supposed to help her. when i went outside there was no one there, everyone in town was gone and i couldn't progress the game anymore.
doubt it...just look at the date of the article.
It's on the third...of March.
Besides, there have been plenty of glitches that I know of in games (from experience as both as a game tester and as a gamer).
A lot of them are clipping and occlusion related glitches. Some are logic/checkpoint/goal glitches.
Some are actually not the fault of the game developer but of lazy video card driver developers (or even hardware issues, such as overheating or floating point precision related).
I loved this game back in the day. Half the fun was seeing what crazy crashes you could get into that would confuse the physics engine, sometimes sending you straight up, hundreds of meters into the air.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stunts_(video_game)
"turn a gameplay experience on its head (sometimes literally)"
Goldeneye cartridge tilting totally counts if you're talking about literal cases.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
F.E.A.R. Multiplayer (incl. F.E.A.R. Combat): In some maps you can glitch into the walls by running at walls corners and/or crouching. Stuck in a wall where you can't be shot, you could shoot outwards. Some thin walls you could poke your gun through and the same effect would occur. It was more a bug in the poor default maps, but the collision mapping was as vulnerable to hacks as the rest of the game.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Has some of the best glitches. The gameplayer list definitely needs more nes/snes titles.
I remember that at one point in the original Deus Ex, you could turn in a quest at a NPC, giving you xp and an item in return. When your inventory was full at the moment of talking to him however, he would ask you to clean up your inventory and come back later. The quest would still be open... but you did get the xp. So I kept trying and trying and trying to turn in the quest with a full inventory, until my xp was maxed out (I believe this was about 60% into the game).
I wonder though, is exploiting a bug in a game in this manner concidered as cheating? I didn't hack any files, I didn't enter a cheat code, I just kept repeatedly talking to a character, who appearantly liked giving me xp for nothing.
They are missing one of the most hilarious and convoluted glitches of all time.
Super Smash Bros Melee: The Black Hole Glitch
2:10 is when it starts to get interesting in the video.
My favorite glitch has always been the Minus World in Super Mario Brothers. Mostly I'm just amazed that someone actually found it. I mean you had to smash like exactly five bricks or something, and then duck and jump into the wall, where you would then be transported to a pipe that took you to an unending water-world. Truly baffling.
Anyone remember these:
- selling buildings, and then stopping the action to get free infantry
which combined rather well with this one:
- dragging the '$' sell cursor off the sandbags so you could sell things you normally couldn't (like infantry)
http://www.zombieapocalypse.tv/
Throw a grenade and pause on the explosion animation.
It would stay at the current stage of explosion, doing damage, until you unpaused and the timer went forward again.
Any minimally good web developer has already learned about input validation and sanity checking on many levels, but for some reason even the biggest game software houses still release stuff that can be ruined by the simplest attacks. Modded software and cheating devices have been around for decades, how come they are still that naÃve? Is the server-side processing overhead so big that it's justifiable to let virtually anyone ruin the experience of every other player they meet?
If you popped the disk out of the drive and walked a little way to make it access the disk to load more terrain it would instead generate miles of random tiles. Some of the tiles were endless stacks of chests. You could open those chests and get tons of gold. Works all the way up through Ultima 4. I never played any after that.
My favorite recent glitch was in Perfect Dark Zero for the Xbox 360: I used to get in a rocket pack, and break through the glass roof of the mall so you could land and walk on the barrier that prevents people from going too high. Used to freak people out, because you could shoot through it and the rocket pack had infinite ammo, leading to a very scared group of people on the ground below (in the city and desert maps, at least).
I think Rare patched this up recently, but I remember having loads of fun with that. Just walking on the barrier, watching the others shoot two rounds then stare in amazement was such an ego boost. Other than that, I haven't found very many other (useful) glitches in recent games, nor do I play them enough to find them or hear about them. In fact, I think my Xbox Live subscription expired like 3 months ago...
There was a bug in World of Warcraft after the Lich King release where you could end up flying across (and through) the entire would if you dueled a death knight who was on a particular boat. Here's a video of it.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I didn't discover this one, and it's documented fairly well elsewhere.
In Ocarina of Time, when you become an Adult, Zora's Domain gets turned to ice. How sad! I know. Anyway, there's a way to get underneath the ice from Lake Hylia. You have to stand directly beneath the gate that leads to the water temple in the center of the lake, against the wall to your right as you face away from the entrance. If you take off the iron boots, you'll start to float upwards, and if you time it right, you'll momentarily see through the wall. If you put your iron boots on at that moment, you'll be able to sink past that wall, underneath the lake. Woohoo.
So, after you do that, you have to swim towards the tunnel that connects the lake to zora's domain. While it's also frozen, since you're under the lake, you can just swim beneath it and still be transported to Zora's domain. When you get there, you'll be under the ice! It's pretty cool actually. There is a hidden cavern down there that looks like it was going to be something that wasn't included in the game. You can get out of the ice through the frozen waterfall -- just walk towards it long enough and you'll get through.
Here's a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_7UmsKh4Gk . There are actually quite a few interesting glitches in that game. Ah, Ocarina of Time, how we loved thee... Still fun ten years later.
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
They just don't make glitches like they used to in my day...
How about an entire Glitch Pokemon? http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Missingno. In orderto figth it you have to go for the training of how to catch a pokemon, fly somewhere, and then surf.
And best of all is that it duplicates the item in your 6th slot 150 times. There is also a strange truck that you can use push on(???)
And a very strange bug to get mew(supposed to require going to a nintendo event)
Later games even had a very slow saving sequence, making Pokemon duplication easy
Back in the day, I made a few custom Doom 2 maps.
I stumbled across a bug where you could create 'one way walls'. So people on one side of the wall saw it as just a normal wall, but people on the other side could see straight through it. You couldn't walk through the walls, but you could shoot through them.
