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{{trope}}
[[File:Some Things Just Should Not Be 4478.jpg|link=Pokémon Red and Blue|
{{quote|''"This huge oversight renders the rest of the game moot and reduces an otherwise enjoyable game to a pointless exercise, making it one of the most shameful QA blunders in all of video gaming."''
The dark side of [[Good Bad Bugs]] and a [[Griefer]]'s favorite variety, Game Breaking Bugs are severe bugs that cripple your ability to play the game involved. They’re almost as old as gaming itself.<ref>Computer gaming, that is. There aren't any coding bugs in [[wikipedia:Blackjack|Blackjack]], [[Monopoly (game)|Monopoly]], or [[GURPS]].</ref>
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The very worst of these can cause a game to be [[Unwinnable By Mistake]] no matter what the player does (except, possibly through a counteracting [[Good Bad Bug]]). Bugs that always happen at the same point of an [[Endless Game]] are known as [[Kill Screen]]s. Not necessarily the same as a [[Game Breaker]] that results from a programming bug; those are typically [[Good Bad Bugs]], which are harmless, but examples of ones that use Game-Breaking Bugs exist; read on..
{{examples|suf=s}}
== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==
* In-unverse example presented in ''[[The World God Only Knows]]'' anime. During episode 4, the main character, Keima, is obsessed with trying to beat a [[Dating Sim]] game which is filled with bugs and glitches which causes a certain scene to replay over and over. Despite the game being very buggy and glitched, he vows to find a way to get out of that repeating scene bug via trying different options/selections. The game company released a lot of patches, but didn't fix everything, and eventually went bankrupt, so Keima feels that he's the only person left who can "save" her. He sort of manages to get past the repeating screen glitch, but then hilariously a bunch of random characters appear on the screen and the game freezes up. Despite that, he still vows to try to find a way to beat the game.▼
* Having the cinematic rights to your game bought by [[Uwe Boll]]. [[Development Hell|He doesn't even have to make the film]]—it's going to be a disaster if he does, but his tying up the rights means no-one else can make a film of your franchise until the rights are wrested back away from him. {{spoiler|Just ask White Wolf about ''Hunter: The Reckoning''!}}{{context|reason=How is this an example of the trope as written?}}▼
* In ''[[Gintama]]'', Gintoki and Kagura end up competing against Hijikata and Okita in a multiplayer virtual reality RPG to see who can clear a section of the game first. However, the game is a terribly glitchy beta version, and Gintoki starts off poisoned so he can't even walk to a shop to get an antidote without dying, and Hijikata starts with so little HP that he ends up killing himself by stubbing his toe on a sign accidentally. [[Gag Series|Predictably]], their partners end up ditching them, and the two are forced to find loopholes in the RPG's mechanics to progress without them.▼
== [[Live-Action TV]] ==
* On the ''[[Pyramid]]'' game show franchise (e.g. ''The $25,000 Pyramid''), if both teams were tied, each team would play a extra round apiece with the subject of "Words that begin with the letter '?'". Several times, the teams would get the same amount of points in each round, and ''still'' be tied after the tie-breaker. This has led to episodes where teams would be playing four or six rounds more than the usual six to decide who would play in the Winner's Circle. Sometimes, however, the producers would fix this by having BOTH of the day's celebrities play for both the day's contestants at the end of the week (as opposed to one celebrity and one contestant). This was later fixed in the 1980s versions by changing it so that whichever team got its seven tiebreaker words faster won.▼
* There were a few instances where this happened in ''[[Legends of the Hidden Temple]]'', specifically when they reached the temple itself and the game was rendered [[Unwinnable By Mistake]]. A few teams lost time because they couldn't open the door despite completing the obstacle. (Sometimes it didn't register a button press) However, one of the absolute ''worst'' cases was in "The war fan of the forty seven ronin", wherein a temple door closed and re-locked behind one contestant, who subsequently got ejected from the temple. Their partner came into the temple next, and was stopped by a door that their partner ''just'' passed through.▼
* A few from ''[[Dungeons & Dragons]]'':▼
