Glitches that can stop you dead in your tracks in a game

[Natty Bumppo]

I have five here (four of which are for Dark Wizard):

Dark Wizard 1 - You can temper the seal of the demons at the blacksmith's - if you do you will get a very low level weapon (such as a knife with an attack power of 5) - but without the seal of the demon seal you can't get the fog chime to summon Tagon - game over!

Dark Wizard 2 - If you switch the alignment of the dragon rider (at least from chaotic to lawful - never tried it the other way) his maximum health points remain the same but his hp level drops to zero - one hit and he is dead. While possible to defeat Arliman with slayer if you protect the dragon rider and let him get the first strike, it is kinda cumbersome. (If you switch him back to chaotic it doesn't fix him,)

Dark Wizard 3 - If the characters you used for the dragon rider (in Krystal's scenario), wing rider and grif rider had merships in their possession at any time during the game (at least after being promoted to their first class - not sure if that applies during their inital hiring before cheshire - that cirumstance is pretty unlikley though) ) they lose the ability to fly and can't retrieve slayer. So no killing Arliman. (IIRC they may regain the ability to fly if they don't have a mership when they get their one promotion in the special classes)

Dark Wizard 4 - If you are careless in your path (and where you place guards) on the map the leader can become geographically isolated from Quentin - if this happens you can't dispatch guards to that area and Quentin will eventually fall - game over.

Ultima (SNES) - I dont' remember which one it was but I went into a dungeon and came out another (without doing whatever it was I was supposed to do) somehow. The game wouldn't let me back in to that dungeon and I couldn't progress to the next one because I needed something from the other dungeon to proceed (i think the floor was poisoned and I would die after taking a few steps - I could not remembering things correctly though - it was a very very long time ago)

[wiggyx]

I can't recall exactly what circumstances were required to make I happen, but Twilight Princess had a glitch that left you stuck inside a room with absolutely now way out. In fact, it was such an issue that Nintendo released a patch.

[kedawa]

There's the dreaded Akuma glitch in Super Street Fighter II Turbo Revival for GBA. Not only does it crash the game, it can also corrupt the SRAM sometimes badly enough to make the game permanently unplayable. It's not even the only serious bug in the game, either.

[jperryss]

SNES FF3 had a glitch in the World of Ruin where there was a town sitting one a three-space wide island (town was in the middle). If you landed your airship on the opposite side than where you appear when you exit the town, you were stuck on the island since you couldn't get back to your airship. If you were unfortunate enough to save your game there, well, time to start over.

Painfully too, since you were well beyond halfway through the game at that point.

[Guyra]

I encountered one while playing Shadow of the Colossus for the PS2 a year or two back. Just before entering the area of the final colossus, the main character and the horse he was riding both froze. Hair was still flowing as if they were still riding, but they didn't move from the spot no matter what we did, and the animations had stopped as well. Reloading the save didn't help, still kept freezing as we approached the final area. And even changing the disc with another of the same game didn't help. Corrupt save file.

Apparently, it seems this can happen at any part of the game, from what I've read. And your only option is to start the game from scratch.

Kind of like that bug in Beyond Good & Evil, where the keycard doesn't drop from the ceiling after defeating the enemies in the room. Only thing to do is start all over again, from the beginning of the game. (Hey, that's another one! And I think this one goes for all versions of the game, except for newly updated versions. So you can probably exclude the HD remake and the PC version if you've patched it, I guess.)

Edit: Seems the BG&E bug mentioned wasn't fixed after all. Joy. :p

[sneekyweezel]

The game "Dead Island", you go all the way to the very end and there's one of the final missions where you follow the tribe chief into an area where you have to fight a massive amount of zombies. If you're unfortunate enough to play through it alone, this area is almost impossible to get past, and the auto save completely screws you- so much you have to start the game from the beginning. It happened to me twice- I never finished the game and it was the first game that made me wanna hunt down the programmers and actually beat them senseless for it.

[Collector_Gaming]

bethesda games are famous for game breaking glitches where you fall through rocks and have no way out (especially if a enemy is near by)

The most recent one that I found and I am hoping they upload a patch for is the new Dragonborn expansion for skyrim.

You find the second dragon born character and you have to collect dragon souls to learn a new shout in order to beat him in a follow up mission.... Well at the same time there was a event that makes it so he randomly appears after you kill ever dragon from here on out and steals their souls making it impossible for you to collect them and unlock the shout. I have read of a way to work around it that feels like your breaking the game in a sense just to make it work. So I said screw it and wait for bethesda to get around and fix it.