I had a map with a secret room right next to the main playing field, seperated only by one of these one way walls. To get to the secret room you had to go to a room that had 10 teleporters. 9 of them led to a lava filled room (instant death) but one led to another room with yet another 10 teleporters just like the previous room, and so forth. In the last teleporter room, one of the teleporters led to the secret room. So esentially, you had to know the code to get into the secret room. Needless to say, I had a pretty good record playing that map.
They're the worst. Team fortress 2 and Left 4 dead are very fun games, at least the rare times people don't ruin it by using a glitch. See TFA for the example of team killing in left 4 dead through the elevator. Capture the point in TF2 also ruined many times by people going "under the map" and being unkillable.
I really don't understand it. If you want an empty victory, there are single player games with plenty of glitches, go masturbate by yourself.
I have little understanding of the computing/programming/whatever behind it, but Halo 3 and other games that seemed to have a central server didn't suffer from that, wheras TF2 (and TF1 before it) seem to connect you to other people hosting games rather than one centralized server, and they seem to have more glitch exploiting. I'd hazard a guess: it's easier to update your own servers to immediately sew up exploitable glitches than it is to force everyone to update theirs. I'm guessing the main reason not to have a centralized system like that is cost and speed. I'd be willing to pay more for TF2 or future sequels if it were more "managed" like Halo 3. I still occasionally play halo 3 even though it's not as much fun as TF2, simply because sometimes I don't want to start a game, then find someone doing shit like that and have to find another game, repeat.
I know that the team fortress... er... team isn't giving up, their blog (http://www.teamfortress.com/) indicates they are themselves extremely annoyed, and they seem to be coming up with new ways of trying to filter out the crap, scoring servers. And they also seem to constantly be taking out glitches. If TF2's servers are decentralized compared to Halo 3's, I wonder if they aren't regretting that decision, and if TF3 would have more centralized servers.
(One last reminder, I don't know anything concrete about the differences or similarities in connecting to games in Halo 3 versus TF2 other than one you click on some server name and often get glitching, and in the other you just hit play and there are much less glitches.)
IMHO by far the most important glitch in gamer history is the "skiing" bug in tribes. It completely changed the game, drastically increasing the speed of gameplay, and turned what could have been another boring first person shooter into a landmark game.
From wikipedia: "This was originally an unintended side effect of the physics system implementation that caused players to encounter less friction with the ground when going down hillsides than on level terrain. The reduced friction was put in to make it harder for snipers to take out enemies. The reduction of friction was proportional to the slope of the hill; this meant that the steeper the terrain, the faster players could travel. Skiing allowed players to traverse Tribes' massive game maps in under 15 seconds in some cases instead of minutes."
Starsiege Tribes at Wikipedia
This bug was interesting because of the actual cause. The spell deathgrip functioned the same as a jump, and because of this explot, we learned that the game engine did not recalculate your postition (in the case of a jump/deathgrip) untill you land.
I dont know if this function was known before this bug was discovered, if it was, it wasnt widely known. But ever since we're always being reminded, when moving out of 'fire', just move, dont jump, since the game wont recognize your position and youll keep taking damage untill you land.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
When I started at Accolade as a video game tester, I was put on Test Drive 4 (Playstation) for a few days until someone could train me to be a tester on Test Drive 5 (Playstation) that was under development. I managed to find all the bugs that TD4 shipped with, including a bug where an NPC vehicle had no collision when turned sideways that other vehicles could drive straight through. Impressed the lead tester I did. :P
This game was released with so many bugs that they ended up shipping a patch disk - before pulling it from the shelves.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
In the old coin-op game 10-Yard Fight, there was a giant floating arrow to point to where the ball would go when kicking an extra point. If one of your blockers ran into the arrow, he was blocked just as if he'd run into an opposing player. It didn't affect gameplay, because it always happened after the kick, but it was amusing, nonetheless.
DMCA - Chilling free speech since 1998.
No GetDown?
It's got to be my favorite glitch-turned-meme.
I am kind of older school than most other posts I see above. Elite 2 was an amazing game, in just a 3.5" floppy you had a whole galaxy to explore. Exploring this vast galaxy was made easier by a few interesting bugs. The best one was that while you had a jump drive capable of around 10 ly jumps (it's been a while, but it was around there), the lengths were not held in a large enough variable, so if you found a target that was a bit over 655.36 * n light years away, you could jump to it! Obviously with just two jumps you could go to any star you wished! Then you had another kind of glitch where you found two planets (or was it even on the same planet, just different traders it's been a really long time...) where you could do a trade with ridiculous margins, making loads of money in a few minutes...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Still the weirdest thing I've ever seen in any game
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd1zzMdel_I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbpLY1fdfcg
The really weird part is that there's all this code that allows bodies to melt but it never gets used in the game, possibly it's just a side effect of their physics system? idk
Operation Flashpoint: The game allows you to save once during the mission. For some reasons I couldn't quite comprehend, very rarely, the wrecked stuff from the game before I loaded the saved game carried over to the loaded game - I suppose the game just didn't clear up some data it was supposed to clear. Anyway, there was this one mission in which you're supposed to destroy the first tank in the advancing tank column using mines and a LAW to block the road, then go kill the rest of the people or flee, failing that.
I lay the mines on the road, then picked up the LAW and went to the roadside bushes, and saved. I destroyed the first tank, then got killed. Loaded up the saved game.
The destroyed tank was there, blocking the road.
And there came the Russian commander who was driving there ahead of the tank column. Finding the road blocked by the destroyed tank, he stops the car... gets out of the car... and scratches his head.
From that point onward, I never ever doubted the ability of the AI programmers to create believable character behaviour.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: Wolves are the heraldic symbol of the city of Kvatch. I like wolves, and tried to avoid killing them in the game - yet, at one time, a wolf was following my horse. When I arrived to the camp near the city, the citizens unfortunately killed the wolf on their own. Very sad! But when I came back to the area later, I noticed that the citizens of Kvatch, bored as they were in the camp, had apparently stuffed the wolf. In other words, the corpse was in the standing position (undoubtedly the neutral position for the 3D model, and the game forgot to restore the dead posture).