** The Truenamer class from the splat book ''Tome of Magic'' is infamous for being broken in the sense that the class is unplayable as written. One noted ability of the Truenamer is that its abilities get ''weaker'' and harder to use as it levels up (You need to meet a check that goes up by 2 each level, while you can only put 1 more point in a skill a level), assuming you can even meet the DC required for an utterance at a low level (unlikely as due to another bad piece of writing the base is 15 vs the lowest level foe you can fight, while the normal first level is + 4 from skill ranks and a + 3 from ability score plus the result of 1d20, yes, [[Luck-Based Mission|your main ability is effectively luck based (need an 8 or higher, can't take ten) as to if it actually works]] against the least threatening foes.) and truenaming checks get ''harder'' to make as you attempt to do it more than once a day.▼
*** As with much of the late 3.5 game, this was possibly a prototype for fourth edition. In 4E, all of your attack rolls increase by 1/2 per level while all of the defenses for any NPC go up by 1 per level (directly compared to your Truenamer skill going up by 1 per level and the DC going up by 2 per level); 4E "solves" this problem by mandating you gain magical items and increase your ability scores to make up for the difference. It was probably expected that any Truenamer would pick up a magical item that grants + 15 to skill checks.▼
*** The ''Tome of Magic'' also neglects to include the target number for an entire class of Truenamer Utterances. The DCs were later set by errata.▼
** Also in 3.5, it's possible to get a sorcerer with Wish as a spell-like ability with no GP or XP cost at level 17. This ''technically'' allows you to get free rings of three wishes.▼
** The [[Drunken Master]] [[Prestige Class]] relies on getting drunk. The problem is the intended entry is Monk, which becomes immune to poison (And alchool is classed as a poison in the rules) at level 11, and Drunken Master does not include wordings that overwrite this. Therefore, it's possible to make it impossible to use your class features.▼
** An Epic Destiny in 4th edition, the Archlich, was also broken: one of his class features (that whisks him away to his phylactery when he hits zero hp instead of going unconsious) made one of his other class features (stay alive and power up when killed...which happens ''after'' you get below zero hp) impossible to use. It was errataed later.▼
* Yes-it-exists-and-the-world-is-stupider-for-it RPG ''Racial Holy War'' is not just unplayable for the reasons you'd expect something with that title to be; the combat rules don't work at all (modifiers are listed, but not the basic chance they modify, making it impossible to actually attack anything), and the outnumbering system (if a party is outnumbered by a given amount, they flee) doesn't take any account of ''what'' is outnumbering them, meaning the [[Designated Hero|supposedly heroic white warriors]] might conceivably run screaming from a mob of babies and pensioners. There's some debate as to whether the game is a [[Stealth Parody|parody]] or just that dumb.▼
** Amusingly enough, one of the [[The Lord of the Rings]] [[RPG]]s had a similar issue; in army combat, there were modifiers based on the troop numbers, but they were based on the ''absolute'' difference, not the ''relative'' difference. So a thousand-man advantage might give an unbeatable bonus...meaning that 20,000 undead knights couldn't beat 21,000 hobbits with sticks.▼
* As written in the core book, there's no way to use skils in ''[[Rifts]]'', because there's no way to resolve skill checks.▼
* In the board game ''Hero Quest'', it is entirely possible to lock the game into an unwinnable state by making either the Elf or the Wizard use the spell "Pass Through Rock" then passing through one of the many boulders that are used specifically to stop you from going to rooms to have no way in and nothing of interest thus trapping you on one side of the board with no way out.▼
** "Empty" rooms in the board are considered to be solid rock. That being said, there are a couple of passages that close behind you in the game and which can be screwed by use of this spell.▼
* In an early edition of ''[[Warhammer 40,000]]'', the Tau had a unit called the Devilfish. Due to a loophole, since they were technically flying units, they couldn't be shot at by ground forces, but you couldn't shoot under them or through them because they were low to the ground and flanking rules. Players of the Tau would move two Devilfish into a V-shaped wedge, and then move troops into it, creating an assault-proof bunker. Worse, the troops ''inside'' the bunker could shoot at you if you tried to rush it, and even with armies that had decent anti-tank weapons or artillery, the tactic was difficult at best to beat. The rules were modified so that Devilfish were attackable again, as well as several other changes that have made the "Fish Of Fury," tactic to be a much reduced threat.▼
==
=== Action Adventure ===
* ''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.
* ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess]]'' was [[Unwinnable|impossible to finish]] if the player saved and quit at the wrong time after crossing a bridge [[Broken Bridge|which subsequently gets broken]]. A required character would also turn invisible if the player saved and quit in the wrong area. He could still be utilized, so the game was not unbeatable, but this was still a frustrating bug.
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* ''[[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.