[wingzrow]

I can't recall exactly what circumstances were required to make I happen, but Twilight Princess had a glitch that left you stuck inside a room with absolutely now way out. In fact, it was such an issue that Nintendo released a patch.

Saving in that room. That was it. The npc blocks you from exiting is you save there.

[Az]

Psi-Ops has a bug where there's a save point right before you enter a room where a boss is. The boss flies around the room and you have to fling these canisters at him from him that appear on a platform. Once you throw all the canisters the platform sinks then reappears with more of them.

If you save your game at the save point before entering the room the platform never appears with the canisters therefore you can never defeat the boss. Sorry Midway, I was unaware of your game breaking glitch and didn't realize I needed to keep multiple save games due to programmer incompetence.

What kills me about it is that you're not doing some obscure thing to make it happen, it happens in the normal course of the game. This should have been caught by QA right off the bat.

[JSoup]

SNES FF3 had a glitch in the World of Ruin where there was a town sitting one a three-space wide island (town was in the middle). If you landed your airship on the opposite side than where you appear when you exit the town, you were stuck on the island since you couldn't get back to your airship. If you were unfortunate enough to save your game there, well, time to start over.

Painfully too, since you were well beyond halfway through the game at that point.

From that same halfway point, using the special ability Sketch, held only by Relm (not sure if using it via GoGo's custom battle menu did it as well) would delete your save file most of the time. I had thankfully kept back ups of my saves, so it didn't take long for me to put two and two together.


Kind of like that bug in Beyond Good & Evil, where the keycard doesn't drop from the ceiling after defeating the enemies in the room. Only thing to do is start all over again, from the beginning of the game. (Hey, that's another one! And I think this one goes for all versions of the game, except for newly updated versions. So you can probably exclude the HD remake and the PC version if you've patched it, I guess.)

I'm not sure that this bug was fixed in the HD releases. I've been stuck in that area of the game for a while, in able to move forward. I recently learned of the bug and I think that's what happened.

[Gameguy]

In the GBA version of Broken Sword you can get stuck if you save in certain areas, when you reload the save some hotspots aren't selectable anymore so you'll have to delete the save and start over. Found this out when I got stuck and had to start over.

[wiggyx]

I encountered one while playing Shadow of the Colossus for the PS2 a year or two back. Just before entering the area of the final colossus, the main character and the horse he was riding both froze. Hair was still flowing as if they were still riding, but they didn't move from the spot no matter what we did, and the animations had stopped as well. Reloading the save didn't help, still kept freezing as we approached the final area. And even changing the disc with another of the same game didn't help. Corrupt save file.

Apparently, it seems this can happen at any part of the game, from what I've read. And your only option is to start the game from scratch.

Kind of like that bug in Beyond Good & Evil, where the keycard doesn't drop from the ceiling after defeating the enemies in the room. Only thing to do is start all over again, from the beginning of the game. (Hey, that's another one! And I think this one goes for all versions of the game, except for newly updated versions. So you can probably exclude the HD remake and the PC version if you've patched it, I guess.)

SotC is SOOOOO buggy! I've had that game glitch out on me so many times that I lost count. To be fair, I've probably played it through about 50 times, but it's still a buggy mess.

[Guyra]

I'm not sure that this bug was fixed in the HD releases. I've been stuck in that area of the game for a while, in able to move forward. I recently learned of the bug and I think that's what happened.
Damn! I thought for sure they had fixed it ... Because, you know, if the publisher really cared they'd have the developers do it. Guess I'm still a bit blue eyed about the industry. ^^;


SotC is SOOOOO buggy! I've had that game glitch out on me so many times that I lost count. To be fair, I've probably played it through about 50 times, but it's still a buggy mess.
Ugh ... do you know if this was fixed in the HD release?



Oh, and here's a PC one. In the game, "Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth," there's a certain scene where you have to fire at enemies on an island using the cannon on a ship, or something. For some reason, that particular scene(which actually was rather simple both in terms of graphics and gameplay) wouldn't work with a bunch of quite common graphics cards. Basically, you weren't able to see the enemies, and even if you knew where they were supposed to be, you wouldn't be able to hit them despite aiming at the correct spots. It really didn't make sense at all. My Nvidia 8800 GTS was one of the unsupported cards. It played the whole game completely fine, but that part was bugged because of it. Only that part. And they never released a patch for this, despite the huge amount of people having this problem. (Guess who published this game? Bethesda.)