Tomb Raider: Anniversary: Not a big glitch, but amused me anyway. In the lost valley, there's one spot where you can land - barely enough leg space. Lara stuck in the leaping position and was pushed by the game upward, up, up, up, and I couldn't do anything. I opened the menu. Closed it. Then, Lara suddenly remembered a few not-so-obscure theorems by good ol' Sir Isaac. *splat*.
Tomb Raider: Underworld: Not played this game too far yet, but the Mexico level had a really weird bug - I drove around with the motorcycle, but there was this one spot where Lara froze in air, while the motorcycle kept going and finally hit the wall. Pretty weird.
Could probably remember more, but I need to get going.
UT99 - for no damned reason the engine itself would fail to work properly any longer. You'd play a game, leave, and the next time you tried to boot up, you got this insanely long error message concerning engine and renderer.
total wipe and reinstall was the only fix, and this was after full patching to the latest supported version. It would just happen about four or five months after install.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Two of the worst glitches I've had to deal with (more due to the timing of them than anything else):
Atelier Iris: Immediately after beating the final boss the game will sometimes (about 50% of the time for me) go to a black screen and freeze. If you repeat the fight you may get past it so not as bad as:
FEAR 2 (PS3): Part way through the final fight the game missed a trigger for the rest of the fight, no amount of reloading fixed the problem.
The entire combat system in Too Human.
I'm not sure if this still works, but I the major reason to spam jump and circle strafe while PvPing on a melee character (such as a warrior) was that the your velocity changes instantaneously when you land, causing the movement prediction code to break a little, making you appear to jump around crazily.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
This is probably the very first glitch I came across. My age must have been in single digits then.
In the original Sim City, you could set taxes to 0% for the whole year and then jack it up to 20% just before the end of the year. Not only did you get the full 20% tax rate but your citizens remained happy because of low taxes.
I checked out the vids. A lot of those so called "glitches" are caused by mods or bugs in mods.
The Oblivion glitches are obviously mods. The glitch in shown in GTA:SA is done while the unofficial multiplayer mod is running.
So the argument "best game developers leave a dirty glitch" does not hold water. Actually the headline should read "best game developers let fans create hilarious video's using mod tools".
Y
In Phantasy Star Online you could glitch through some of the laser grid fences that would normally need a switch. Simply go to one of the posts that is next to a wall then take out a melee weapon that you move a lot with such as the sabre or daggers and slash the crap out of the corner until you get in and do the same to get out. Of course sometimes its easier to hit the switch, especially in earlier levels when the switch is either in the same room or the next one.
Physics model fail: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQi4BeO015E
Note the cars on the lake.
I used to play a tetris game for windows A LOT!
One time I was on my way to beat my old record of ~31000, but the idiot programmer had implemented the score counter as an signed int. Needless to say, my new high score of -30000 didn't make it to the high score list and I have never played the game again.
The article led me to other articles, all of which are just as badly 'written' (read: bunch of videos).
Ultima III was basically tile-based and shipped on multiple 5 1/4" diskettes. From time to time you had to swap disks in order to access a new areas of the map. But the game didn't check whether or not you inserted the correct disk. With the wrong disk, half the tiles on the screen would show up incorrectly and, if your avatar was in the right location, "treasure" tiles would show up nearby (if you were unlucky, it would be "fire" tiles"). With a little experimentation, infinite riches and health could be yours.
I remember in Jet Fighter III you could land your plane upside-down.
It was important that airspeed be appropriate, flaps down, gear down, angle of attack correct, etc, etc. But if you met all the criteria upside-down, it would still be counted as a successful landing.
It was good fun to pan the camera around this jet, on its top, with the gear sticking straight up, with a message about a perfect landing!
Dwarf Fortress is an old-school-style 2D game in the same style as Dungeon Keeper 2 (minus the creature control features, and with 100x more content). You control a team of dwarves who have set out to build a fortress, and you must find a way to feed them and keep them safe without having any direct control of them at all. It's loaded to the brim with all kinds of crazy things happening every moment of the game, some intended and some not. Just a few examples:
A kitten attacks a dragon, and the dragon dodges itself right off a cliff and dies.
An old dwarven king shows up on the map who was supposed to have died 20 years ago. The new year ticks by and the king suddenly remembers his past death and keels over.
A waterfall (which are frequently used to produce happy thoughts in dwarves since they like the mist) can potentially suck puppies in and drown them, even if you use a proper drain with a grate.
Cats reproduce at a ridiculous rate and kittens are widely regarded as a valid source of food.
These are just a few and I find dozens more every time I play. It's a fascinating game, check it out if you can.
I will admit this after many years, but Ghost Recon had the worst client side weakness of any game I have seen in multiplayer mode. Before starting a map, you select your soldier type and weapons from a fairly large list of possibilities (especially with the expanded gun and weapon mods that were very popular in the day). The glitch came in when my brother and I realized that the ballistics and weapon characteristics were loaded only from the player hosting the server, and were never verified by the clients connecting. The big bad exploit came when it came time to gear up. Several weapons were basically useless in game as they had been included from the beginning single player missions. Crappy guns and rifles with no accuracy or ammo capacity that even noobs would never ever pick. Since you knew that your opponents would never chose these hunks of junk, you were free to go into the ballistics text file and change them into weapons of infinite accuracy and even more instant death. My fully automatic silenced gattling gun sniper rifle with 0 recoil would have given Reason a run for it's money :) Combine that with poor rendering of scrub bushes and I was able to mangle the entire opposing team for over a year with impunity.
It was the only time I ever exploited anything in a multiplayer game, but it was like heroin...one taste and I was hooked :)
If there is a special place in hell for me, I'll save a spot for the rest of you up front :)
I seem to find MMOs have the most "glitches" that seem to become exploits because of lazy testing.