* ''The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe'', specifically the PC release. It was mostly free from game-breaking bugs, but some physical copies had a very annoying and frustrating glitch that would [[Unwinnable|prevent you from beating the final boss and level.]] When fighting the white witch, you're supposed to use the abilities you've learned from the kids in a certain order, reacting quickly to the prompts before they reset and only damaging her health when she comes out from an area where you can't actuality hit her - unfortunately, after finishing a certain amount of the prompts, there is a final part where the witch is supposed to come out this time permanently from behind the rocks so you can continue to the final stretch of the fight. Sometimes, it just won't happen. The witch will just be frozen, and there is no way to reset her, or even attack her - forcing you to reset the entire level and try your luck again. No one knows exactly why it happens or what stops it. Some people even had her just reset after being frozen without having to reload the level.
=== Action Game ===
* An entire page could be spent listing the various Game Breaking Bugs in ''Hidden And Dangerous''; fortunately, this got better with patches and an eventual free re-release.
** 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.
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=== Adventure Game ===
* 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.
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=== Card Battle Game ===
* 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.
* ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh!]]: Nightmare Troubadour'' has a glitch that can cause Pegasus to disappear from the game after a certain point, rendering [[100% Completion]] impossible.
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=== Driving Game ===
* In the American version of ''[[Tokyo Xtreme Racer]] 3'', the game's money system is deflated tenfold—you earn 1/10 as much money as in the Japanese version, and everything costs 10% as much. Unfortunately, the money requirements to encounter two particular opponents were not adjusted; as a result, one of these opponents, Whirlwind Fanfare, requires more money than you are allowed to hold—you can hold up to 99,999,990 credits, she requires 100 million. Since you need to beat the first 599 opponents, including her, to challenge the [[Final Boss]], it's impossible to beat the game without an Action Replay.
* 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.
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=== Fighting Game ===
* 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.
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** Turns out that even other modes are not safe, including the regular Smash mode, as [https://www.reddit.com/r/smashbros/comments/al99tm/psa_using_piranha_plant_in_allstar_mode_has_been/?sort=new reported by a few players]. And not all of them has to involve the plant. After a while of no patch/update addressing this, it turns out that Nintendo could not recreate the similar glitch, though they are still investigating the issue.
=== First Person Shooter ===
* ''[[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.
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* 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.
* The Activision PC game ''Revolution'' had a level that actually could not be beaten without a cheat code. A patch supposedly fixed it, but it would not work on existing saves (requiring that the game be completely started over). [https://web.archive.org/web/20100713200419/http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/revolution/index.html Here's a very amusing review at GameSpot.]
* ''[[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.
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=== Massively Multiplayer Online RPG ===
* The initial release of the ''[[EVE Online|EVE Online: Trinity]]'' update contained a glitch that prevented some Windows XP systems from ''booting'' until fixed by a rescue disk.
** 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.
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=== Platformer ===
* [[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.
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* [[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.
=== Real Time Strategy ===
* An insidious bug in the ''[[Dawn of War|Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War: Soulstorm]]'' expansion lets players queue an upgrade and cancel it to receive their investment back. Which would be a good thing...if the upgrade's price didn't increase in the meantime, thus resulting in infinite resources in ''multiplayer''. [[Good Bad Bugs|Hilarity usually ensues]]. The first problem with this bug was that it took Relic over ''half a year'' to patch. The second problem was once they patched it, they replaced it with an even worse bug—the Sisters of Battle armour upgrade applied itself to all their units rather than just their infantry (and applied itself to their infantry twice). At least you had to ''choose'' to use the infinite resource bug.
** 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.
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=== Rhythm Game ===
* ''[[DJMAX]] Portable Black Square''{{'}}s and ''Clazziquai Edition''{{'}}s background music have a bad habit of skipping and desynchronizing every now and then. In a [[Rhythm Game]], this is a big problem, as it can make the song more difficult to play. Although some have fixed this problem by using the "Data Install" feature (which installs some of the game's data onto the memory stick to reduce load issues regarding the UMD). On the other hand, playing the game via an ISO on a memory stick circumvents
* 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.
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=== Role Playing Game ===
* ''[[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 initial PC release of ''Fallout: New Vegas'' was prone to random crashes from the start of the game. But the Game Breaking Bug part was that quicksaves were corrupted and would only load the very first one the player made (usually in the starting town). This meant only autosaves (from entering or exiting a building or location that brings up a loading screen) and regular saves could be used to recover your game if it crashed. Hope you didn't like quicksaving.
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** 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].
