Glitches and bugs, amusing and/or game breaking.

[Revising Ocelot]

So, what strange oddities in games do you remember?




Late to the party as always, I had bought the Fallout 3 GOTY edition for PC at Christmas and finally started playing it a week ago. So I was around level 6 or so, equipped with nothing more than a half-broken 10mm pistol, a laser pistol and a backpack full of random stuff I didn't know had a use or not (so I hoarded it anyway). I had heard of Dogmeat being "north of DC" somewhere, so I set off in search of the Wild Unknown.

The Wild Unknown found me first, in the form of a Deathclaw. Which immediately noticed me. I tried firing my puny weapons at it, which had barely no effect. It came towards as me as I ran backwards poking it with low damage gunfire... and then the Deathclaw spontaneously launched off into the sky like a rocket. I saw it disappear out from sight in the air about 6 seconds later.


Haven't seen any other Deathclaws since.

[Green Spanner]

That Space Station Silicon Valley glitch that prevented you from getting 100% was pretty annoying (there was a collectible hidden in each level, but in one level you just glitched right through it rather than pick it up).

Hell, that whole game was a mess of glitches and bugs. It just so happened to somehow be sufficiently awesome to offset it.

[Toast]

Speaking of Fallout 3 bugs and gamebreaking glitches, I've encountered two.

One is a fairly common one found during the quest the Waters of Life. If you go into the Jefferson memorial and kill one of the super mutants inside and his body is too close to the door, when you come back later with the scientists they can sometimes get stuck on his body and not move. It's possible to use grenades to move the body out of the way so that they can get past him. The problem for me was, I had used a plasma rifle to kill him and he didn't leave a body, just a pile of goo. The entire game was broken, I couldn't move forward and I didn't have a save from before I killed the super mutant.

Another time, when escorting a bunch of escaped slaves to Lincoln's memorial, the ex-slaves, instead of going to the memorial, turn in the opposite direction once they reach the mall, head to the subway that leads to Rivet city, swim out to the Jefferson memorial, swim back, then head north up the road until they were finally stopped by an Enclave barrier and I couldn't get them to move.

Mass Effect 2 also had a number of bugs and glitches, including one side mission that kills the sound until you exit to the dashboard and reload the game and another mission where the enemies you're supposed to fight sometimes don't spawn in. The one that bugs me the most, though is using the resume save file function doesn't load the most recent save, but rather the save at the bottom of the list of saves.

[Amake]

Contra 3 on SNES has a bug where you do something involving getting game over while you're using a smartbomb to skip to the next level. What's funny about it is that as far as I know no one on the whole Internet knew about it until last year, but I watched a friend of mine's mom discover it all on her own while trying to figure out which side was up on the controller sometime around 1994 or 95.

Not that any of us could guess how it was done. And the mom stuck to playing Solitaire ever after.

[The Artist Formerly Known as Hawk]

Fallout 3 tends to like doing that, "launch shit into the air" type bug. I once encountered a car which had spawned onto the wrong spot, got stuck in the scenery, then suddenly launched itself skywards and over the horizon. Duno where the hell it ended up.

Best bugs in a game though? Deus Ex (http://www.it-he.org/deus.htm).

[Doc ock rokc]

TF2 New sandman stun
if you tap A & D when moving forward or backwards Or W and S when moving sideways. You can move at 100% speed
If you hold down the fire button you can fire at some specific times during the stun
If you where in water the air or crouched when your hit you can fire for the first .25 seconds.
If you switch weapons right when your hit you can completely negate the stun.
Seriously valve! I gave up 15 health for them to do everything they could do before when I stunned them!

[Shyria Dracnoir]

Someone in one of my Left 4 Dead 2 games pointed out a glitch in the Dark Carnival finale. You have to activate a stage show to signal a helicopter, along with zombies. However, there's a stack of plywood sheets the whole team can jump to and apparently it messes with the game and stops a lot of the horde from spawning, even the Tanks. Only saw a few Smokers and a Charger show up. No idea whether this is a commonly known one, whether it's gotten patched by now, or whether it was really just the guy secretly messing with cheats. Interesting round nontheless (this was the Campaign mode, by the way.)

