Game Breaking Bug: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

 

 

 

In these days of mainstream, multi-million dollar titles, developers seem to favor release dates over thorough quality assurance. With the advent of integrated network play, developers also seem to favor releasing patch after patch (if they even bother) and treat their paying customers as unpaid testers. The flaw with this approach is that it alienates a sizable chunk of gamers (in this case, gamers who live in a house without a high-speed internet connection). That, and it's technically illegal in most jurisdictions, anyway.

Note that the presence of one of these doesn't necessarily make the game itself bad; many programs have been quite entertaining despite horrible bugs. One should also probably keep in mind that a lot of bugs only occur in certain builds of the game. In today's market, where even console games can be patched, it's incredibly rare to have a game-killing glitch maintain itself for very long.

 

 

* ''The Matrix'' for Xbox (the original one), sometimes would BSOD the console right before a boss (in the mansion), and sometimes you could reset the game, even from playing again from start, and still get that BSOD every single time. Also, the game would sometimes freeze after the helicopter scene, triggered by an unknown glitch earlier in the game that would affect all subsequent saves.

** In the original copies of the Wii version of the game, the aforementioned required character was outside the room behind a sealed door, in which case it actually was unwinnable.

*** In the Eagle's Tower, if you must save and quit before smashing the four pillars, then for Nayru's sake throw the orb used to smash the pillars down a pit. If you don't, it will be erased and the dungeon won't be winnable.

*** Also in ''Ocarina'', you can freeze the game in the Gerudo's Fortress if you push the Ocarina button right when they spot you.

** ''Majora’s Mask'' has a few other examples as well:

*** There's a glitch where you can equip the Fierce Deity mask outside boss battles. If you try to talk to anyone, or do certain other things, it crashes the game.

*** You can also dive to the underwater chest in Termina Field in normal form, and the "Open" icon will appear. If you push the button, though, the game freezes.

*** The same game removed the [[Bottomless Pit]] fall damage, so that you would be teleported to the last normal solid ground you were standing on 'completely harmelss'. The catch is that because of rushed collision detection in some areas, you can glitch through the scenery and fall through to a bottomless pit. However...you respawn 'on the "bottom" of the bottomless pit', which is mistaken by the game to be solid ground, triggering an infinite loop of falling, respawning, falling...Reset Button!

*** Among notable spots where this glitch is bound to happen, there is a certain [[Instant Plunder, Just Add Pirates|miniboss]] bridge in the Sky Keep. You wouldn't want also to swim too near next to that tree roots in the Ancient Cistern, or clipping through walls whith the clawshots in the wrong place.

* ''[[Bubble Bobble|Bubble Bobble Revolution]]'' for the [[Nintendo DS]] had to be recalled and replaced because the boss didn't appear on level 30, meaning it was impossible to reach levels 31-100.

* ''[[Psychonauts]]'' had a quirk where you became unable to use your double jump in a level where you have to jump between flaming grates while the water level is rapidly rising. Fun times.

** A real breaker is a rare glitch where your Cobweb Duster will disappear from your inventory. Normally an optional device for just collecting mental cobwebs, the route into the final level happens to have three cobwebs impeding your progress, and requires the Duster to take them out. If your Duster disappears, then you could just go back to the shop, collect ludicrous amounts of money, and buy a new one...if you weren't at the Point of No Return (as the game literally calls it) and incapable of returning to camp in order to do so. At least the game autosaves just before you hit the [[Point of No Return]]. Of course, you still have to fight against the same boss again.

* Infamously, in ''[[Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy]]'', if you use the second save point during your second visit to Castle Uruk, and then load the game, you will be [[Unwinnable|unable to complete the game]], because the door you unlocked will somehow become locked again, with no way to unlock it. ''Nasty''.

** And speaking about ''Castlevania'', in ''[[Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow]]'', when executing a special attack with some shortswords and knives, Soma briefly disappears and reappears behind an enemy...or even a locked door, as long as there is some space behind it. And since most of such doors have the pressure switch to open them right behind them, this can be used for major [[Sequence Breaking]]. But go somewhere you're not supposed to go yet (i.e. down a slope you're supposed to double-jump when you haven't acquired it yet) and save just before you realize it...[[Unwinnable By Mistake|whoops!]]

* ''[[Metroid]] Fusion'' has relatively few glitches, but one of them is severe: when you're finally able to fight the SA-X, its second form (which is [[Clipped-Wing Angel|usually a sitting duck]]) will occasionally be ''invincible.'' Since the first form is [[That One Boss|very hard to get past]], this is a really unfair glitch.

* There is a bug in ''[[Metroid: Other M]]'' as stated [http://www.nintendo.com/consumer/systems/wii/en_na/ts/metroid-other-m.jsp here], where a door becomes locked and unopenable after you get the ice beam. Nintendo is accepting mail-ins for save files.

* ''[[Tomb Raider|Tomb Raider: Legend]]'' had one of these in the England stage of the game. Activating the levers in the boss room of the stage, whilst passing through earlier on, will render the later boss fight [[Unwinnable]]. The only choice at this point is to either hope you have a secondary save (unlikely), use a save game pack if playing the PC version, or start the game from scratch. This last choice is particularly annoying, since England is one of the last stages in the game.

** ‘’Tomb Raider III’’ has a potentially fatal bug in Lud's Gate; if you save too soon after throwing a switch in the water area with [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2754-mN7M7o Secrets 5 and 6], a door may be blocked by an [[Invisible Wall]], making the level [[Unwinnable]] or preventing you from obtaining the last secret.

* ''[[Legacy of Kain|Soul Reaver]] 2'' has a glitch in the Sarafan Stronghold, after Moebius closes the gates to the tomb of William the Just. If you walk too close at one point in the gate, you pass through. You cannot leave, except by resetting.

* The N64 version of ''[[Indiana Jones and The Infernal Machine]]'' had several, documented [http://www.flyingomelette.com/glitches.html here] (starting around 1/3 down the page). Bugs include random freezing possibly associated with a music loading error, getting stuck inside of objects and walls, getting stuck between objects, objects not functioning as they should due to unintentional [[Sequence Breaking]], and a glitch that caused the player to enter the same room over and over again until they killed themselves to fix it.

* The PC version of ''[[Lego Adaptation Game|LEGO Harry Potter]]: Years 1-4'' has a glitch where you can get the Lord Voldemort character token before getting all 200 Gold Bricks, but made it impossible to return to Hogwarts. And this is far from the only one, nor is it the worst. It's pretty sad when a modern game has a [[Game FAQ]] devoted to listing all known glitches and how to avoid them. Several of these glitches have the ability to render your save file unplayable, or prevent 100% completion if you're unlucky enough to encounter them. It's pretty clear the game had only a cursory QA check done before going to print.

* [[Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood]] is an incredibly buggy game. Falling through the scenery is very possible and the only way out is to restart the game.

** On release, the game had bug with the tunnels. Ezio would be stuck in an endless loop when going through the tunnels. There was nothing that could be done save for starting the game from the beginning. Made even worse by the fact that you must use a tunnel in the game once. Players had to hope the bug didn't occur at that point. This bug however, was patched.

* ''[[Batman: Arkham Asylum]]'' had a bug that randomly corrupts your savegame. The worst part is that it can be triggered by ''completing the story mode on 100%''. Hundreds of puzzles, lost.

* ''[[Heavy Metal (animation)|Heavy Metal]]: F.A.K.K. 2'' for PC at one point has you progress by entering a cave, but your entry is blocked by interconnecting stalactites and stalagmites. Fortunately, there is a pile of unstable meteorites right in front of it, so you can lay down a thermal detonator and wait a few seconds for it to explode, clearing the way for you to proceed. ''Un''fortunately, this pile of unstable meteorites will sometimes be located near the ceiling of this cave mouth, and not the floor. Thermal detonators can only be placed on the floor, and other explosive weapons like the rocket launcher have no effect on these meteorites. The only way to proceed is to either start a new save file and hope that the meteorites spawn on the floor this time around, or to use the cheat codes conveniently included in the game's readme file for just such an occasion - simply turn off clipping, fly through the barrier, and turn clipping back on again.

