Game Breaking Bugs/Glitches!

[JakeM]

What are some games you liked or games you were kinda liking, but then a bug occurred and you couldnt play it. Or like with me you played a bad game like Enter The Dragon Fly and a horrible glitch happens and you lose an item you need to enter the final stage, and because the cave doesnt go up anymore to the guy who has it if you do a favor for him, like I got before, but instead the cave now leads over to water instead......URGH! That was a horrible game!

[Atarileaf]

Atari 7800 Impossible Mission literally lived up to its name

http://atariage.com/software_page.html?SoftwareLabelID=729

[bigbacon]

i once had Half-Life on the PC glitch out on me where any one I looked at would just flat out die. So on the tram at the beginning the scientists all around would just drop and die. Security guy at the end of ride just died and I was stuck in the tram.

[Alpha2099]

Occasionally there is a glitch that occurs at the final boss fight on Arkham Asylum. It happened to my dad the very first time he played. The game skipped the cinematic sequence before the fight, and when the game resumed, the Joker just stood in the middle of the arena. No matter how many punches Batman landed on him, no damage could be done, and Batman couldn't get hurt either. It was like a weird limbo state. Fortunately all you have to do is select "Restart from checkpoint" and everything's fine.

[recorderdude]

To quote the TVTropes entry I typed up last year after I discovered the bug:

You can crash (Mendel Palace) completely and glitch out the characters if you flip the block to your right on the "fat guy" level boss fight right before the girl jumps up and throws magic at you. The sprites turn into mutated combinations of your arm sprite.
Of course, not many have probably tried this since the boss is one you can defeat EVERY TIME by doing absolutely nothing - just stand in place and she'll transform you, flip the block you're standing on, trigger the fat guy body's "auto-stomp" move which makes him attack and flip all of the blocks in the direction he was hit from and it sends her flying into the wall for an instant win.

[goldenband]

Several RPGs have game-breaking glitches that can be triggered under certain circumstances and make it impossible to complete the game. Beggar Prince for Genesis and Destiny of an Emperor for NES are two of them; in BP you can end up trapped somewhere you're not supposed to be, and in DoaE a key character, needed to trigger a particular event, simply won't show up. Unless you have a savegame from before the bug was triggered, the only solution in either case is to restart the game from scratch.

Sword of Vermilion for Genesis is very buggy, and at least once or twice I was trapped in a wall after a boss fight (or something like that). Without a teleport item, you'd simply have to reset the game and restart from your last save point.

I also ended up trapped in a wall once in Gauntlet Legends for N64, and had to restart the level. By contrast, I once crashed Escape for Monster Manor for 3DO by somehow going through a wall and getting teleported outside of the maze, into a featureless grey landscape that crashed after a moment or two.

The Smurfs for Genesis has a crash bug, but since it was a European exclusive, PAL/NTSC issues could be at work. Late in the game, if something happens with Azrael (I don't remember what, but I think it involves attacking her repeatedly), the game will slow down to something like 0.1fps. After a while, it'll either clear up or crash. I think Fantasia hit me with a similar bug at some point.

In Championship Tennis for Intellivision, you can crash the game by checking the score between games (e.g. right after you've gone from 2-2 to 3-2). As often as not, the game would bug out on me afterwards, typically by refusing to allow me to serve. I've seen other weird stuff in that game, like phantom players and graphical glitches. A few other Intellivision games have crashed on me, like Ice Trek, Demon Attack, and the original release of Donkey Kong Arcade.

Finally, Super Battleship for Genesis crashes when you beat the game! Or at least, it did on my Model 2 Genesis, just going to a black screen after the short "stage complete" sequence. In emulators, it goes on to show the standard post-completion screen that normally gives you a "secret code" i.e. password, but it comes out as:

"Congratulations!
You Have Reached A New Level
The Secret Code Is
(null)"

Clearly someone didn't bother doing much playtesting.

[Guyra]

I played Shadow of the Colossus on the PS2 once, and just before the area of the final colossus the everything froze. Except for the horse's mane and the guy's clothes that kept moving as if they were still riding. Reloading the game didn't help. Turned out this was a common glitch that could happen anywhere in the game, and the only fix was to start over from the beginning. Didn't happen.