[Doc ock rokc]

Someone in one of my Left 4 Dead 2 games pointed out a glitch in the Dark Carnival finale. You have to activate a stage show to signal a helicopter, along with zombies. However, there's a stack of plywood sheets the whole team can jump to and apparently it messes with the game and stops a lot of the horde from spawning, even the Tanks. Only saw a few Smokers and a Charger show up. No idea whether this is a commonly known one, whether it's gotten patched by now, or whether it was really just the guy secretly messing with cheats. Interesting round nontheless (this was the Campaign mode, by the way.)

I heard it was patched for everything but Xbox. Who will have it patched in the Passing or whatever update.

[CelesJessa]

My favorite glitches have to do with The Sims 3. I was being a nerd and making Metal Gear-themed Sims. IT JUST SO HAPPENED that Snake and Otacon fell in love and got married, but at one point, Snake got pregnant with Otacon's child. There isn't supposed to be male pregnancy in The Sims 3, considering there's no body mesh for a pregnant man, so Snake's body just turned invisible while he was pregnant (his head, hands, and feet were visible though). Three days later he gave birth to a little girl.

And then, my "Liquid Snake" Sim managed to give birth, twice, all by himself. The kids don't have any other parent but Liquid and they are genetically exactly like him (his daughter, in turn, spawned two children of her own, completely on her own later in life).

It was amusing but so much WTF.

[bluestarultor]

My favorite glitches have to do with The Sims 3. I was being a nerd and making Metal Gear-themed Sims. IT JUST SO HAPPENED that Snake and Otacon fell in love and got married, but at one point, Snake got pregnant with Otacon's child. There isn't supposed to be male pregnancy in The Sims 3, considering there's no body mesh for a pregnant man, so Snake's body just turned invisible while he was pregnant (his head, hands, and feet were visible though). Three days later he gave birth to a little girl.

And then, my "Liquid Snake" Sim managed to give birth, twice, all by himself. The kids don't have any other parent but Liquid and they are genetically exactly like him (his daughter, in turn, spawned two children of her own, completely on her own later in life).

It was amusing but so much WTF.

Really? Sounds par for the course for MGS. ;)


Well, there are a few neat bugs in FF7 I'm sure everyone knows about. If you load up Barret's Missing Score with maxed Knights of the Round or kill enough crap with Vincent's Death Penalty, you get an insta-kill effect from damage overflow. The game basically says, "this is too high for me to count, fuck it, dead." Then the PSX version also has the Regen trick where you open the lid and get a free full heal. Also, if you take Vincent to where Aeris dies, his model gets all whacked out. Among other bugs.

[Kyanbu The Legend]

Really? Sounds par for the course for MGS. ;)


Well, there are a few neat bugs in FF7 I'm sure everyone knows about. If you load up Barret's Missing Score with maxed Knights of the Round or kill enough crap with Vincent's Death Penalty, you get an insta-kill effect from damage overflow. The game basically says, "this is too high for me to count, fuck it, dead." Then the PSX version also has the Regen trick where you open the lid and get a free full heal. Also, if you take Vincent to where Aeris dies, his model gets all whacked out. Among other bugs.

I've heard of the first one but that last one is the first I've heard of it. (might load up my PSX copy of FFVII and try it out. Then maybe load up the PSN version and see if it was ever patched.) If not, I'm going to abuse the fuck out of that damage overflow bug.

Only bug that I remember that hasn't been posted here before (to my knowledge) is the Django chip glitch in MMBN 6 (Megaman Battle Network 6). Since nearly all Boktai refs were removed from all English versions of MMBN 6 (due to issues between Konami and Capcom). You're not suppose to be able to obtain it (it's not even counted in the library). Yet there's a way to obtain said card even though it's not on the cart. When you use it in battle, a white dot appears where django would be and attack animations for the card play as normal. Basically the card was never completely removed from the game. Just the Django sprite. Lame glitch but it was a pretty amusing to me back in 2005-2006.

[mauve]

My favorite L4D glitch is when Hunter ragdolls start twitching uncontrollably (and sometimes continually spout fountains of blood) for extended periods of time after they are killed. One instance in particular had a ragdoll flying back and forth across an apartment floor and up a wall for a good twenty or thirty seconds after it died. It was both creepy and hilarious.

Me and my sister played the hell out of Crash Team Racing when we were younger, and discovered that if you launch yourself off a particular railroad track in Komodo Joe's mines while invincible, you fall off the map into an area of the skybox and can drive around down there. Your character will continually jump around, as though he's running into a wall over and over.