 

** Characters in vehicles often grew to twice their normal sizes, causing half their bodies to stick through the roofs. One mission featured a vehicle that had to be driven. It might be larger than the hole that this vehicle must pass through, forcing the player to cheat past the level.

** If you ran out of ammunition, you ''fell through the ground''.

** The freeware version/latest patch introduces a new bug; some maps on hard difficulty allow enemies to empty all bullets in their clip in one frame. The result is instant destruction of the boat containing your whole team. Affected missions are still winnable if you can kill all enemies before they can attack.

* The [[Game Boy Advance]] version of ''[[The Lord of the Rings|The Fellowship of the Ring]]'' was plagued with bugs. Most of them were merely agonizing, but there was one place where, in order to progress, you need to save the game during the [[Fade Out]] between scenes. If you time it wrong, you lose the save file.

* ''[[Max Payne (series)|Max Payne]]'' sometimes had a glitch on the final stage where the cutscene would fail to activate, resulting in Max firing a couple shots at Nicole and the game freezing. Reload.

** Alternatively, Nicole could snag the wall next to the gate leading to the helicopter and stop. Max would then catch up and unload hundreds of bullets into the back of her head until you reloaded.

* ''Final Zone II'', at least on some copies, had a problem where a [[Hell Is That Noise|horrible buzzing sound]] would sometimes start after the intro cutscene and continue throughout the game. This may have been due to a defect in the CD.

* ''The Cursed Crusade'', at least on the [[Xbox 360]], will corrupt your save if it crashes during a chapter load, preventing it from loading anything beyond the crash point.

 

 

* In [[Faxanadu]], the reward for beating dungeons are items which can be used to clear certain blockades or obstacles in certain screens. However, it disappeared after being used, and if you left the screen from the left side (probably to refill on health since the level layouts often sport monsters camping near ladders, from where you couldn't attack) the blockade would reappear, but the items would not respawn anymore even after beating the dungeons again, making the game unwinnable.

* ''[[Gabriel Knight]] 2: The Beast Within'' featured a crippling bug at the end of Chapter 4 that would prevent the player from progressing to the next chapter.

** The most memorable: As a Wizard, using your last Dispel Potion in the Lost City froze the game. Every time. The only way to bypass that point was to fight the monster that the Dispel Potion was meant to take care of for you, which for a Wizard was often lethal (it was a tough fight even for a Fighter.) And not being able to use the potion screwed you out of points, which made 100% completion impossible.

** In the same line as Error 52, there's '''Error 4''' that crash your game during the Simbani initiation.

* A devious glitch with the [[Text Parser]] in ''[[Leisure Suit Larry]] 2: Looking For Love (In Several Wrong Places)'' snuck into the game just the night before the game shipped: Near the end of the game, the player is expected to combine an airsick bag with a bottle (to make a Molotov cocktail, the bag serving as its wick). The only acceptable input was some variation of ''"put airsick bag in bottle"'', because a) the parser was (badly) written specifically to understand fully formed English phrases instead of "adventure game shorthand", b) a completely unrelated bug had just been fixed by another coder by turning the word "bag" into a '''verb''' and c) no one cared to fix it in time, because Sierra's testing policy at the time was to use the longest possible phrase in a situation and see if it works. Contrary to popular belief, the input does not require the word "the" several times; the point is that "airsick bag" works, whereas the common shorthand "bag" doesn't (since it's a verb).

* Graphic adventure ''[[Simon the Sorcerer]] 2'' had a strange bug where a certain character and the object you needed to give them were on the same screen, and you could successfully use the SCUMM-style interface to "Give <object> to <character>" despite <object> not being in your inventory. This skipped a large chunk of game and messed up many dependencies.

 

 

* The initial release of ''[[Capcom vs. Whatever|SNK vs. Capcom]] Card Fighters DS'' had a fatal bug during its [[New Game+]] mode where one opponent's dialogue wouldn't appear when spoken to and consequentially couldn't battle them. Since you needed to defeat everybody on a floor to move on, that's as far as you could go. After the glitch was discovered, you could send SNK Playmore your bugged copy for a fixed one.

* ''[[Magic: The Gathering]]'' occasionally releases a card that has to be reworded after printing because they either cause infinite loops or don't work for whatever reason.

** One particularly goofy example was a red enchantment that would randomly change the target of any ability that was played; it was accidentally worded in such a way that it would try to redirect its own ability, effectively creating an infinite loop the first time any player did anything.

 

 

* In ''[[Mario Kart]] DS'', the game can be completely frozen simply by holding A and B together and turning on the steps of the Luigi's Mansion track.

* The whole of ''[[Big Rigs Over the Road Racing]]''. This one is unique in that the game is broken in such a way that it’s impossible to ''lose''.

 

 

* In ''[[Naruto]]: Rise of a Ninja'' downloading Shikamaru from Ubisoft on Xbox Live would cause your game to freeze if Naruto was hit by anything like a log or spikes. The Jiraiya/3rd Hokage download corrected this problem.

* ''[[Soul Calibur]] III'' had one of these; [[GameFAQs]] has a writeup on it. Essentially, it's possible if you do something in a ''different'' game (but one whose save file preceded your ''Soul Calibur III'' save on the card), you may find your next Chronicles of the Sword run-through wiping out...well, if you're lucky, ''only'' your Chronicles progress. In some cases, the whole save file may get wiped. Some have reported that the card itself can die as a result. Unpleasant, to say the least.

** This was quite a common problem with Pokemon Yellow due to cheap parts being used because of the demand.

* ''[[Marvel vs. Capcom 3]]'' has the [[Mega Man X|Zero]] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK3YseTHEBQ Glitch]. If you used his [[Doppelganger Attack]] to snap back the enemy when the enemy has an assist, the enemy will not come back in to replace the one that got kicked out. Which means that you could stall for time over...but if the time limit was set to infinity, the game would really be broken after that.

* The 1.04 patch for ''[[Street Fighter X Tekken]]'' added a nasty glitch where if Rolento's projectile knife collides with another projectile, the game will crash. Tournament holders have actually considered banning Rolento until the glitch is fixed.

 

* ''[[Far Cry|Far Cry 2]]'' has the infamous 27% Glitch, so named because it occurs when you have gotten to 27% completion. It only happens sometimes, but what does happen is that one of the factions' mission-giving NPCs fails to spawn. This prevents you from completing the game, as you have to do all the story missions in the Northern District to go to the Southern District and then finish the game. The only way to avoid it is to restore from a save before 27% completion and hope it doesn't happen again.

** Its other bug is that at some point, the taped messages you find - which explain the story and set up the motivation of the Jackal, who is the guy you're hunting and your entire reason for being there - stop being new messages. After that point, every tape you find only has the same message on it, which means that the Jackal's character development stops halfway, destroying the storyline. You can still play though, the plot resolution just doesn't make any sense.

* In ''TNT: Evilution'' (one half of ''Final [[Doom]]''), the first secret level, "Pharaoh", is impossible to finish in single-player without cheating or engaging in [[Sequence Breaking]] because the level's designer mistakenly flagged a vital key as multiplayer-only. The creators, TeamTNT, soon released a patch to correct the bug and make it winnable. To this day, however, id Software has never fixed the bug in their distribution. However, it's not actually impossible to complete, thanks to an oversight by the map author (and a couple of bugs in the Doom engine). By strafe-running onto the right-hand throne, you can in fact activate the switch hidden on the "backrest" to open the door to the last few areas, and skip almost the entire map. Even with this method, you can still achieve 100% kills, items and secrets, as the key isn't completely necessary to complete the map.

** Similar tricks allow you to get into the secret stage of Doom 1's 3rd episode without rocket-jumping. iD software actively tried to prevent one of those tricks from being usable (pressing the switch from outside the room - not unlike the trick for the backrest switch in Pharaoh). The strafe-running trick was found too late for iD to do anything about it, though.

* ''[[Call of Duty]]: Black Ops'' has a strange one - in a level towards the end of the campaign mode, using a shotgun to get your way through the level, without warning an error message [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzzLQ2ccazM will appear] warning of "more than 160 bones" (or, sometimes, "bodies"). The exact cause of the error is unknown, and after closing the message box, the game will essentially reset itself and return to the main menu. Reloading campaign will send you back to the start of the level, so goodbye to all the hard work put in before the message.

