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?"

Grand Theft Auto...

[Twide]

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

Goldeneye Cardtidge Tilting

[gcnaddict]

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

Goldeneye cartridge tilting [youtube.com] totally counts if you're talking about literal cases.

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: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.

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.

Re:Glitch in Deus Ex

[mcvos]

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.

Exploiting an obvious and avoidable bug counts as cheating in my book.

Huge glitches

[Quiet_Desperation]

The entire combat system in Too Human.

Wish they did this in real life!

[freaker_TuC]

I'd really wish they would do that in real life ... but what gives ;)

Re:My personal favorite

[twosat]

A little bit off-topic but I remember reading a few times about a battlefield simulation program that was modified for the Australia military. The programmers were told to use kangaroos in the scenery so elected to modify the object-oriented coding for foot-soldiers. All seemed to be well until the aircraft in the simulation buzzed the kangaroos which then scattered and regrouped to fire Stinger missiles at the amazed pilots. The programmers had forgotten to remove some of the settings and code for the soldiers to fight back at aerial attacks.

Re:Ghost Recon

[ElAurian]

I forgive you... you utter, utter, utter...

Re:Old School Glitches

[BlindSpot]

Since you brought up Intellivision... I remember Lock 'n' Chase (a Pac-man-like game) had a bug that would every once in a while cause one of the enemy guys to become almost as tall as the entire screen. Something to do with when they hit the edge of the screen IIRC (which I probably don't). I was like 5 years old when I had that game and that bug used to absolutely scare the shit out of me when it happened... It wasn't quite a "cry and run to mommy" scared but it was definitely an "I don't wanna play anymore" scared.

Re:Wish they did this in real life!

[JamesP]

I wish Real Life had a 20% cap on taxes, that would be the best. Also, advisers that complained about what the public wanted.

But we can skip the giant monster from space thank you very much...

Re:Integer wrap in Tetris

[Anonymous Coward]

Try 9999 on scace invaders for the atari 2600. The challenge was to see how many times you could wrap (go from 9999 to 0000) on one life. My record was 28. At the time I was 8 years old with two broken legs. I had a lot of time on my hands.

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."