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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?"

9 of 282 comments (clear)

  1. Grand Theft Auto... by Twide · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  2. Final Fantasy Bugs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Minus World by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Ultima I on the C64 by bucketoftruth · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  5. Doom 2 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:Doom 2 by X0563511 · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

      --
      For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
  6. Re:World of Warcraft flying off the boat by palegray.net · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  7. Re:Under the ice in Zelda: OOT by Anthony_Cargile · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  8. This led to new understanding of a game fundamenta by Cyno01 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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."