Case in point, LOTRO's last expansion, while good, had so many glitches you could burn through all the lvl 60 instances in a day or two without so much as a death.
Others are terrain issues - monsters can't hit you but still attack you - or line of sight issues.
Unfortunately they seem to have this attitude that because they made a mistake it's an exploit and you'll get banned for using it.
In Commander Keen 6: Aliens Ate My Babysitter, there is a bug where the player shots are marked as rideable (like a platform). So, you can jump up in the air, shoot down at the right point, and ride the bullet down. When the bullet hits the ground, it's removed from the game, but the pointer to the current platform (the bullet) doesn't get cleared (since real platforms never get removed), so you are left standing on a "ghost" of the bullet. If you immediately fire another bullet, it will occupy the same location in memory, so you will now be riding the new bullet. If you fire sideways, you will fall off, but if you fire upwards, you can ride all the way up to the ceiling -- in other words, an unlimited jump.
There are several other bugs which allow you to jump through walls and floors, like in "BloogFoods, Inc."
Also, any unused keys stay in your inventory when you exit a level.
Flying, invincible corpse from QuakeWorld or TeamFortress whichever it was. I don't think anyone can top all the exploitable bugs from early online games, not a chance. But, this is the Internet, we have to forget everything every few months. :\
This RPG by Piranha Bytes had a load of glitches, one being particularly funny. In certain areas, if you walked in certain spots, you'd be instantly transported to kilometers above ground, falling down and dying in the process.
A CC-licensed illustrated horror novel
When you load quick saves, some items do not refresh, like arrows shot during one save, stuck in a character, like they are supposed to. then quick save, then loads the arrow will still be stuck in that character, plus, possibly you'll lose your shield... I've lost 3 glass shields that way....
In Spider Solitaire it is rather easy to get the game in an inproper state. Getting new cards from the deck with at least one column empty gives a warning for breaking one of the games rules "You cannot get new cards while there are empty places". However, if you manage halfway the game to have fewer than 10 cards remain you will get this warning, whereas it either should report that the games is over or it should allow new cards to be drawn from the deck since there are not enough cards to fill all 10 places.
I'd really wish they would do that in real life ... but what gives ;)
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
There are a couple of bits where you can take cover behind a car, then shove it forwards - basically, moveable cover. At one point I ducked and shoved, and the car sailed gracefully up, up off into the sky. Fun to watch until the locust horde started eating my face...
The fiasco that was Ultima IX: Ascension had so many bugs on its release in 1999 it's not even funny. Or is it?. Someone actually played the game in such a twisted way taking advantage of these bugs to hilarious effect.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
This was a compact version of the Sega CD system that could play both carts and Sega CDs . The system would only play one or the other. However, I was able to get the Audio CD going and then slide in the Hang On cart then reset the game. It would only reset the cart and leave the Audio CD playing. I still have the CDx just because it was so cool looking and Nostalgia playing it in College.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Multi-Mega
The one issue i have with this article, is they seem to completely miss out on the most famous and exploited physics engine bug/glitch since the dawn of time. That being the strafe jump and the bunnyhop.. These two engine exploits not only added a huge new depth to games wherein they existed, but also proved that glitches are not necessarily bad or fun killing.
Obviously glitches like falling through the world are frustrating and need to be solved, but theres another side completely to glitches and consequences of their exploitation
I dualbox, with one character on /follow to the other most of the time, and occasionally the second character's camera ends up upside-down. I can't click through to the article due to work restrictions, but the cryptic clue made me think of this.
No Jet Set Willy, the ultimate in bug/glitches where an enemy corrupted the game making it unwinnable as it travelled past the floating point index of the game, took some serious recoding to fix iirc.
One of my favorite bugs in the old pc game Darklands was that if you would go to a certain type of church and donate money, it didn't check if you had enough money to donate, which could set you to a negative amount of money. From that point on, you could essentially buy everything in the game on credit, until you spent such a ridiculous amount that it would wrap back around to a positive amount.
Anyone remember the old arcade Dig Dug bug? By squashing and a sploding a bad guy simultaneously, you could make all the enemies vanish and have the level to yourself.
Pac-Man had some crazy bugs, too, mostly involving overflows.
Well prior to the patches you could make drones (gathering units), high Templar (spell units), dark Templar (big badda boom units) and a couple of others all fly across any map by terminating a build/merge at the right time and telling them to move.
Lead to a huge amount of special User Map Settings where to complete puzzles you had to do this.
Other ones include path finding by using gathering units to head to a mineral patch (which causes them to ignore everything else) and then clicking somewhere when in the middle of units causing their units to have to move out the way (great for unblocking a route!).
Same could be done by un-burrowing the Zerg when on top of each other. I think a few of these are now gone, but used to be good fun!
Actually, the part about jumping not recalculating your position until you landed was known to pre-WotLK raiders, for the exact reason you describe. The Death Grip bug just made it more obvious to people who hadn't quite figured out why jumping out of fire was a bad idea.
This is my sig. There are many others like it, but this one is mine.
I got a funny one, how about KOTR II (Knights of the Old Republic II). There was this interesting glitch, the whole game!
In their rush to get it to shelves before Christmas they whipped up some terrible inconclusive ending and didn't bother to QA test the thing.
One bug in particular involved a mini-boss killing my wookie and having it lie on the ground screaming for a long period of time. The body never went away and everytime I went near it he screamed again.
Kotor 2 is just a huge glitch
how about these:
1.A character tells you their name, then forgets they told you it and refuse to tell you their name.
2.Little robot agrees to destroy something after you leave, big robot says he wont let it, and destroys the little robot. The object is still destroyed.