[G-Boobie]

The SotC re-release fixes most of the PS2 era bugs, though some new ones apparently make appearances. For what it's worth, I played through it without a problem.

I played two hundred hours of Morrowind before I went after the final boss, but every time I entered his chamber, the game would freeze requiring the task manager be summoned to kill it. I put it away for a year or so after that.

[Graham Mitchell]

Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver on the Dreamcast (and on the PS1, so I hear) has a glitch in the cathedral area where you are supposed to jump on a vent that is pumping air, and it's supposed to propel you up into the boss's chamber. I've gotten it to work in the past, but for some reason in my most recent playthough It simply won't go. I jumped and flapped my wings on that stupid vent for 30 minutes, and got nothing. What's worse is that when you load a save it takes you about 30 minutes just to get to that point, so it's a major pain.

I noticed that Steam just released the PC versions of Soul Reaver 1 and 2. Does anybody know if the PC version has that bug?

[Scissors]

In Journey to Silius (NES), if a mini-boss leaves the screen before you defeat it, it will disappear and you will be stuck in that room with no way out.

It has been a while since I played, but I recall in Time Cruise (TG16) that the ball would occasionally leave the play field making it impossible to continue playing. I never figured out exactly what causes this to happen though.

[wiggyx]

Ugh ... do you know if this was fixed in the HD release?

Not sure. I've played through twice so far on the HD release without any issue that I can recall, so keeping my fingers crossed.

At this point, the bugs just add nostalgia for me :P


The SotC re-release fixes most of the PS2 era bugs, though some new ones apparently make appearances. For what it's worth, I played through it without a problem.

Yay! New bugs to find LOL

[Guyra]

The SotC re-release fixes most of the PS2 era bugs, though some new ones apparently make appearances.
Ah, good to know! Hopefully the new ones aren't completely game breaking. :P I've been planning on getting the SotC / ICO HD Collection for the PS3. ;)


At this point, the bugs just add nostalgia for me :P
Ahahaha! xD

[G-Boobie]

Ah, good to know! Hopefully the new ones aren't completely game breaking. :P I've been planning on getting the SotC / ICO HD Collection for the PS3. ;)


Ahahaha! xD

The best part? The final colossus runs at a playable frame rate. If you have the option, the 3D is actually very good, too.

Even with a few bugs, the HD SotC/Ico collection is pretty incredible. It's well worth the thirty bucks.

[Guyra]

The best part? The final colossus runs at a playable frame rate. If you have the option, the 3D is actually very good, too.

Even with a few bugs, the HD SotC/Ico collection is pretty incredible. It's well worth the thirty bucks.

Nice! I never got to experience the final colossus though, as the place where I encountered the bug was just before the entrance to his area.

But yeah, I'm definitely getting the HD SotC / ICO collection. But I'm being slow about it, need to get my ass in gear! ;)

[FoxNtd]

In Journey to Silius (NES), if a mini-boss leaves the screen before you defeat it, it will disappear and you will be stuck in that room with no way out.


I found a more interesting glitch. It's either the third or fourth level, where you're headed to the left and need to drop down, avoiding turrets in the two ledges on the way to the corridor below. There's a way to drop down without the screen scrolling down with you, and you're entirely off-screen. You can still hear your character move around but there is no apparent way out of this except to reset. :puppydogeyes:

[xelement5x]

Tomb Raider Underworld for the PS3.

I had some point where you had to ride the bike and ramp something, but the ramp had been reversed and it was impossible to continue the game. All the solutions to the glitch online said to reset the level or something similar, but with the PS3 version you couldn't reset levels because everything was autosaved and there was no way to manually select levels. Unless you had done a manual save somewhere you were pretty much screwed and had to restart the entire game.

[IHatedSega]

Spyro Enter The Dragon Fly had a lot of bugs and glitches, I was so heart broken by how it turned out after LOVING the first 3 games. I couldnt get 100% because I lost some items due to a glitch, then I went back to a level which was an island, and I couldnt walk though a small cave up to where that item was, EVEN THOUGH I HAD ALREADY DONE THAT BEFORE!!!

Jak and Daxter, first world, couldnt jump to an island that had those spinning orbs on it, again kept me from getting a full 100%.

Those really left a bad taste in my mouth of the PS2, but now I see it as the best game console of all time, backwards compatibility has never a strong suit of Nintendo unfortunately.

[Guyra]

Tomb Raider Underworld for the PS3.