** Apparently this glitch can also appear on other COD games made by Treyarch. Hmm.

* On that note, the original ''[[Marathon Trilogy|Marathon]]'' had what is possibly the biggest bug of all time. If you installed it on your computer, IT DELETED EVERY SINGLE FILE YOU EVER HAD. Luckily, this was found before release, but they already had quite a few boxes of the games shipped. The shipments had to be recalled.

* In the original ''[[Quake]]'', sometimes you will lose the runes from previous episodes if you die and reload. Keep multiple saves.

* ''[[Medal of Honor]] 2010'' has a lot of these bugs, such as [[Scripted Event|scripted events]] failing to activate, and parts of levels failing to draw in, causing you to fall to your death in the void.

* In the original ''[[Deus Ex]]'', it was possible for the player to bring the game to a grinding halt by succeeding when the game needs them to fail. At one point, the plot requires the player character to be arrested and detained at UNATCO headquarters. The main character emerges from a subway station and is confronted by a squad of UNATCO troopers, a pair of cybernetically-augmented agents and a heavy-duty bipedal combat robot. Normally, the player character can choose either to go quietly or get the tar whipped out of him and wake up in a UNATCO prison cell. However, a well-placed electromagnetic pulse grenade will cause the combat robot to go haywire and turn on the UNATCO troops who will forget about their real target as they try to defend themselves from the crazed robot. It is entirely possible for the robot to wipe out the enemy, with or without the player character's assistance and be easily finished off by the player. Unfortunately, with no way to advance to the next chapter, the player becomes stuck in the decrepit shanty town that surrounds the subway station.

 

 

** How this actually happened is definitely a “what not to do” in programming. The EVE program folder contained a file called boot.ini which contained various parameters...boot.ini is also a critically important Windows system file located in the root of C:\. During the patching process, the patcher was supposed to delete boot.ini (in the EVE folder) to allow a new one to be written, but a typo meant the patcher looked in the root of the drive. If you had EVE installed on the same drive as Windows, you got an unbootable system. Since that incident, the file in question is named start.ini.

** A similar bug existed in pre-release versions of ''Myth II''. Uninstalling the game wouldn't wipe just the game's files, it would wipe one level up in the file tree. This could result in the wiping your ''entire hard drive.''<ref>Trying to prevent something like this from ever happening again might be why most games these days install themselves at least two folders deep into the Program Files folder.</ref>

** Each new release of EVE tends to include at least one bug that breaks gameplay as well. Most recently with the Crucible release, they broke the NPC police mechanics that protect players in the space controlled by some of the NPC factions.

* ''[[Ace Online]]'' had an event in 2009 called ''Bloody Valentines''. In this, nation-aligned Elusive Scout Guards would spawn in maps defined as the main territories of ANI and BCU, and they [[Randomly Drops|had a chance to cough up]] [[Heart Symbol|Broken Hearts]]. So far, so good. The mechanism they used for this spawning was that as mobs were killed in a specific map (for example, ANI's Relic map), sometimes a normal monster's death would cause an Elusive Scout to spawn (for this example, an ANI-aligned Scout would spawn). However, the GMs messed up in that they '''also''' made the monsters in Safe Maps (Relic Safe in this example cannot be invaded by BCU) capable of spawning Elusive Scouts which could not be attacked by pilots aligned to them. This eventually caused maps like Relic 1, Doleful Plains 1, and even the Desert of Ardor to be ''filled'' [[media:motivator252941.jpg|to the population limit with Elusive Scouts]], preventing newbie pilots from safely <s>grinding</s> training in the Safe Maps. The GMs eventually limited their spawning to the new Episode 3 Maps and New Bark City to prevent the Safe Zones from being clogged up again. Most interestingly, ANI (of the Subagames Artemis server) [[Game Breaker|made great use of the Elusive Scouts]] during the [[Escort Mission|Horos Mothership Defensive]] of April the 19th. As the countdown to the Mothership's appearance loomed, several pilots went on a ''great'' Elusive Scout spawning spree, culling vast numbers of neutral monsters in their territories to create Elusive Scouts (which did not despawn for the Mothership Defensive!). During the great war that followed, the BCU army was beset not only by the usual formations and gatecamps of the ANI regulars and elites, they also had to contend with a ''swarm'' of Elusive Scouts jamming up their targeting reticules and pumping missiles at them - quite a significant number of BCU regulars blamed their deaths on Elusive Scout-launched missiles. What a cunning ploy by the Arlington Boys, to utilise the Event Mobs in such a fashion!

* ''[[Kingdom of Loathing]]'' had the meat vortex bug, caused by an improperly coded check to ensure the meat (currency) wouldn't underflow. The meat vortex bug allowed players to gain 18.4 quintillion meat instantaneously, which wrecked the in-game economy. Fortunately, Jick proved that he ''doesn't'' [[You Fail Economics Forever|fail economics forever]] by cleverly fixing the problem via "meatsinks" - the Penguin Mafia (who would show up at a specific adventure site and randomly steal large portions of an adventurer's meat), the Council's attempts to stop the Penguin Mafia (which required a massive amount of donated meat), and, after a few more sequences along the same lines, the foundation of Uncle P's Antiques (overpriced, unsellable knick-knacks designed to get the last traces of "bugmeat" out of the economy). A later meat generation bug was discovered, but it was fixed quickly enough that the exploiters just had their accounts disabled.

*** As of this edit, there's a bug that if you die, there's a chance your corpse will be in Gavin's Naze in Hillsbrad Foothills. This is especially game breaking when you're on a different continent or world, forcing you to spirit resurrect because of bad game design.

**** This is actually a fix to an earlier bug. Gavin's Maze (or Crossroads for the Horde) is the default graveyard you'll appear at if the server gets confused and can't figure out where you should be. Before this bugfix, instead the server would have you drift slowly in a void with a green vortex-like sky and you would drift slowly through a continent and across the ocean. Since there were no spirit rezzers there, the only way out of this was to file a GM help request.

** Even worse than that is the infamous [http://runescape.wikia.com/wiki/Falador_Massacre Falador Massacre] that happened (creepily) on [[Number of the Beast|6/6/06]]. It all started when one player decided to have a party at his in-game house in celebration of getting level 99 in Construction. This, of course, included a combat ring. However, the lag in the house became so severe that he had to kick everyone. The players who had been in the combat ring somehow retained to ability to attack players, so, needless to say, they went on a killing spree, looting millions (in-game) in items. What made this even worse is that the victims were not affected by the glitch, so they were completely helpless, unable to fight back.

* ''[[Global Agenda]]'''s new 1.3.2 patch contained a major bug in the auction house that allowed players to effectively create money from nothing. So far, Hi-Rez has responded by banning everyone who has come in contact with the exploit in any form, including people who recieved duplicated cash without knowing that it was effectively counterfeit. There have been accusations that the exploiters started giving away the money to unsuspecting players when it became apparent that Hi-Rez was tracking it, [[Griefer|in order to get as many people banned as possible]].

 

 

* [[Glover]] on the N64 has one where you have to throw your ball into a holding tank and then jump into another holding tank and it will rocket you to the other platform. Only problem is, about 75% of the time, you or your ball will phase through the floor and die from it. There is also a point where if you fall off a platform in a certain level, you will glitch through the floor and get stuck there.

* ''Rastan'' on the Commodore 64 is fatally bugged on the second level, it is IMPOSSIBLE to make a jump over a flaming pit over 2 ropes, try it on an emulator with save states and you'll see.

** Perhaps for that reason, it became famous as the most hacked game then in existence. A couple of hundred separate hacks were published in various magazines, including one that removed Maria, the housekeeper. (Since the entire purpose of the game was to get past Maria by [[Gotta Collect Them All|collecting]] all the [[Plot Coupons]], this hack made the game pointless.) Even better, there was one that triggered the ending sequence when the player collected the first, very easy [[Plot Coupon]].