* ''[[Makai Toushi SaGa]]'', released in the US as ''The Final Fantasy Legend'' had a lot of strange bugs, including warps, area glitches, character corruption, extreme increases in travel speed, and a [[Good Bad Bugs|one-hit-kill that works even on the final boss]], which [https://web.archive.org/web/20140301202842/http://magweasel.com/2009/07/06/the-final-fantasy-legend/ when exploited ruthlessly] make it possible to [http://www.destructoid.com/this-is-how-you-beat-final-fantasy-legend-in-two-minutes-138937.phtml finish the game in under two minutes]. That's less time than the ending credits take.
* In ''[[Star Ocean: The Last Hope]]'', sometimes when the player or the CPU-controlled partner casts the spell Silence on an enemy, if the spell misses, "Miss !" will remain displayed on the top of the foe until the battle ends, and after that, the game freezes, forcing the player to reset. Fortunately, the player can manually prevent the IA from casting that spell, which is a [[Useless Useful Spell]] anyway. In the [[Play Station 3]] port of this game, the glitch still remains. It was also reported that playing the [[Play Station 3]] version with the Playstation Network still running in the background occasionally freezes the game, so the player better has to play the game 100% offline, as it doesn't feature any online mode anyway.
* 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.
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=== Shoot Em Ups ===
* The Prismriver sisters' glitch in ''[[Touhou|Perfect Cherry Blossom]]''. Occasionally at the end of the girls' final spellcard, Merlin (the white-haired trumpet player) [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU2Z6VobIvc&feature=related will fail to transition properly into it] and continue to attack the player—causing her to lose lives even ''after'' the battle has ended. Amusingly, [[Fanon]] gleefully turned Merlin into a nutcase after discovering the bug, and in doing so made "Merupo" the most recognizable of the sisters.
** 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.
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=== Simulation Game ===
* ''[[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.
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=== Sports Game ===
* 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].
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=== Stealth Based Game ===
* An enemy in a certain room in ''[[Beyond Good & Evil (video game)|Beyond Good and Evil]]'' drops a key when it's defeated. However, depending on how you defeat the enemy, the key it holds can spawn in weird places—such as in corners, or in the ceiling, or even ''slightly beneath the floor.'' Since you need the key to progress through the dungeon, the game becomes [[Unwinnable]]—luckily, it's fairly easy to reload from an earlier save if this happens.
** 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.
=== Survival Horror ===
* 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.
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=== Third Person Shooter ===
* 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.
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* ''[[Ghostbusters the Video Game]]'' for both the 360 and the [[Play Station 3]] had glitch(es) that made two of the multiplayer achievements/trophies impossible to get. It was finally patched, ''18 months later''! And the real kicker is the patch only worked if the player hadn't already met the requirements for the achievements/trophies. Which meant practically '''everyone''' was screwed. And did I mention it's not possible to delete games in which you already have achievements in?
=== Turn Based Strategy ===
* 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]].
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=== Wide Open Sandbox ===
* [[Dwarf Fortress]]
** In older versions, if you happen to be on
** In the new version, creatures made of inorganic materials (such as Bronze Colossi) are [[Nigh Invulnerable]]. They can be destroyed by being [[Kill It with Fire|melted into a puddle]], [[Kill It with Ice|encased in ice]], or ''sometimes'' [[Chunky Salsa Rule|torn to shreds]], but ordinary combat generally goes nowhere against them.▼
** For a while, reproduction didn't require two creatures of the opposite sex to actually meet, thus the population of cats soon reaches a critical level (cats are promiscuous and have large litters of kittens), then it becomes impossible to curb and keeping track of so many moving creatures, and they caused the game's framerate to spiral downward rapidly into unplayability. This is known as a [//dwarffortresswiki.org/Catsplosion "catsplosion"], after the usual source of this problem. Cats adopt dwarves without those dwarves needing to do anything, which led to problems when combined with another oversights: if you try to curb their population by butchering cats, no matter how cautious you are, eventually one will become a "pet" randomly after designation for slaughterhouse and give some dwarf a tantrum, [[Disaster Dominoes|starting a chain reaction of disasters]].
*** Some Hidden Fun Stuff is literally unkillable, since they don't have organs to damage. Though given that this ''is'' Hidden Fun Stuff, it's probably intended as a feature.▼
▲** In
** A recently fixed bug caused rain to [[I'm Melting|melt]] creatures caught in it, including dwarves.▼
▲*** Some Hidden Fun Stuff is literally unkillable, since they don't have organs to damage. Though given that this ''is'' Hidden Fun Stuff, it's probably intended as a feature. Also… sponges, especially giant ones. They don't have organs and don't even feel pain (but somehow could be enraged). Still can be killed by pulping or bisecting, but it's very hard on large creatures.