3. Many of your party can be turned into jedi, but it only happen really late in the game where they end up with like 18 force points, not enough to string together 2 attacks
4. Near the middle you have to rescue or kill 4 people who will mend the jedi temple. Kill them all and the temple rebuilds itself
5.The boxart - there are at least 2 pictures on the box which are wrong - one with your character with a lightsaber before you get one, and another with a female character and a male character only NPC
6.Near the beginning there is an area of mist, walk into it and your character freezes(mid step) the only way through is to use a speed boost, or target an enemy on the other side
7. Unnamed villain - the guy on the box is never named until after you kill him
8. One character keeps talking about a sith either them self or someone else, in the third person. It is never revealed who it is
There are MANY more, but I don't want to bore you
And in the original Kotor - you can kill members of your party, but at the end they are all there cheering with you
Okami for the Wii:
I was trying to beat the mail carrier in a race in Shinsu field for the second time. I kept having to restart the race due to his "spiny droppings". I had forgotten that you have to shake the remote to headbutt him(it's hard to read the Wii remote suggestion on the screen at that moment). I kept pressing A and Z to try and tackle him. During that I was making physical contact with him a bunch. Then I lost him. I think it turned to night or day during that particular race too. I found him again for a race, but this time he was some weird floating polygonal blob. All you could see was parts of his torso and neck. The game started heavily lagging periodically and at points the background, foreground - heck everything! - was mostly gray, a little green, and one big polygon that looked like an ice wall. I beat the bastard though on that next race, even with all that crazy shit going on!
No-one is gonna read this far down, but what the hell :)
The Return To Zork one might not be a glitch so much as just evil designers, but if you made a slight mistake on the FIRST SCREEN (cut instead of dig the plant) then you're blocked from completion of the game, but you don't find out until much (much) later!
Dark Age of Camelot is a still-breathing MMO that got roundly whooped by WoW despite having probably the best PvP of any MMO to date. The bane of this game was the sheer number and scale of Line-Of-Sight and NPC-pathing problems. It made certain situations in the game almost unplayable.
There were also a lot of questionable decisions made by the design team that led to some interesting game dynamics. Anyone who's played will remember the MoC3/RR5 Sorc combo, the Large Shield blockrate against Dual-Wield and various other fun bits and pieces.
Still loved that game though...
The original Blackjack for the TRS-80 Model I, on audio-cassette, would let you bet negative dollars. Do that, intentionally lose the hand, profit.
Santa Paravia en Fumaccio had a bankruptcy bug that left you with all your grain if you declared you were broke. Buy a buttload of grain, default, profit.
I noticed in Madden 96 that the AI could audible into any defensive set they wished (the player could only audible 6-8 plays...not fair). So I would come out in punt formation on first down, the AI would audible into punt return. Then, I would audible into a pass play and throw to an uncovered receiver. Touchdown!! I loved beating the AI in older games.
Maybe a glitch, more of a trick, but since I doubt the game makers intended it I would venture a glitch. On one of the boards (i think level 1) a turtle would walk down the stairs. If you timed the jumps right you could jump up and down on the shell (actually TAPE the button down and leave it for a few hours) to come with maxed out lives and a ridiculous amount of points.
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
in Zelda, you walk into one of the houses and the guy says "I am error!"
also, the invisible blocks which sometimes trapped Mario in Super Mario Bros.
I found both of these on my own, then found them online as "known" glitches.
The Banjo-Kazooie Stop n' Swap relied on early Nintendo 64 models having [RAMBUS memory] retain data while you could swap cartridges, theoretically between Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie so as to access secrets in the sequel based on progress in the first
But why didn't Rare just use the Nintendo 64 Controller Pak, a memory card that was designed for this sort of thing?
In Need for Speed: Kill the Cops edition, you could drive on top of a building at the petrol station. The dumb cops would then drive round and round repeatedly bumping into the building.
Vanish
Quake 2: bunny-hopping
Starsiege Tribes: skiing
If you were able to get shot by a warrior while the Sinistar was eating your last ship, you'd die twice. This would leave you with -1 lives, which the game would interpret as 255.
Tempest had a bug that operated something like this ...
1. Play a game and get higher than 186,000(?), stopping the value on some certain last digit. (I can't remember what either were at the moment.)
2. Once game ends, wait for it to cycle through it's demo two times.
3. After the 2nd demo cycle, once the Tempest logo starts up again, insert a quarter.
At this point you should have access to ALL the levels in Tempest. The manufacturer caught wind of the bug later and some arcades upgraded their system to remove it.
Here's a couple from the Intellivision that my brother and I discovered:
Also, the Sega Genesis game Phantasy Star II, one of the best games I've ever played on the system, had a few bugs, some of them useful. My brother and I had catalogued 10 or so. Here's a couple:
Program Intellivision!
You can do some interesting things in StarCraft as well.
A well-known trick is having 11 mutalisks and some slow unit (overlord, larva) in a control group; moving them around makes the mutalisks group together in a single spot, which makes them more effective (hit-and-run attacks all target the same unit).
I saw a video called "Pimpest plays of 200n" (n=5?), where a Terran lifts a barrack (that's placed next to a mineral patch which blocks a pathway), then lands the barrack again and while the barrack is landing, moves some marines down under the barrack. When the barrack lands, the marines try to scatter and move out from under the barracks and walk through the minerals -- and are thus able to shoot the overlord on the other side.
I remember playing Bill Sims College football for the Genesis back in the day, and there'd be downs where the defensive member you selected would be face down on the turf and still movable. and they'd be lightning quick too, until the play started. Then the player would get back up and be normal again. I believe this happened with Madden as well.
Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uO_2cJqXG2o
Xaotik Designs
In Space Taxi for the C64, pick the 24 hour shift, play level 1 (Short'n'sweet), then power off the disk drive for the remaining 23 levels, power up the drive again for the secret level.
Eat the pie until a "fire" glows, then go up until it stops, touch a star and you'll see the Secret Menu!!!
