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?"

Comments

Grand Theft Auto...

[Twide]

There was once this minigame...er..um glitch

Final Fantasy Bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Final Fantasy Bugs

[ShecoDu]

Don't forget about the psyco cyan glitch in ff6, a combination of remort, imp, death and life will make him unleash an infinite attack combo until the enemies are dead.

Re:Final Fantasy Bugs

[holmedog]

The best FF 6 (3 in US) glitch was the Vanish->Doom. Because Vanish caused all spells to hit (and all melee to miss) you could Vanish anything in the game (bosses included) and then cast Doom on it for an instant kill.

Re:Final Fantasy Bugs

[Rei]

Bah, that's the lousy version of the tactics cloning bug ;) There's one version you can do that lets you clone any shield or weapon, 100% free. I don't remember the exact mechanism offhand (although I remember that you do *not* buy at any point and time; it's all done within the fitting screen). It's something along the lines of using Equip Shield in a job class that allows you to use the weapon you want to clone, then go into the fitting room, try to put a shield in the left hand, and then best fit, and then manually revert back to your original eq. Something like that. I'd have to mess around to figure it out again, and I recall it varies a bit depending on what you want to clone. In my best savegame, I had 99 of all of the best weapons and shields.

Want some more tactics glitches? That game was glitch city ;) Two of my favorites:

1) Learn abilities for free. Doesn't work in every class, and like most tactics bugs, there's a bit of finesse to exploiting it. It only works for job classes where you can scroll down the page, and not all of them -- but it's great for some of the big-ticket ones, like summoner, priest, black mage, time mage, etc. You get enough JP to buy at least one skill, but not all skills. You save, because the results can be unpredictable, and you may need to reload. You click to buy the skill, and a yes/no confirmation dialog comes up. While the dialog is up, you scroll the page up and down -- I forget which button it is that turns the up and down buttons into pageup/pagedown, but they erroneously let it still work while the confirmation dialog is up. So, you scroll down to a job that you *can't* afford and buy it. Depending on which job you can't afford that you left off on, it'll have a predictable effect for that job. There's no way to know in advance, however, what that effect will be. It may bring you to extremely negative JP, wherein when you exit and re-enter, you'll have 9999 JP to spend. It may bring you to maxint JP, where you can buy everything and still be over the top. It may increase your JP by a fixed amount or decrease it by a fixed amount. There's a bit of practice needed to figure out how to do this right because it can be hard to get just the right amount of JP to spend and to land on just the right, too expensive, entries. But once you get it, you can learn all skills in that class :) It's funny having a level 1 master Priest or whatnot. ;) Sadly, one of the jobs that this doesn't work for is the dreaded Calculator.

2) Level up/level down super-stats. This one is more widely known. Your base stats, like speed, magic power, attack, etc go up relative to your job class when you gain a level. When you lose a level from a degenerator trap, they go down relative to your job class. So, if you go up as one class and down as another, you can get different stats. *And*, some classes give very little for gaining/losing levels, while some give a lot. So, for most males, it's best to go up as a ninja and down as a bard, and for most females, up as a ninja and down as a chemist or dancer (it's best to alternate). However, Reis and Orlandu are best to level up in their base class rather than ninja. It's a slow process to go up and down 99 levels, so you have to work for it, but ultimately, you can have god-like stats. To speed up the process, there are a number of tricks. Normally to hit a degenerator, you have to move on and off it -- i.e., two turns per level. But if you equip the person with teleport, and then try to teleport to the opposite end of the screen, the teleport fails, and you land back on the trap, every turn. To level up, bave Steal as a secondary ability. The most exp any action can give you is 99 (i.e., a level every other turn), but if you use steal exp on a high level player or monster, you can get that 99 exp plus what you steal, and gain a level every turn, all the way up to about level 70 or so.

Tactics, of course, also had quite a few fun

Quake

[hism]

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.

Re:Quake

[weirdcrashingnoises]

yes, these are truly awesome things, i remember when bunnyhopping in counter-strike actually worked, oh man that was great for the ramp in dust...

and of course the original Tribes, which changed the bunnyhop into skiing, and also combined it with rocket(disc) jumping, or maybe a heavy nuke jump... :-D that was some crazy awesomeness.

along with that i really love the quake done quick videos.

http://speeddemosarchive.com/quake/qdq/movies/

my favorite is still "the rabbit run" going thru easy mode in just under 11 minutes, freakin amazing.

look at the date of the article

[MoFoQ]

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).