** The programmer of the C64 version fixed the infamous Attic Bug, but didn't finish implementing the final cutscene, and so the game was ''still'' impossible to complete. Heartwarmingly, in 2010 a bunch of chaps from the forums of Lemon 64, a C64 fan site, transplanted some of the code from other versions of the game, thus making the game finally winnable. The 27-year-gap between initial release and final patch must be some kind of record.

* In ''[[Jak and Daxter]]'', a glitch sometimes makes it impossible to win a certain race (the game will expect you to complete a course in 1 second instead of 45), thus preventing you from getting every power cell in the game. The makers of the game apparently knew this, as the number of cells required to get the good ending is one less than the total number in the game.

** ''Jak II'' has a showstopper late in the final act of the game. It seems that playing the optional races in the stadium creates an event flag that supersedes a later story mission. The mission icon appears on your radar, but as soon as you approach the area, it disappears to be replaced by the icon for the optional races you triggered earlier, making it impossible to trigger the start of the story mission. You have to delete the save file and start from scratch.

* A horrible, horrible glitch in the first editions of '' [[Spyro the Dragon|Spyro: Year of the Dragon]]'' prevented you from gaining the second egg of the first world's Speedway level if you exit the level without getting it, ''even if you didn't even select the objective needed to get it in the first place''. Even if you ''do'' win the race needed for the egg after this glitch is triggered, it won't register, preventing [[One Hundred Percent Completion]].

** The game's own difficulty system led to a borderline example. On Fireworks Factory, a pair of ninja opponents are present on all difficulty levels, but on Easy they don't jump down to fight Spyro. It's necessary to fight them for two gems. It ''is'' fixable by using a cheat code to change the difficulty level or by playing well enough for the game to change the difficulty itself, but unless you know how it can be a game breaker.

*** Another fun glitch at this point. By this time you could be playing as Super Sonic. During the Robotnik animation where he is demolishing the scenery just moments before the boss battle, it is actually possible to damage him. Well...just try and hit him 8 times. GAME CRASH!

*** [http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL01596721403E0594 This Youtuber] has analyzed an incredible number of bugs in ''Sonic 3 & Knuckles'' in all stages. The worst cases cause the game to crash; the silliest cased cause the game to ''restart''.

** [[Shadow the Hedgehog]] has a bug in The Doom stage. Playing the dark mission requires you to [[Kill Them All|kill all]] GUN Troops however one specific area the final mech that you are required to kill in order to complete the mission will not spawn without you backtracking to a previous checkpoint. This added to an already [[The Maze|ridiculously expansive]] and maze like level.

* ''Harley's Humongous Adventure'' on the SNES has a nasty tendency to crash by merely ''jumping or walking to certain locations during normal gameplay''.

* In ''[[Mega Man 4]]'', if you time a Rain Flush so that it goes off while Wily's escape pod is on the screen, it will destroy it. However, the victory music and the lead-in to the final stage will not play if that takes place, meaning that you have no choice but to restart from the last place you wrote down the password for. Thankfully, this is more of a [[Unwinnable by Design|deliberate undertaking]] than an accidental one. There is a similar bug in the original Mega Man, where if you get hit by the final boss just as you defeat him, the screen will glitch and the game will never proceed to the ending. The only remedy is the reset button.

** A similar glitch occurs if you use Flash Stopper to finish off the third Cossack boss: The game will never proceed to the next stage. Thankfully, Flash Stopper is useless against this boss anyways, and there's a bed of instant-death spikes in the room.

** Least severe was the terrible, horrible server lag that was apparent for the first few months of the game, rendering it nearly unplayable online, despite the online connectivity being one of the main points of the game.

** Many players encountered a bug that, when making a large grab-able material spin extremely fast in the level editor and grabbing on, they would no longer be able to respawn, stuck on some sort of infinite pseudo-death loop. Returning to the pod (main menu, basically) continued this, and this persisted ''even upon resetting the game,'' rendering the game completely unplayable for those affected. The only way to undo this was to delete the entire save data.

** A worse one in some of the builds of the first game made one of the levels in Oribitus nigh impossible to beat. The level featured bouncy walls and a bouncy floor that also, unfortunately, acted at a ceiling that sucked you up to the level above if Jazz so much as scraped a hair on it. Add in a few tiny holes the player has to navigate to without touching the floor or ceiling makes for a recipe of pain. Players attempting this should turn on slow motion mode, as it's unwinnable otherwise.

* The ''Wizard of OZ'' platformer on the SNES. As stated by [[The Angry Video Game Nerd]], one glitch that defies all gaming sensibility is the fact that you fall off any platforms that you try to jump on unless you land perfectly dead-center.

** Donkey Kong runs into these nasty glitches more than once. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yk2BCDaw5Dk&feature=related This video] shows a number of glitches from the first ''[[Donkey Kong Country]]'' game, most of them harmless, but the one starting at 8:47 is decidedly nasty. Rambi gets glitched as the cave is opened, and the game freezes when he tries to exit. On restarting, the environment is a mass of flashing error, rendering the game utterly unplayable. An ominous annotation near the start of the segment says the glitch was tested in Super Nintendo and altered the system - whether he's just talking about the emulator or if it was tested on an actual system is unknown. Fortunately, unlike the Castle Crush glitch from the next game, this one requires enough set-up as to almost never happen by accident.

* In ''[[Donkey Kong 64]]'', there is an obscure bug with the "Sneeze Alert" mechanical fish in Gloomy Galleon. If you get the Sniper scope late in the game, then later go to the fish, the spinning fan lags, but not the timer. This makes the Golden Banana here ''impossible'' to get at this point. There is a workaround, where you can disable the Sniper scope while you are waiting for the fan to finish spinning [http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/191702-donkey-kong-64/53989112\], but due to the sheer obscurity of this bug, most people won't know to do this at all.

* [[Home Alone]] 2 for the NES has a fatal bug where, if you manage to get through the game with the Bell item intact without getting hit and spin jump into Marv ''or'' Harry in certain parts of the third level, the game freezes.

 

** There's another bug that you can use to screw over the AI in single player while playing Orks, in which saving and reloading causes the game to forget how many troops you actually have and start thinking your whole 100-Ork-resource army has only 24 Orks in it, allowing you to build another 76 troops.

*** There was also another bug that allowed ''spectators'' to activate a Dark Eldar player's [[Useless Useful Spell|Soul Powers]]. While this was more annoying than fatal; it was still a ridiculous oversight that led to severe annoyance on the part of DE players.

* ''[[Command & Conquer]]: Tiberian Sun'' had a rather useful bug (for single player) which turned really bad in ''multiplayer'' - for your enemies. If you play as the GDI and build so-called Firestorm Walls, you can activate these via ability and they become fully indestructible to anything, even superweapon strikes, they block all weapons (except your own) and also force aircraft trying to fly over them to crash into the ground. Normally they deactivate and have to be recharged after some time of use, but when selling enough powerplants while they are activated so your radar shuts down...they stay active. Indefinitely. You can bunker down and wait until your enemy gets annoyed and quits. There is nothing (s)he can do but try to destroy the special generator structure powering the walls with a superweapon - which is impossible since the structure has more health than any of the superweapons does damage.

** ''Aftershock'' can also uninstall anything that runs in the background.

 

 

* The arcade version of ''[[Beatmania IIDX]] 9th Style'' has a bug in which starting up the song "Quasar" will sometimes cause the game to freeze, forcing a reboot. Additionally, after rebooting, selecting a certain song as the first song since the machine's reboot will trigger a hilarious bug in which [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpUX-Dq7K78 you cannot get any note judgments other than POOR], making the song [[Unwinnable]]. To be fair, 9th Style was the first version of the game to run on a PC-based system with Windows XP Professional instead of their legacy "Twinkle" hardware. Later versions (which also soon switched operating systems to Windows XP Embedded) would have fewer of these glitches...except for one:

** The song "GAMBOL" had a history of having completely broken timing windows. On 12th Style (Happy Sky), this was finally fixed...by putting a fixed chart on the Normal difficulty and keeping the broken version as an [[Ascended Glitch]] on Hyper. The joke got taken [[Up to Eleven]] on the console version of well...11th Style, by making an even ''more'' broken version on Another.