The noble and majestic Crabspy is an endangered semi-aquatic species known to occupy the waterways of 2Fort, Well, Hydro, and other exotic locations such as Barn.
These beautiful creatures can be easily recognized by their claws held proudly at a sharp angle over their heads. In one pincer they carry a cigarette case which they display to attract potential mates and ward off predators. The Crabspy employes a full 360 degree range of scuttling motion and moves at approximately the same pace as the theme song to Ulysses 31.
Sadly the Crabspy is an endangered creature often hunted for their luxurious free points. If you spot a poacher please report them to the proper authorities. Keep our waterways safe and clear for the Crabspy!
(Considering how the article is nothing but YouTube links, I think I'll roll with the trend)
Starkle, starkle, little twink.
EA went nuts in their effort to make the physics work in the game. But all they managed to do is turn it into a stuntman's heaven. Videos abound of jeep jumps, inverse jumping (you get blown UPWARDS and land on a bridge or building above you) wing walking (I think the current record for most on a B-17 was like 25) and my favorite, plane switching in mid-air.
One nut managed to take a panzer and make it break dance for a few minutes.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
the missingno glitch from the old blue and red versions of pokemon are by far the worst glitch I have ever seen. Almost like the developers put it in on purpose.
Space Invaders
A very popular glitch was to hold the reset button while turning the Atari 2600 console with Space Invaders in it. It gave your single-player tank a double-shot. I'm no longer convinced it was unintentional.
Mountain King (originally by Imagic)
There was an accidental "super jump" in the game. If you timed a jump just right, by releasing the stick for a split-second and then hit "up" again, the man would make a half-jump followed by a jump that would fly up into the air until it hit something. This caused the game to move into ROM and RAM addresses creating a "sky world" to explore.
On Leaderboards in general, "rollover glitches abound." Mario Kart on the Wii had rollover glitches to the timer, making them patch the game and reset the leaderboards. I noticed the more recent "Cuboid" on PSN has the same problem! Both the number of moves and the timer rollover to zero making it possible that somebody willing to make 1000 moves and wait 99:99 minutes (or whatever the maxes are) to get the top leaderboard position.
I remember when I got the final boss in the game (darth maul). I ran away from him instead of fighting him head on, and remarkably he didn't follow. He just stood still and let me shoot him until he was dead.
Apparently the programmers never thought that the player would try that.
But my negative funds don't leave me $godlike amounts ... bummers..
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
...I had a silo full of a strawberry crop that refused to disappear. I could sell it and sell it, but it refused to go away. I just had to keep selling it to pay for a my huge farm full of crop dusters that I could fly around.
If you flipped the power switch off and on very fast, sometimes it would start up in a funky mode which allowed you to fire two bullets at a time instead of one. The game played normally other than that.
It didn't look intentional, but I admit I haven't seen it since I was probably eight years old.
There's one 'glitch' listed for Oblivion that is not: slaughterfish gasping.
A fish could spawn over land depending on the location of your load point - THAT issue should be the glitch.
But if it does appear over land, what do you expect a fish to do?
A gasping fish is an intentional feature, not a bug or glitch.
This is not my sig
I encountered a bug in the Wii version of Zelda: Twilight Princess.
In the first dungeon, near one of the last doors in the place, there are some clay pots along the wall. One of the pots contains a fairy that you can put in a jar. Link can have two jars at this point in the game. So fill one jar with a fairy, then warp out of the dungeon and warp back. When you get back, the clay pot should have regenerated, and you can put another fairy in the second jar.
Now comes the difficult part: Don't ever lose enough health that the game forces you to auto-use a fairy from your jars.
Continue to follow the storyline in the game, defeat the boss in the first dungeon. Eventually you come to a part where Link gets out onto a bridge. The enemies set fire to the bridge behind and in front of Link, and you have to move a box in order to climb up and jump off the bridge before the walls of fire reach you.
With the two fairies, you can survive moving against the firewall, and if you jump against the firewall (instead of off the bridge) and time the jumping right, you can get past the firewall and "escape" the fire and the bridge without jumping off the side.
The "dramatic encounter" music continues to play, and you can run around on the bridge and the land on the side you managed to escape. The story won't be able to move forward until you run back to the firewall and commit suicide, as now there is no way to jump off the bridge without coming into contact with the firewall and dying.
There might be more stuff to explore and see, but I didn't try it out at the time.
There was an old game called Dragon Wars. Probably back around 1990 which sets four characters out on a quest to save the realm. Interesting game in that you viewed the game 1st person when most adventure games at the time were 3rd person.
Anyway, a friend of mine and I discovered that if we built the characters up, saved and restarted, we could import the characters we'd saved. So basically, we'd have set of 5th level characters in the 1st level area. Or 10th level, or 15th etc. It was pretty easy to keep building them up and reimporting until the characters could kill anything bare handed.
There was this dragon that was designed to be invincible via normal combat - the programmers gave it like MAXINT hit points, and the dragon breathed fire that would destroy everyone except the guy in the back. However, they also had a spell that calculates damage by percentage, and a spell that resurrects everyone in the party. So, the guy in the back resurrects everyone, including the other mage. The other mage would ding the dragon for ~5% of its HP, which was a huge number. The dragon would breath, everyone would die except the guy in the back, and the cycle repeats itself until the dragon dies.
They way you were supposed to "kill" the dragon was with some kind of orb, which the dragon would react to somehow and further the storyline. But I killed it and ruined the quest chain and had to start over.