Also, Cheetahmen for the NES. :p (Though I haven't played it myself.)

[Koa Zo]

The PS2 release of Trio The Punch freezes up randomly, usually late in the game.
I've also had one of two other Oretachi Geasen releases freeze up. I think Rabio Lepus was one that froze, but I know I did play through it all the way too.

[Daltone]

I finished the last boss in Headhunter for theDC and couldn't leave the area. Convinced I was doing something wrong, but no, a check on GameFAQs revealed that a door should have unlocked, which just didn't happen.

One of the Wing Commander games, encounters a fatal error every time you try to quit. The developers apparently replaced the error dialogue with "Thank you for playing Wing Commander" (or words to that effect - it has been a long time)

Edit: Oh, and Skyrim. Most of it.

[biggzy]

Batman Returns for SNES. Awesome game, but if you "cape spin" near the bottom of a screen, you *sometimes* drop to the bottom of the screen below all the action. You can attack, but it won't reach any enemies, nor can they reach you. So no way to die and respawn, and no time limit to expire. Nothing to do but hit reset and rage. Anyone else remember this?

[kupomogli]

Secret of Evermore. There's one part in the game you have to use levitate to lift a rock which will move over and drop it on a switch, allowing you to fight a boss. It's not really much of a boss fight as there are a bunch of teleporters and you have to go through the correct teleporters to reach the boss finishing the battle. My first time playing I had to leave with my parents and I didn't want to quit as I didn't save once completing the prior dungeon so I checked my spells and the escape spell would work, so I cast it. I went and saved. When I came back to the game later, the rock was still on the switch. I used levitate on it it picked the rock up and dropped it back down but nothing happened. I was stuck.

When I replayed the game and got to the boss the next time, I still couldn't get past him until I got frustrated and kept going into the same teleporter I exited from. Guess how beat the boss.

This might not even be the only part it can be done. If it allows you to do this during any boss in the game, there might be quite a few spots you can get permanently stuck. This is the reason why they don't allow escape at certain points in RPGs. Once a flag has been activated, it can't be activated again unless it's one that doesn't turn off.

Secret of Evermore is a great game, but I wonder who else got stuck because of the same thing.

[FoxNtd]

USA version of Battletoads has the famous broken stage for 2P (level 11 I think, the one with the unicycle things where you flee from a deadly swirl of some sort.)

On top of that is the truly game breaking glitch in Rat Race (level 10 I think.) It is possible to reach the bottom of a section and never have the rat come rendering you incapable of advancing to the boss. There is no way to die and without a timer to run out and kill you, you're forever trapped until you reset.

I've had this bug happen twice. >_>

[RP2A03]

On top of that is the truly game breaking glitch in Rat Race (level 10 I think.) It is possible to reach the bottom of a section and never have the rat come rendering you incapable of advancing to the boss. There is no way to die and without a timer to run out and kill you, you're forever trapped until you reset.

I've had this bug happen twice. >_>


I hate that bug. It happens when you get zapped at that last gap. Even more annoying is when you have to take that hit in order to make it to the bomb on time. This bug happened to me a lot more than twice before I caught on.

[camarotuner]

Someone with a better memory than me can fill in the gaps but I remember there being a "playtest arena" hidden in either the 1st or 2nd god of war game that once you get IN you can't get OUT. Though technically you weren't supposed to be there in the first place so maybe we shouldn't count it as a glitch lol

[Ed Oscuro]

Strider 2 arcade version, at least in MAME, discovered by trap15:

Start climbing up or down while hanging on a wall, and then press A + B together.

Instant game freeze!

Doesn't seem to work in the PlayStation port, so there's something to be thankful for.

[Tron 2.0]

Last year when i was playing dark souls.If i remember right it was the dark root garden.I attacked a enemy and "my character" fallen through the floor and died.

[FoxNtd]

I seem to recall a bug in Goldeneye (N64) where on the Aztec stage if you throw a large quantity of mines onto the shuttle you could get the game to freeze requiring a reset of the console. I can't quite remember the precise condition to trigger the game crash but I'm fairly certain that's the gist of it.