 

 

* ''[[Fallout]]'' had its share of minor bugs, but the second in the series, whoo boy. The car seemed to be a Bug, and not in the 'small German vehicle' sense. It would end up stuck in the exit grid, making it unusable, as you couldn't reach it to drive away. In a particular mission, it would block the exit and prevent a load of freed slaves from escaping the map, and again preventing you from being able to use it. Occasionally the trunk would detach and follow you around; the rest of the car just vanished.

* ''[[The Elder Scrolls|The Elder Scrolls: Arena]]'' and ''Daggerfall'' are exceptionally buggy games; their stability is alleged to be different between different start-ups, between different systems, and between different installations on the ''same system''. Inherently, both games suffered from broken quests, garbled dialogue, texture loading problems, item and enemy failures, unloadable saved games, audio-induced crashes, and nonfunctional features; the latest (last) patches for each respective game, including save state and quest fixer programs, make the games workable but leave many errors.

** The infamous Void, introduced in ''Daggerfall'' and featured in many other ''[[The Elder Scrolls]]'' games, is a consequence of 3D gaming - an expanse of emptiness that existed outside of the game's standard corridors. What makes the ''Daggerfall'' Void (in)famous is the frequency of the player's helpless fall into it. One of the many tunnels in plot-relevant dungeon Castle Daggerfall ends abruptly on an opening into the Void. Given that Castle Daggerfall houses the [[MacGuffin]] central to the plot, you'd think it was one of the few of the thousand or so dungeons where designers would catch that.

* In the XBox version of ''[[The Elder Scrolls]]: Morrowind'' (the Game of the Year edition), annoying glitches prevented one from using most of the added features. The quest chain in which the player gets turned into a werewolf would not progress after a certain point. Going for Vampirism afterwards would allow one to complete a few quests for the chosen vampire clan, but the keywords to get the next quests didn't show up.

** A rather lethal but nevertheless hilarious one is a bug (has been fixed by official patch) where any item stolen by a ''female'' character automatically loses its stolen tag, meaning it no longer counts as stolen and can be sold to any honest merchant, this breaks the Thief's Guild quests as it requires you specifically to sell "Stolen" goods. The [[Double Standard]] implication can't help but make some wonder whether such a quirky bug was ''really'' by accident.

** And then we have the infamous Abomb bug. This is a particularly malevolent and soul-crushing one, as it kicks in after you played for hundreds of hours (which is very easy to do in a sandbox game, especially one with as much stuff to do as Oblivion). When it triggered (yes, WHEN, not IF - it's inevitable and can't be fixed on consoles), effect animations like fires, lighting or, say...doors opening, would either slow to a crawl or stop executing entirely. This, among other things, caused dungeon gates and Oblivion gates to stop working altogether...which has predictable results on the playability of the game. The worst part? Bethesda KNEW the Abomb bug existed - they found out during a contest to see which player could play for the longest time. They did NOTHING to fix it. For shame...

* ''[[Super Paper Mario]]'' had a glitch that froze the game if you did some stuff out of order. Not [[Sequence Breaking]], just completing some tasks without talking to someone nearby who specifically tells you to do them. Since the Wii doesn't do downloadable content and patching very well, Nintendo just let people swap for a patched disc if they really wanted to.

* The original ''[[Paper Mario (franchise)|Paper Mario]]'' also contained a game breaking bug in Bowser's lower area of the castle. There was a room containing an item that was supposed to only be accessed after getting rid of the lava. If you tried to jump into the entrance of the room, what would happen is, the lava will damage you, sending you up in the air as usual, but afterwards, you would trigger the "enter area" script. It would show the room in lava momentarily, then the game cuts sound and practically implodes, and you see countless numbers pop up.

* The Japanese version of the DS remake of ''[[Final Fantasy IV]]'' had a glitch where, if you played a certain video from the Fat Chocobo's video viewer menu and saved afterward, the player would actually gain control during the ending sequence, and the game would never actually end. Thankfully, this was fixed in the Western releases.

* ''[[Final Fantasy V]]'' had a weapon that would sometimes make you run away from battle instead of doing an attack (the Chicken Knife), and a class that could not run away from battle (the Berserker). If the Chicken Knife's effect triggered from a Berserker attacking with it, the battle would keep going, but neither you nor the enemies could actually do anything to each other. The only way out of this one was to reset your game. Better hope you saved recently. To make this one even more annoying, the Chicken Knife could easily be one of the most damaging weapons in the game. Thankfully, this bug was fixed for the [[Updated Rerelease|Advance version.]]

** You can't get Gau out of "Rage" mode once you've chosen that command, so it's possible to trigger an endless feedback loop. Namely, if you choose to have him imitate a monster that attacks with fire and is healed by it, and if you go up against an enemy that does the same, you'll keep attacking/healing each other forever until you finally reset the game.

** The original Japanese version of the game supposedly has a bug late in the game that lets you return {{spoiler|to the World of Balance, i.e. before [[The End of the World as We Know It]]}}. No points for guessing whether or not you can get ''back''.

** The Greatest Hits release of ''Final Fantasy Chronicles'' (which includes [[Final Fantasy VI]]) has a bug that can render the opera scene [[Unwinnable]]. You're required to have Celes and Locke in your party for the scene, but the game doesn't lock them in your party; it only locks the characters in the first two slots. So, make a party, switch them around so Celes and Locke are on the bottom, and make a new party. The only problem is, to switch party members again, you have to go back to the house in Narshe and talk to one of your other party members. Celes and Locke aren't programmed to show up at the house, parties contain four members, and you only have six characters available; making a full party that doesn't include Celes and Locke, then saving, makes it forever impossible to put them back in your party.

** It is also possible to render the game unplayable by having a party with nobody in it. This can be done via a somewhat convoluted method of making a party containing only Gau, after the battle at Narshe when everyone splits up to look for Terra, and then joining up with Shadow, who will appear in Kohlingen if there is an empty space in your party. Then travel to the Veldt, have Gau Leap on an enemy, leave before he returns, and take Shadow back to Narshe alone. Upon entering the town, he will spout one of his "my job is done" lines and leave, which happens every time you take him there during this part of the game, but since he's your only party member, it will then become impossible to continue in the game. (You can, however, bring up the status screen and see your empty party. The game will crash when you exit the status screen, though.) Demonstrated [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPDtoTMwAkY here].

* Early versions of ''[[Neverwinter Nights 2]]'' had a cutscene that would repeat constantly in one area, with only one round of combat in-between "cycles", taking forever to finish one boss fight. This was fixed in 1.06 and later.

** NWN2 can also "lose" the targets for its area transitions, resulting in your party being stranded in an area and unable to progress through the game. Complete uninstall/reinstall and patches do nothing to fix this. Users must mod the functionality back in.

** And there's also the fact that randomly, your party members will get frozen into place, and thus they can't assist you when you're attacked. Sometimes it's fixed when you move to the next area, sometimes they're just stuck in that next area.

* In the PC/Xbox 360 adventure game ''[[Two Worlds]]'', save files made before the most recent patch would not be able to get the achievements Visit All Locations and Visit All Undergrounds due to a glitch that occurs when a player attempts to enter Beaver Kettle Cave. The player attempts to enter the cave and is suddenly warped across a fairly large river quite some distance away from the cave, and is therefore unable to unlock the cave on his map.

** Similarly, at launch it was possible to make the game [[Unwinnable]]. If one were to steal from a town or attack someone, the townsfolk would rebel and there was absolutely no way of calming them down apart from killing them all. If left to their angry ways, or if left for dead, this could possibly interrupt questlines required for the story and make it impossible to finish.

* In ''[[Star Ocean the Second Story]]'' for the PS1, if the player presses ANY buttons while switching from the 'battle complete' screen to the field screen, you get the Blue Screen of Death. Particularly interesting if you're in the Secret Dungeon, which has ZERO save points. There are other various glitches, but this is the most prominent.