Back in high school and college I made a bunch of videos of combos and glitches for the Street Fighter II series, and some other random games too. In fact, the Killer Instinct videos were featured here on Slashdot a few years back. http://nki.combovideos.com/
I came here to mention the Pac Man level 256 bug but looking for a link I found a whole glitch wiki!
was one that very few people ever knew about, mostly because it was in a niche mod for UT2004. The mod was called Chaos UT, gave you all kinds of cool weapons and items to use, including a grappling hook. You could grapple to pretty much anything and then tell it to retract, zipping you around quickly, and of course use it to swing around in all kinds of crazy ways. The cool glitch part was, if you did it just right you could grapple to a player's head. The target had to be standing right next to a wall, so you aimed for the spot where the top of the player's head was right next to the wall, tricking it into thinking you were aiming at the wall, but in reality the player's head was in the way. The most we ever got was a 4-player chain because eventually the grapples break loose.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
"Commander Keen 6: John Carmack Pays His Mortgage Off"
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
What is BigRigs? I don't know what was done right in the game actually, such a buggy horrible game!
Ah, Hoyle. They couldn't be happy producing a collection of board games. They had to provide a system when you earn ingame money for certain achievements, which you then spend on useless tsochkes.
Fortunately, there was a great big gaping bug in the Chess game. If you put your opponent's King in check, a music sting would play and your opponent would make a "witty" remark.
If you tried to take a second move while the music sting was playing... the game would let you. And then, if the enemy King were still in check... music sting, witty remark, etc.
Get your Queen out and make a kamikaze attack, and you could clean out the whole enemy side about five moves in, getting credit for each kill and then for a lopsided victory.
(You could have gone on to promote 8 pawns, etc, but it was faster just to kill all the enemy pieces then score checkmate.)
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
The funniest one I've seen was in Fallout 3. I was talking to Nova in Megaton. She starts to cock her head to the right and it just keeps going, doing a complete 360 degree rotation, talking all the while.
The cake is a pie
Back in the 90s my friend's copy of Accolade's Winter Challenge showed interesting behaviour. In the skating event, when you were just about to complete the final lap, the left border of the rink started to "magnetically" pull the skater towards it. By rigorously skating in the opposing direction you were sometimes able to fight the this force and reach the goal.
The game was cracked so I wondered maybe it was some kind of anti-piracy prank. Or maybe the game files were just corrupted in some way.
Remember those nintendo lcd games in the 80s?
It was powered by two lithium batteries. Remove the battery cap, tickle the batteries to make the power flicker on and off. And here you go, you are playing snoopy tennis starting with 6000 points.
Only now the pace is infernal and you have one hand busy keeping the batteries in place...
Can't believe noone mentioned this one yet...
Chuck Norris was in a street fighter game, but no matter what button you hit, he did a roundhouse kick and killed the other guy.
When asked about the glitch, Chuck Norris said "That's no glitch."
Back when I played BBS Door Games, one of the board operators told me about the planet cloning bug for some of the older versions of TW2002. This was a great way to instantly become the biggest fish in your particular pond and quickly allowed a friend of mine and I to start surrounding the Star Dock with well defended planets and toll fighters.
This bug combined with one of the add-ons, a planet that kept warping to a new location every day and undid ownership, made for a great deal of fun when we cloned the planet with too much money on it, causing an overflow and dumping anyone who landed on the planet to be dumped out of the game. Imagine finding an unowned planet with what appeared to be a ridiculous amount of money and toys on it, only to land on it and get dumped out of the game. Yeah, we were assholes.
It took me forever to beat HL1, because I could never get out of the tram at the beginning of the game. The guard would walk over to the tram, moan, and fall over dead without activating the door. I thought it was an irritating puzzle for the longest time!
I worked at the Beverly office a while back, and these are what just comes to mind. NWN1: Pretty close to release, and within my first week there i noticed that you could drop gold on the ground but it wouldnt subtract from your inventory. NWN1: For a long time you could reject your level up roll for HP if you didnt get a 20. NWN1: Most go get this or that quests are repeatable if you drop the item in question just before saying here it is. then you pick it up and talk again. Moonbase Commander: On one level you were attacked by three AI. Two would attack randomly, the third would always attack in the same spot in the same amount of turns. So once you got the shot correct, you could always stop that AI. Unreal2: For a long time the AI of the vicious pig looking monters was broken in that they wouldnt actually attack you, but rush and growl. Most people would always just blow em away anyways so it was barely noticed. Unreal2: There was a bug where randomly if you used a sniper rifle on your enemy, the ragdolled corpse might fall to the ground then twitch, and then fling off into the direction of the push from the force of impact. Was funny to see a corpse just hit the ground then skid across the map. UnrealT2k3: The link gun use to not lose power from a teamate when he was killed. So you could raise the power of the gun to the point where it pushed the person firing it into a wall with enough force to kill them. Also one could aim at the groind and fly into the air and get crushed against the skybox. UnrealT2k3: I forget the map but there was a spot on a CTF map where either blue or red side could take the opposite flag and hide in a rock near thier own. I actually saw this a year after release when i saw kids playing the map in a lan event. Didnt tell them about it. Ahh good times.
There was a pretty interesting glitch I had in SSX 3. Apparently I did something pretty impossible in-game, then I saved the replay. Went back and watched it later, and... well, did you know that the Replay feature isn't actually a video of what you did? It keeps track of your actions, then when you watch a reply, the game just mimics what you did.
Turns out, the "replay" clipped some bad snow and crashed (where I had not), ended up bombing a ton of tricks (due to lack of momentum), and just spend the rest of the replay just completely screwing everything up, since it was in the wrong place due to your character being "reset" on the stage if you miss jumping gaps or something similar.
All in all, it was pretty funny. Wish I had saved it.
Certain maps had very acute polygon edges along the invisible borders. A friend and I would spend quality time just trying to find areas where our cars would get stuck in these acute edges and start to vibrate rather fiercely until the car popped through the invisible border and was lifted to the top of the tree line! It's hilarious in multiplayer when you can see your friend's 911 skidding on ice(null friction;))around the outside of the map. Driving back in towards the center of the map closer to the road the car would finally drop and give the greatest Dukes of Hazards ala Deutsche jump and would make the driver not-far-from-poopin. Finding this stuff is better than a stick of Toblerone. What a great game that was; missed that sort of NFS and hopefully the new one (NFS: Shift) will reclaim some of the old simulation feel. I'll be screwing with the wall again on that one. hehe.