Stunts

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

Goldeneye Cardtidge Tilting

[gcnaddict]

"turn a gameplay experience on its head (sometimes literally)"

Goldeneye cartridge tilting totally counts if you're talking about literal cases.

A Link to the Past

[cjfs]

Has some of the best glitches. The gameplayer list definitely needs more nes/snes titles.

Glitch in Deus Ex

[Amarantine]

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.

Minus World

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

C & C glitches

[jaxtherat]

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)

Re:C & C glitches

[DeathCarrot]

In RA1, get a group of grenadiers and make them force fire at the ground in front of them. Just as they're about the throw their grenades, force fire anywhere on the map and they'll throw the grenade there, regardless of whether the target is in range or not. It's basically extremely cheap artillery with infinite range - certainly one of the most 'cheaty' glitches I've come across.

Ultima I on the C64

[bucketoftruth]

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.

Under the ice in Zelda: OOT

[qw0ntum]

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.

Re:Under the ice in Zelda: OOT

[Anthony_Cargile]

There is a hidden cavern down there that looks like it was going to be something that wasn't included in the game

Too bad the mods won't scroll this far, but there's a whole story behind that little cavern - it was rumored to be some kind of fountain, don't quote me on this but I believe a "unicorn fountain" (no BS) that was scrapped in the end. There were found to be little traces of graphics from this fountain buried here and there within the game cartridge, but no playable version of the fountain was uncovered.

This secret, alongside the Banjo-Kazooie Stop n' Swop conspiracies, are amongst the Nintendo 64's greatest mysteries. I haven't seen the cavern myself personally (yet plenty of youtube videos), but I have seen evidence of the Stop n' Swap thing, which may be related to the unicorn fountain in that extra gameplay was to be accessible via an addon hard drive to the Nintendo 64 but was never sold in the US (yet the Japanese Zelda/BK never included any of these features despite briefly selling the hard drive).

The Banjo-Kazooie Stop n' Swap relied on early Nintendo 64 models having nvram 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 the idea was never finished in the sequel to the end of the nvram feature in later N64 models. Whether or not the OOT cavern relied on the hard drive (or didn't at the last minute) remains a secret lost with time.

Doom 2

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Doom 2

[X0563511]

That's not a bug. You just set the one-side flag on the wall.

Re:World of Warcraft flying off the boat

[palegray.net]

After extensive research on the WoW gaming community, I believe I've identified a major glitch that causes many gamers to forgo showers, lose their jobs, and leave their significant others taking desperate measures to divert their attention from the online life. The economic and reproductive ramifications are staggering. Someone really ought to do something about this bug.

This led to new understanding of a game fundamenta

[Cyno01]

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.

Re:Online games still not validating input

[The Master Control P]

If you've ever played BZflag online you know all about this. There's zero sanity checks anywhere. While every player's computer is expected to run the shots/tanks physics engine AND render the display in real time, I've asked about server sanity checks and found that they'd be a major burden.

So cheaters fly around invincibly doing whatever they want. About half an hour later, the rest of the players finally begin to finish putting 2+2 together, but they never goddamn vote to ban cheaters despite everyone agreeing.

Bit of a shame, because it's a good engine to build off of...

My favorite classic Glitch

[robkill]

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.

Elite 2: Frontier

[Ecuador]

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...

Some funny ones from the top of my mind

[WWWWolf]

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.

Re:Online games still not validating input

[fractoid]

While every player's computer is expected to run the shots/tanks physics engine AND render the display in real time, I've asked about server sanity checks and found that they'd be a major burden.

I've always heard that excuse too ("oh but the server will bog down if we do too much on it"). It's pants. Unless the server's entirely written in VBScript AND it's running on a 486, there should be no problems at all doing at least basic sanity checks. IMO it's just lazy programmers not wanting to bother with checks when "it works fine as is" until people start trying to cheat.

The golden rule of *any* client/server app with apps distributed to the world at large is never trust the client. Treat the client as hostile, because for all you know, it may be. That's more work, though, so most developers don't seem to bother. :/

Sim City

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Glitches on mods

[Yuioup]

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

Commander Keen 6

[jspenguin1]

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.

Whacked Out Ultima IX

[dido]

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.

Dying twice in Sinistar

[bubba_the_mermaid]

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.

StarCraft

[jonaskoelker]

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.

Re:Super Mario Brothers 1

[Mr Z]

Actually, no, going over 127 lives makes your count negative, and will give you game over the next time you die.

Street Fighter

[weszz]

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."