** If you were in the battle arena and used a Lunatic High, (an item which canceled player control) on a character you had set to "Avoid Enemies", they would continually evade the enemies with no interest of taking or dealing damage, forcing you to restart

** While it doesn't actually destroy your game, performing the infamous [http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Surf_glitch Surf glitch] incorrectly can lead to getting stuck forever and forcing one to delete their current file and start a new file. Or use PokéSAV to edit their current location; whichever works.

*** Actually, even some of the "standard" glitches can erase your file depending on what you do with it. While Missingno. is entirely harmless, 'M can be dangerous if you catch it at Lvl 0 and it goes to your computer instead of joining your party (if you try to take a Lvl 0 'M out of the PC, the game crashes). Apart from that, they mess up your Hall of Fame data and nothing else, but the other, lesser known glitch Pokémon can eat your game data.

** Also from ''Pokémon'', saving in Glitch City without a Pokémon who knows Fly renders you trapped forever and the game [[Unwinnable]].

** In some versions of Pokémon, there was a rare bug that made the game ignore the most recent save and revert to the previous one. This meant that the player had to save twice to ensure that he/she would not lose progress. However, beating the Champion of the Elite Four caused the game to save once, and then automatically reset, taking the player back to the previous save in an endless loop and making the game [[Unwinnable]].

* ''[[Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep]]'' has a rare glitch during Aqua's fight against Maleficent: at times the fire the boss causes on the bridge won't go out, killing Aqua if you do nothing.

* In ''[[Tales of Symphonia]]'' there is a curious glitch where if you screwed up during a puzzle in one dungeon a bolt of lightning would move you partially into a wall, and you won't be able to move.

* In ''[[Tales of the Abyss]]'', there is a truly amazing glitch where, if you were to remove the disk from your [[PlayStation 2]] while in the overworld, and run around a bit, the land would give way and you could run infinitely in any direction, and you could concievably go ANYWHERE. This leads to easy gets of, if exploited early, some very high-level equipment, making the game ridiculously easy until that equipment is outdated. However, it is possible to replace the disk, making you drop back down to the ground, in the ocean, a river, in a city, on an edge, or in a mountain, and be unable to move, thus making you reset. Still worth it early on, given you save before trying it.

* ''[[Ultima IX]]: Ascension'' has too many to begin listing here. Although it also had a few [[Good Bad Bugs]], the genuinely bad ones far outweighed them. Some of the bugs make for a very surreal experience, such as [http://www.it-he.org/u9_otwab.htm crossing the ocean on a bridge made of bread].

** You can fix this bug with an action replay and allow her to use that attack properly. Hah, [[Irony|a cheating device to make the game play properly]]

* Save with any unpurified firefly cocoons in ''[[Jade Cocoon]]'' and quit, you'll reload the game to learn all their magical abilities are [[Lost Forever]]. This can become a [[Good Bad Bug]] if you know how to handle it, as your own monsters won't have their abilities overwritten by the depowered monsters but will still benefit from their stats.

* ''[[Champions of Norrath]]'' had a pretty serious one. Several hours into the game, your character gets an escort mission to rescue an NPC from a jail cell and have him follow you back to town. Simple, right? Not when the game loads that scene with the NPC embedded inside a wall so he can't walk. Restoring from an earlier save ''might'' fix the problem.

* ''[[Icewind Dale|Icewind Dale II]]'' has nasty bug in the Black Raven monastery. Any characters crossing a certain door will not be able to leave the room. If you don't have an old save of game or a specific item that can teleport you out, you're screwed. Thankfully if the player enables cheating it is possible to escape with the teleport command.

** Also in [[Mana-Khemia 2: Fall of Alchemy|Part 2]], a glaringly obvious bug in the Extra Scenario, where {{spoiler|all 10 characters team up}}. While encounterable if you chose Raze first, it's ''especially'' apparent if you chose Ulrika as the first character. Having Ulrika read an entry on the Job Board or even ''going into the Job submenu in the Student Handbook'' during this Scenario will freeze. Fighting an optional mark in the second scenario will freeze like Raki does - but on the first attack. Thankfully, at that point, you have a load of fresh items with which to lay the smackdown on. A harder one to find is in Puniyo's last Character Quest, where you get up to three Punis in your party. Using a Finishing Strike with a Puni will freeze the game.

* ''[[Nostalgia]]'' has a particularly painful one of these, known by fans of the game as simply the "Albion glitch", after the [[Sequential Boss]] it affects. Roughly two-thirds of the way through the game - fifteen to twenty hours in, depending on how many sidequests you take on - you fight Albion, a dragon, in your airship...after which he demands you face him [[Honor Before Reason|without the "help" of the airship]]. Upon landing, he's supposed to appear and you're almost immediately taken into the boss battle...except that in a large number (somewhere between a third to half) of US-released carts, ''this second battle simply doesn't trigger'', leaving the game completely [[Unwinnable]]. And unlike most bugs of this type, this isn't fixed by starting a new game. If the Albion glitch occurs, the only solution is to ''get a new copy of the game''.

** During the {{spoiler|Matriach Benezia fight}} if you have been hit by a biotic power and are currently in the glowy blue ragdoll state while one of the mid-battle cutscenes goes off you are trapped when the cutscene ends. You can't enter the menu, and you can't move. The only way to get out is to restart the game.

** Biotics in general are incredibly buggy. It's not only possible but nigh inevitable that at some point, if Shepard or one of your squadmates uses biotics on enemies in enclosed spaces (such as the bunkers or mines that make up about 75% of sidequests), the enemies will end up clipping through a wall, where it is impossible to reach them, either by shooting them or through the use of powers. The only way to progress in many places is to use Singularity on them (which will slowly whittle their health down; this is only available if Shepard is an Adept or Liara is in the party) or to exit the map and re-enter, which isn't always possible or convenient. If neither options are available, have fun reloading from the previous save, which was probably a long time ago.

** A vanguard who likes to charge a lot will end up in a lot of buggy situations. There's many occasions where a charge at an enemy will take Shepard past an event trigger (where a cutscene is supposed to begin), only fixable by reloading from a previous save.

** There's also strange glitches related to reloading several times in quick succession, where you reload the game only to find the enemies have simply disappeared. This can be good in some cases (allowing you to bypass difficult fights!) but in cases where you need to kill a certain number of enemies to progress, you'll be stuck until you reload.

 

 

** Also the One-Billion-Bug from ''Undefined Fantastic Object'', that would crash the game if you reach one billion points. Thankfully, ZUN released a patch for it.

** Scene 12-6 in ''Double Spoiler'' has a tendency to glitch and kill the player for absolutely no reason whatsoever. This isn't [[Hitbox Dissonance]], this is the player just randomly getting killed by thin air. This can even affect successful clear replays. And this one has not been patched. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY-LbqHSzZ0 Seen here.]

 

 

* ''[[Star Wars]]: The Gungan Frontier'', an otherwise extremely fun ecosystem game, had a glitch where creatures that were paralyzed by an in game item would occasionally grow in size. The creature itself would stay the same size, but its graphic would expand. If the player did not notice this (which was very easy) and let the creature continue this way, the graphic would eventually fill up a large portion of the map and continue to grow, causing the player to have to either exit the game, or trudge through oversized pixels to find the exact spot that the creature was standing, and use a capture tool to remove it from the map, removing the graphic. It even occasionally happened to creatures who weren't paralyzed, though in this case, it was easy to notice a creature who was suddenly frozen for no reason.

* In a series known for glitches and bugs of various levels of usefulness and/or annoyance, the original PAL version of ''[[Harvest Moon]]: Back To Nature'' takes the cake: Once your character gets married, and your bride asked you what she should call you from now on, every choice resulted in the game simply blacking out. You could reload and replay from that point, but getting further was impossible.

** The Japanese version of ''Animal Parade'' had a rather nasty glitch where recieving a present from someone over the WiiConnect service could ''completely remove all festivals from the calendar,'' making it so you could never go to one of them again. The English version outright doesn't have the WiiConnect feature enabled, to stop the bug.

*** ''Animal Parade'' has another nasty one in the "Missing Children" glitch, where certain circumstances can make your children disappear completely except for certain events, with "None area name" showing up as their location if you track them. [http://www.gamefaqs.com/wii/960313-harvest-moon-animal-parade/faqs/62943 This guide] has more information about the bug.