I had some point where you had to ride the bike and ramp something, but the ramp had been reversed and it was impossible to continue the game. All the solutions to the glitch online said to reset the level or something similar, but with the PS3 version you couldn't reset levels because everything was autosaved and there was no way to manually select levels. Unless you had done a manual save somewhere you were pretty much screwed and had to restart the entire game.

Oh yeah, I experienced a similar bug, when I played through that game earlier this year, that happens just slightly after that part! When you get to the pool of eitr and shut one of the Jormundgandr statue mouths, and then accidentally(or intentionally, ofcourse) manage to open it again, then the next Jormundgandr statue mouth won't close. And you have to restart the level. I basically had to replay most of the game up until this point because of this bug. Fantastic game if you look away from all the bugs, though! :)

[JSoup]

Jak and Daxter, first world, couldnt jump to an island that had those spinning orbs on it, again kept me from getting a full 100%.

Having recompleted that game recently, I'm reasonably certain that you're talking about the island that sticks out from the shore a bit half way between the ruins and the village to the south west of the starting position. You can get those orbs, actually. It looks like you should be jumping from the front, but what you're actually supposed to do is go across to the island just behind this island and use the blue eco jump pad to get to them. It doesn't look like the pad will give you enough lift to make it, but you actually have more than enough to over shoot the orb island by a fairly wide margin.

[SpaceHarrier]

Metroid: Other M had a glitch where a door that should be unlocked was permanently locked, preventing any further progress in the game (across the lava pit, sector 3). This was triggered by returning to a previous save point after beating a boss but just prior to entering the area. Similar to The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess glitch.

Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin had a glitch that prevented further exploration if you skipped the cutscene with Death in the middle of the game. There was a work-around discovered for this one though, suspending your game while in the elevator room. Still, if you didn't know, you'd be really stuck.

[A.C. Sativa]

Metroid: Other M had a glitch where a door that should be unlocked was permanently locked, preventing any further progress in the game (across the lava pit, sector 3). This was triggered by returning to a previous save point after beating a boss but just prior to entering the area. Similar to The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess glitch.

Other M had a glitch where it was a piece of shit game to begin with, throwing out a tried-and-true formula for the usual Nintendo gimmicky crap.

Anyway, Black Ops II has a glitch where the campaign mode just crashes shortly after you have to take out the helicopter with the Javelin missile. Not sure exactly which part, I'm just going on my brother's experience, he's on his 3rd copy of the game and it keeps crashing on the same spot. It's not his 360 either, he's tried it on my 360 and 3 others with the same result. Remember when game companies actually tested games before releasing them, instead of letting the pre-order people do it for them and issuing patches?

[IHatedSega]

Having recompleted that game recently, I'm reasonably certain that you're talking about the island that sticks out from the shore a bit half way between the ruins and the village to the south west of the starting position. You can get those orbs, actually. It looks like you should be jumping from the front, but what you're actually supposed to do is go across to the island just behind this island and use the blue eco jump pad to get to them. It doesn't look like the pad will give you enough lift to make it, but you actually have more than enough to over shoot the orb island by a fairly wide margin.

Thank you, it was this island off the shore. So when I get it out again from the storage room Ill try this. Thanks!

[Tanooki]

I got one that I bet most of you haven't hit just because the game doesn't get played that much being a very late N64 release and mostly rental at that -- Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine. I wish I could remember the stage it was on but it has been years, it's a 100% entirely reproduceable crash bug.

Basically(which really sucks) at the very end of a stage you approach this single man cable car that goes over a ravine. TO be able to use the thing you need to move this crate. The logical (non broken) way would be to either push or pull the crate like 3x in the same direction to clear the path to get into the cart. The crash basically is doing that, you're screwed. The only way to beat this stage without it killing like an hours work is to push-(go around the crate)PULL-(then go back so there's room)-push again. Then you can ride out. Pull twice and you pull yourself over the ledge too.

Lame eh?

There's an even sadder story behind that. I was at E3 the year that game came out in 2000. At the back of the NOA booth was this game and one dude in a Factor 5 jacket looking bored and frustrated and me being an Indy fan I went over there. I ended up trying the game which pleased him and we got to talking. Apparently greedy Lucas took his entire team away on the game so that at the same time for Christmas that sorry Battle for Naboo N64 game could get out and be highlighted. He ended up having the same release date for it, and had to finish up code, tying assets together, and testing it the best he could on his own to finish it as they'd spare no expenses or bodies for him you know since Jar-Jar is so awesome.