That damn game broke my will when I was 9 years old. I could not accept that a game could defeat me. Turns out something went wrong with the pc port making it just that: Impossible to beat. Now I can get closure and move on with my life. Next challenge: Zeliard.
Winkey shortcut mapping for 64bit windows. WinKeyPlus
Dungeons of the Unforgiven (Dos):
The monster map for this game could be deleted causing the monsters to reset their positions on the map. If you knew where a monster that was really beneficial to be killed was located, you could kill it, save/quit, delete the monster map, and then load your game back up.
Ultima: The False Prophet (SNES version):
There's a glitch where you can get tons of free items. The gist of it is that you have to have enough items in your storage sack in your inventory so that you can scroll down past the bottom of your normal inventory in the sack (which takes something like 16 items if you have nothing else in your inventory). When you exit the sack you will be below your normal inventory. From there you can scroll up to get to your inventory, or scroll down to find hundreds of different items including armor, weapons, and key items from the game. You can pick those items up and move them to your main inventory then and have them for your own use. This glitch does occasionally kill all your party members without sending you back to lord british, which means you have to load your last save, so always save before use. I've never seen this posted anywhere before I posted it on gamefaqs a few months back, but I've known about this for around 15 years.
Just thought of another glitch I found at some point that I'm not sure if it's ever been posted around before. In Super Mario World (SNES) if you used something like a game genie to alter mario's jump height (I believe it was the option for the tallest jump height for the game genie in the book that came with it) it was possible for mario to die during the attract screen. If mario died during the attract screen the game would then stick you in the game on that level mario was just in that was being played by the computer. You could do all the normal stuff, but there wasn't a whole lot to do. I think the only way to exit was to reset the game, but it's been many years. It didn't have a whole lot of use, but it was a neat trick none the less
Just search for that on Youtube. You flip a crate on its side, get two guys inside it, and jump real fast. And it starts flying around. And it's so stupid it looks awesome.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Weird there was also another glitch in M&MII. Basically you go out of town and find that group of about 200+ trolls, goblins or whatever near the first town. When you fight them the first 10 or so are listed as individual enemies but the rest are one group. That "group" is considered by the game as an enemy that is worth a huge amount of experience, gives a huge amount of treasure, yet is extremely easy to kill. However since you can't target them they're normally impossible to hit.(Spells that hit "Everyone" miss the group and you can't select them as a target.) However there are also spells that can hit multiple enemies and also let you select which enemy to start with. (I think the spell I'm thinking of hits 4 people.) Anyway if you targeted the last guy in the list and the spell didn't kill him the next "guy" to be attacked was that huge group and the spell would pretty much kill the group. (Since as far as the game is concerned it's just another enemy with very low HP.) So I'd go do that fight pretty early in the game and afterwards my guys would be very powerful with all that experience, money, and equipment.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Whith a fully loaded character carying a bucket, use a nearby well you will get a new bucket spawned at your feet. Not really useful unless you consider houses made of buckets a good thing..
When the game first came out there was a popular physics glitch whereby punching the Gatling gun repeatedly and then jumping on it would send your player flying. This was quite effective for skipping certain "horde" zones, and for ensuing hilarity, in general. It was sad when that was patched. :(
In Need For Speed: Porsche Unleashed (PC) on the Alps track if you drive onto the frozen lake and drive into the snow in the back center of the lake, your car will be thrown up into the air for what seems like miles. Sometimes you'll land on the snow behind the lake and you can drive up the mountains until you eventually fall out of the sky.
I remember happening upon what appeared to be a level editor that was never removed from the game. But basically it allowed you to add enemies, rings, platforms, whatever to the level, and you could then exit the editor mode and collect the rings, kill the enemies or use the platforms. It was especially fun to place springboards in novel locations. The one caveat is that anything you add tends to disappear if it moves off-screen. It also had a tendency to lock up the game if you got too ambitious with your additions.
In UT 03, we discovered that the nuke would reduce a player's score but not a team score in team death match. We would get the reclaimer and run into a group of the opposing side and shoot the floor.
In God we trust, all others require data.
I remember in Halo on silent cartographer, you could blast the warthogs on top of this island and drive around. That was a blast!! Definetly one of my favorite glitches.
Another trick, in the same level, you could push the warthog INTO the cartographer room, I'm talking into the structure, down the stairs, and into the room where you access the map. That takes me back!
I also HATE people that are glitching on Call of Duty World at War, getting under the map and killing you with impunity.
They say, "Evil prevails when good men fail to act." What they ought to say is, "Evil prevails."
I used to play Delta Force: Land Warrior online quite a bit. It had a few quirks that made for interesting gameplay...
For instance, you could attack with the combat knife through anything - walls, doors, you name it. If you suspected someone was following some distance back, probably with the intention of knifing you when you stopped, there were some corridors where you could turn a corner, stand on the other side of a thin wall, and then spam-click into it with the combat knife. The other player wouldn't see you, but the knife attack would kill them when they approached the corner.
Another interesting glitch was concerning reach with the combat knife. If you were jogging backward, your reach was slightly longer - probably because it calculated the maximum reach distance using an old position while your character continued to move back. If someone was chasing you in close combat trying to knife you (and knife kills were worth 3 points, so this was quite common especially on maps with buildings), you could spin and run backward, killing them as they ran into your blade - but they couldn't reach you. This was particularly nice when using Snakebite - her knife reach is slightly longer to begin with because she's the close-combat specialist. ;)
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
GTA:VCS for PS2. Not a huge glitch, but if you shoot the moon with the laser sniper rifle you can make it bigger, smaller, etc.
Also, in the computer game combat arms, in the map Sand Hog, sometimes you fall under the maps and you're in a blank sky. And then you die.