** There also a black hole glitch in the Double Deluxe edition (at least). For some reason if you save after building a house, it and the land it was on will suddenly disappear. The lot is effectively gone, and there's really nothing you can do to recover the lot shy of resetting the map somehow.

** And in The Sims 3: Late Night, several windows in the unpatched game will actually freeze up your game if you select them. A few debug objects will freeze the game also.

 

 

* There was a design oversight in ''MVP Baseball 2004'' that made it abnormally rare for left-handed hitters to hit home runs. This could be compensated for by jacking up the slider setting that controlled power, but that would result in righty batters hitting an unrealistically high amount of homers. The PC version received a patch that mitigated this somewhat; console owners had to make do until ''MVP Baseball 2005'' was released.

* The Commodore Amiga football game ''Kick Off 96'' suffered from an infamous bug whereby first half injury time would continue indefinitely, making each match unfinishable. The game received the lowest mark in Amiga Power's history, with Stuart Campbell awarding it 1% in the [http://amr.abime.net/review_1774 magazine's final issue].

* If you have a computer that has just enough capabilities to run ''Pro Evolution Soccer 2010'', expect to go through some wild framerate swings. At some points, the game will slow down enough that, next thing you know, it will speed up just enough for you not to see where you're leading the ball and end up losing it. This may even happen when you manage to get through the defense - the game may freeze for a split second and, when you take notice, the goalkeeper has already fetched the ball from your player's feet.

* ''NCAA Football 11'' received a doozy of a glitch after a patch: if a quarterback pump-faked backwards (towards his own endzone), every single player on the defense would abandon their coverage assignments and charge him, leaving all wide receivers open deep.

* ''Tony Hawks Pro Skater 4'' for the [[PS 1]] is notorious for its lack of error testing, and graphically clips quite often. There are moments where you can grind a rail and suddenly it disappears and you fall THROUGH it and lose your combo. The worst part about this is that it's random, though can happen quite a lot in the opening "College" level.

** ''Tony Hawks Underground 2'' had a horrible tendency to freeze up completely at random ''while saving''. There was no way of knowing if it would happen or not, and because it would freeze up while saving, all save data for that file would become corrupted. The only way to play that game to the end effectively would be to keep two saves, updating both, and hoping you could redo any challenge if the game froze up on your first save.

 

 

** It's also possible in a few places to "lose" your partner permanently. Not only does this keep you from finishing the game in the usual way (You lose access to their abilities, which you need to finish the game), it also prevents you from using your hovercraft, since you'll wait around for them to return before you can set off. Resetting is once again the only option.

* If, for whatever reason, you decide randomly to backtrack to the Comm Tower from the Snowfield in ''[[Metal Gear Solid]]'' and ride the elevator down, and then save your game, the elevator will never come back again.

 

* In ''[[Silent Hill Homecoming]]'', during the fight with {{spoiler|Scarlet}}, there is a quick-time event at the half-way point that must be completed into to face the boss's next form. Many have had problems with this event, as no matter how well-pressed the buttons are, some copies of the game just to refuse to register it, making the fight [[Unwinnable]].

** Another glitch is that on the Xbox 360 version in the hotel level, when you are on the highest reachable floor, there's one room with a hole to jump down into similar to one earlier that you climb out of. This room is crucial, as it contains the last post card needed to take back to the creepy woman. the glitch is that, the first time you walk up to the hole, it gives you the prompt to climb down. If the player doesn't take this command prompt and instead goes to continue exploring, when they come back to the hole the command prompt will not appear; there is nothing that can be done other than reloading your last save (Unless of course, you saved after you made the glitch without realizing it. then you have to restart the game). This is very troublesome, especially if you haven't saved in a long while.

 

 

* The Dreamcast version of ''[[Fur Fighters]]'' was rather buggy. One of the worst occurred in the level "The Bad Place." There's a bridge you have to cross, but once you pass a certain point, the character walks directly into the abyss for no apparent reason, sending you back to your last checkpoint. Apparently, if you cross at JUST the right angle, the character will stop walking before they reach the edge and you'll be unable to continue.

* The PC port of ''[[Gears of War]]'' had a rather nasty bug that deleted your saved game. There is no way to back up these saved games, either. It was finally fixed with patch 1.2...which came out six months after release.

* In ''[[Dark Forces Saga|Jedi Academy]]'', there's one mission that has you going into a Jedi tomb to stop the Cultist bad guys stealing Force energy from it. To finish the level, you need to seal the tomb, preventing the Cultists from getting to it again. The entire level is composed of your typical railingless walkways over infinite drops, so the most efficient way to kill enemy Dark Jedi is to Force Grip them and quickly chuck them over the side before they Force Push back at you. However, if you employ this method on the last one (the guy guarding the tomb itself), instead of killing him directly, then the final objective - telling you that you need to seal the tomb - never triggers. It's not quite a game-breaker, since you only need to complete 80% of the levels to advance the plot, but it definitely breaks that level (right at the very end, literally two button presses from finishing).

* The PC version of the 1999 Acclaim title ''[[Shadow Man]]'' is unwinnable on computers running Windows 7. For unknown reasons, various bugs pop up in the game when run under Windows 7, likely due to incompatibilities between game and OS and not even compatibility mode will fix these problems. The player will slide on any angled surface as if they were ice, lighting effects are broken to the point that the flashlight barely works and cutscenes don't always play properly. None of these make the game unwinnable. The game breaking bug takes place in the prison level as the zombie monsters can not be killed. They will fall to the floor when taken enough damage but the shadow gun will not finish them off and all other weapons fail to deliver the death blow, causing them to get back up. In some rooms, the zombies are so heavy that their gun shots will kill the player in seconds, rendering the game unbeatable as it will be impossible to get through these areas.

 

* In ''Master of Monsters: Disciples of Gaia'', if your Master reaches level 99, they can't go any higher. Why? Because if they gain a level at that point, ''the game will crash''.

* ''[[X-COM]]: Terror from the Deep'' has the Research Tree bug, where researching something too early can accidentally block off advancement in that research path. Most crippling is the Live Deep One bug. If you research a Live Deep One before you research the prerequisites for the Ion Armor, you won't be able to research the ships needed to complete the game. Thankfully, most of these have been patched away by the [[Updated Rerelease|Windows 95 version]].

** The American version of ''[[Fire Emblem Elibe|Rekka no Ken]]'' was just...buggy. Among the ways it can be crashed:

*** In the first chapter in which Kishuna appears, if an enemy unit is standing in the spot where he's supposed to appear when he does so, it will sometimes have its sprite changed to look just like Eliwood's. Attempting to attack this fake Eliwood crashes the game.

* In its initial release, [[Civilization|Civilization V]] suffers from a bad memory leak in which it's possible to never finish a very long game with many players. The game runs in 32-bit mode, which on 64-bit systems, limit the game's actual memory usage up to 2GB. Once the game hits 2GB, it will crash.

* It's possible for ''[[Galactic Civilizations]] 2'' to glitch in such a way that when you start the game, your ships become sublimely convinced that every single location on the map, including your homeworld, is outside the area they can move to. Being completely unable to colonise new worlds means that a game about building empires ''prevents you from building an empire''.

 

 

* In ''[[Grand Theft Auto]] III'', there are two generic black street gangs in one area. Over the course of the game, you can fully eliminate one of them. Starting a new game from the options while playing a game with that gang eliminated will also remove them from the new game, making that branch of missions [[Unwinnable]].

** Saving the game at the ice cream factory in ''Vice City'' has been known to corrupt many a gamer's save file.

** The Malibu crash (for lack of a better name), exclusive to the PC version (and possibly the [[PlayStation 2]] version as well) of Grand Theft Auto Vice City, causes the game to immediately crash when nearing the vicinity of the Malibu. It's not known what causes it, but it causes the game to crash, saying "Error reading the Grand Theft Auto Vice City DVD."