In the end the game is a buggy mess but can be finished. My advice if you play it, save and save often, like every half hour. For no rhyme or reason at any rate in any level of the game it can suddenly without warning go into a quick crawl followed by what could be called rainbow pixel barf all over the screen with a mix of silence or annoying high pitched ear damage locking so hard you have to flip it off as RESET won't work. There are no other patterned crashes to the game, just that mess and the above. The saddest thing is this guy along with the crew he had for a time took a fairly annoying (bad control/camera) PC game and gave it a really well working camera and stole the Zelda64 control scheme and made it super playable and fun. Even using the ram pack this game runs at a smooth frame rate and retained all the music, sound effects, and full spoken dialogs of the PC CD title. Bugs aside, the superior version.

[Collector_Gaming]

There's an even sadder story behind that. I was at E3 the year that game came out in 2000. At the back of the NOA booth was this game and one dude in a Factor 5 jacket looking bored and frustrated and me being an Indy fan I went over there. I ended up trying the game which pleased him and we got to talking. Apparently greedy Lucas took his entire team away on the game so that at the same time for Christmas that sorry Battle for Naboo N64 game could get out and be highlighted. He ended up having the same release date for it, and had to finish up code, tying assets together, and testing it the best he could on his own to finish it as they'd spare no expenses or bodies for him you know since Jar-Jar is so awesome.

In the end the game is a buggy mess but can be finished. My advice if you play it, save and save often, like every half hour. For no rhyme or reason at any rate in any level of the game it can suddenly without warning go into a quick crawl followed by what could be called rainbow pixel barf all over the screen with a mix of silence or annoying high pitched ear damage locking so hard you have to flip it off as RESET won't work. There are no other patterned crashes to the game, just that mess and the above. The saddest thing is this guy along with the crew he had for a time took a fairly annoying (bad control/camera) PC game and gave it a really well working camera and stole the Zelda64 control scheme and made it super playable and fun. Even using the ram pack this game runs at a smooth frame rate and retained all the music, sound effects, and full spoken dialogs of the PC CD title. Bugs aside, the superior version.

Basically another ET case. High potential for good game but dropped on its face because of lack of resources or time frame. I hate it when this happens

[xelement5x]

Oh yeah, I experienced a similar bug, when I played through that game earlier this year, that happens just slightly after that part! When you get to the pool of eitr and shut one of the Jormundgandr statue mouths, and then accidentally(or intentionally, ofcourse) manage to open it again, then the next Jormundgandr statue mouth won't close. And you have to restart the level. I basically had to replay most of the game up until this point because of this bug. Fantastic game if you look away from all the bugs, though! :)

I agree that it's a fun game, but the glitches do detract quite a lot from the fun. I'm glad I picked it up, but I wish they had released a patch or something for it.

[Graham Mitchell]

The best part? The final colossus runs at a playable frame rate. If you have the option, the 3D is actually very good, too.

Even with a few bugs, the HD SotC/Ico collection is pretty incredible. It's well worth the thirty bucks.

The 3d is phenomenal, isn't it? With ico it's okay, but sotc looks incredible in 3d.

[G-Boobie]

The 3d is phenomenal, isn't it? With ico it's okay, but sotc looks incredible in 3d.

It does! It almost looks like it was designed to be played in 3D. SotC sold me on 3D gaming, though most games still screw it up.

[Guyra]

I agree that it's a fun game, but the glitches do detract quite a lot from the fun. I'm glad I picked it up, but I wish they had released a patch or something for it.

Yeah, they really should've. :/ But the smaller glitches weren't so bad that it stopped me from getting Platinum in the PS3 version, though. ;)

[Steven]

I'm surprised no one's mentioned Secret of Evermore yet, as it's infamous for its game-stopping glitch(es).

Can someone post the lowdown? When I eventually get around to playing it, I'd like to avoid said glitch(es). Heh. Thanks.

[SparTonberry]

Probably the most well-known is if you drop your plane in the very upper-right corner of the map, you'll permanently lose it.
But since that's a random spot in the middle of the ocean, you kind of deserve it for being an idiot. :D
(and you probably wouldn't have done it unless someone told you about it)

The one that could reasonably accidentally happen (it happened to me the first time!) is if you enter the town of Ebon Keep, it will lower the drawbridge letting you into Ebon Keep castle from this hedge maze you were in earlier. That is, if you walk all the walk backwards through this forest maze you were just in.
Then after speaking to the queen of Ebon Keep for plot advancement, if you try to leave the castle through the front door, in one room you will stuck inside a stack of crates (where you were supposed to have previously fought a boss by entering the room from the other end first).