* The infamous Mad Dogg glitch in ''GTA: San Andreas''. A glitch in a mission where you had to save him from his own suicide attempt by positioning a truck full of hay under him before he could jump off a building would become [[Unwinnable]] because he would jump off the building before the cutscene ended. This glitch also made the ‘’game’’ Unwinnable, and this is compounded by the fact that no one is certain what triggers this glitch; it seems to be completely random. Many suggestions have been made, the most commonly accepted "cause" being that it's caused by cheating extremely often, or using common cheats. This is discredited, since many people who never cheated once the entire game still had the glitch occur, while some that cheated extensively never saw it. One cause is the "pedestrians riot" cheat (which cannot be turned off), causing everyone to become hostile to each other. This mission is affected because Madd Dog's character attempts to run to the nearest NPC to fight them, and in doing so, runs off the roof and dies. This is made even worse by it being one of the last missions in the game, meaning that if you get this glitch, you're screwed and have to start all over and pray you don't get the glitch again. Though, mercifully, it seems as though it never happens in two new games in a row.

** If you can manage to push a locomotive into your airplane hangar, the game will freeze after the doors close (which resets all the vehicles in the hangar) because the program won't know what to do with it.

** Another glitch occurs when you have to steal a van with stereo equipment but you need to impress the girl behind it with your dance moves before she lets you get inside. Playing on an HDTV causes input lag, which means your button presses during the dance sequence are either out of sync or never registers at all, causing the mission and the game to become [[Unwinnable]]. To be fair, the game was released at a time when HDTV technology was new and developers weren't fully working on HD tech yet.

* Yahtzee's ''[[Zero Punctuation]]'' review of ''[[Mercenaries]] 2'' described a particularly crippling AI bug as follows: After failing a mission where he was supposed to rescue a hostage from the top of a tall building via helicopter, Yahtzee discovered upon retrying that the hostage now recognized him as soon as he came within earshot of the building and, in an effort to come and greet him, walked right off the edge of the roof and came plummeting down to his death several stories below.

{{quote|"Hostage dead, mission failed, [[Voice with an Internet Connection|support character]] [[Stop Helping Me!|gets sarcastic]], broken game gets to '''fuck off'''".}}

* ''[[Spore]]'' has a really bad one in the space stage: if you invite allies to add ships to your fleet, they very commonly fly right behind your ship and get in the way of the cursor. If you fire a colony-spawning pack, and you accidentally click an allied ship, the pack fires horizontally into space, and you become trapped in the atmosphere of the planet, unable to save the game. This is very unfortunate, since the space phase is very engrossing, and the game ''has no auto-saving feature''.

** The most recent patch (1.05) added a couple more major ones. First, it screwed up the orientation of buildings placed over water/lava in adventures, rendering many unplayable. EAxis released a ''patch for the patch'' to solve that (1.05.1). However, the patched patch can still cause creatures to become almost completely un-animated, "sliding" around and maybe bobbing their head or wings a little, and this is only solvable by a reinstall. And this patch was supposed to ''improve'' creature animations...

** Luckily, if you are stuck, you can set the game on Hard difficulty and let the hunger meter drain to empty and let the hunger kill you off.

 

* Indie puzzle game "[[Chroma Shift]]" has two game-breaking bugs:

** Playing with the mouse instead of the keyboard prevents the game from satisfying the condidions to unlock Lenore as a playable character.

* The ''[[Elite]]'' series of space trading games featured several bugs, due to the sheer size and scope of the series. The first wasn't that bad, but ''Frontier: Elite 2'' had some nasty ones - your spaceship's autopilot would occasionally fly you through planets, sometimes without sustaining damage - and the third game, ''Frontier: First Encounters'', was released in a semi-completed state. For example, the biggest, toughest, and most ultimate spaceship you could buy was basically useless, since firing any of the 'turrets' resulted in you hitting yourself; early releases of ''First Encounters'' would crash when you fired a laser, or tried to use a joystick connected to a SoundBlaster gameport, or played certain missions.

** The ZX Spectrum version of the original ''Elite'' had a notorious one, caused by its copy-protection system, which consisted of a plastic lens. Anyway, the lens was used to view a distorted captcha on the screen to gain access to the game. Trouble was, the lenses from the original shipment were badly engineered, making it impossible to play the game ''at all.''

* Parodied in the fifth game of ''[[Homestar Runner|Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attactive People]]'', which requires you to ''deliberately induce'' one of these (which is nigh-impossible without cheating, but the cheat is easy to activate) in a [[Show Within a Show|game-within-the-game]].

* Of all things, the ''Chess'' software that shipped with Apple's OS 10.4 had one of these. Set the computer to its hardest setting and make sure you're white. The correct way to break the AI was 1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 * twitch** freeze* as the computer forgets how to continue a Sicilian defense.

* ''Yu-Gi-Oh Reverse of Arcadia'' has numerous bits of [[Copy Protection]] as it is, so this may in fact be one of the various parts of the Copy Protection activating, but occasionally (albeit exceedingly rarely), when a player takes damage that does not reduce their LP to 0 after being attacked directly 5 times in one turn, the attacking player will say their "duel victory" quote...and the defending player will spontaneously lose the duel, even if there is a chance for that player to win in the next turn.

* The [[Nintendo 64|N64]] game ''[[Battle Tanx]]'' has an infinite health cheat, but the game doesn't always let you turn it off. If you use the cheat during a bonus level, where the objective is to survive for as long as possible, you enter a situation where the bonus level will never end because you can't turn the cheat off.

* ''Wonderland Adventures'' used to have a bug where you could use blink to teleport through a single wall tile. This "wallblinking" became famous after spots were found where you could blink in and then waste your blinks, leaving you stranded and making the game unwinnable. Perhaps nastier was The Void where you could skip the power cube levels by blinking past the gates at the cost of forfeiting [[One Hundred Percent Completion]]. Except there's no indication you can't go back to the void once you finish the final level. This bug was fixed in a later version, but since many people liked the shortcuts it provided, the more adventurous people can still try it out by enabling it with a cheat code.

* ''[[Oregon Trail]] 4th'' and ''5th Edition'' have a lot of these, especially crashing bugs, as well as compatibility issues with Windows 2000 and XP.

* In the old PC Point-And-Click adventure game ''[[Pink Panther]]: Hokus Pokus Pink'' skipping through the cutscene where the "Star's Bite" collection is unveiled makes the camera un aquireable, thus making the Greek Mythology chapter [[Unwinnable]].

* In the defunct browser game ''Little Cave Hero'', you'll often find arrow launchers in levels. If your computer runs the game with lag, it'll have the bizarre effect of increasing the arrows' speed. At "best" the arrows will wreck your score. At worst, levels will become [[Unwinnable]] (e.g., in the level Signs, you won't be able to break one fake wall because a arrow keeps stunning you before the breaking animation ends).

** Some results: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svnwyO_kHJE Super Mario Bros] is the best known example of this, [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG3z41XIdKk here] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JcaE1O2-60 some] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47tu8jSKnAM others].

* ''[[League of Legends]]'' had the Anivia stun bug. Normally she has the ability to shoot a ball of ice that damages and stuns enemies within range when it bursts. After one patch the range on this detonation became global, allowing her to spam that spell from anywhere (such as in the summoner fountain that restores mana at high speed) and hit the entire enemy team with it every few seconds. Obviously this made a match against Anivia essentially unplayable, and it was fixed very fast.

** There was also a bug with Yorick's ult. Yorick's ult would summon a spectre of an allied hero that Yorick would control. However, if they died while the spectre was up, they would control the spectre for a little while. At launch? The person "resurrected" with Yorick's ult would die ''repeatedly''.

 

 

* [[Homestuck]] has two. The first is prototyping a First Guardian, which will result in every enemy the heroes faces having First Guardian powers. And unfortunately, the most powerful enemy of all has no interest in following the rules of the game. The second is [[Bigger Bad|Lord English's]] {{spoiler|"glitch", which will make an affected session impossible to win. Both of these can only be fixed by causing The Scratch, which is essentially a [[Reset Button]] of reality. However, the Scratch is not without consequences. Lord English utilizes his "glitch" as a calling card, and he will appear in the reset universe. His appearance on the Scratched Earth made it a [[Villain World]].}}

 

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[[Category:Fake Difficulty]]

[[Category:Bad Writing Index]]

[[Category:Videogame Culture]]