▲** In older versions, if you happen to be on an evil-aligned map containing a stream with [[Legendary Carp|carp]] in it, you are doomed. Carp are already [[Demonic Spiders|godless killing machines]] due to a bug in the skill system that caused them to get stronger by swimming and an overpowered bite attack. And undead creatures, which randomly appear in evil areas, are amphibious. The resulting zombie carp can not only maul anyone who gets close to the river, but ''follow the survivors back and murder them in their beds''.
▲** A more recently fixed bug caused rain to [[I'm Melting|melt]] creatures caught in it, including dwarves.
* 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.
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** 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.
=== Other Games ===
▲== Miscellaneous Games ==
* 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.
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* ''[[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]].
* ''Monty Python's The Meaning of Life'' was released commercially, despite its developer going out of business. As such, the first two 'episodes' of the game (themed around life and the afterlife) are more or less flawless... the final section, which takes place entirely in Terry Gilliam's cottage, is quite troublesome. Primarily, the final task of the game is broken. After collecting a number of cheese wedges, the player is meant to build a ladder with the cheese in order to reach the trap door to the Attic and complete the game. Opening the trap door doesn't trigger the end sequence as it should, but rather, presents the player with a black screen. (A workaround does exist, involving usage of the 'Windows' keyboard key.)
* 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).
▲== Others ==
▲* A few from ''[[Dungeons & Dragons]]'':
▲** The Truenamer class from the splat book ''Tome of Magic'' is infamous for being broken in the sense that the class is unplayable as written. One noted ability of the Truenamer is that its abilities get ''weaker'' and harder to use as it levels up (You need to meet a check that goes up by 2 each level, while you can only put 1 more point in a skill a level), assuming you can even meet the DC required for an utterance at a low level (unlikely as due to another bad piece of writing the base is 15 vs the lowest level foe you can fight, while the normal first level is + 4 from skill ranks and a + 3 from ability score plus the result of 1d20, yes, [[Luck-Based Mission|your main ability is effectively luck based (need an 8 or higher, can't take ten) as to if it actually works]] against the least threatening foes.) and truenaming checks get ''harder'' to make as you attempt to do it more than once a day.
▲*** As with much of the late 3.5 game, this was possibly a prototype for fourth edition. In 4E, all of your attack rolls increase by 1/2 per level while all of the defenses for any NPC go up by 1 per level (directly compared to your Truenamer skill going up by 1 per level and the DC going up by 2 per level); 4E "solves" this problem by mandating you gain magical items and increase your ability scores to make up for the difference. It was probably expected that any Truenamer would pick up a magical item that grants + 15 to skill checks.
▲*** The ''Tome of Magic'' also neglects to include the target number for an entire class of Truenamer Utterances. The DCs were later set by errata.
▲** Also in 3.5, it's possible to get a sorcerer with Wish as a spell-like ability with no GP or XP cost at level 17. This ''technically'' allows you to get free rings of three wishes.
▲** The [[Drunken Master]] [[Prestige Class]] relies on getting drunk. The problem is the intended entry is Monk, which becomes immune to poison (And alchool is classed as a poison in the rules) at level 11, and Drunken Master does not include wordings that overwrite this. Therefore, it's possible to make it impossible to use your class features.
▲** An Epic Destiny in 4th edition, the Archlich, was also broken: one of his class features (that whisks him away to his phylactery when he hits zero hp instead of going unconsious) made one of his other class features (stay alive and power up when killed...which happens ''after'' you get below zero hp) impossible to use. It was errataed later.
▲* Yes-it-exists-and-the-world-is-stupider-for-it RPG ''Racial Holy War'' is not just unplayable for the reasons you'd expect something with that title to be; the combat rules don't work at all (modifiers are listed, but not the basic chance they modify, making it impossible to actually attack anything), and the outnumbering system (if a party is outnumbered by a given amount, they flee) doesn't take any account of ''what'' is outnumbering them, meaning the [[Designated Hero|supposedly heroic white warriors]] might conceivably run screaming from a mob of babies and pensioners. There's some debate as to whether the game is a [[Stealth Parody|parody]] or just that dumb.
▲** Amusingly enough, one of the [[Lord of the Rings]] [[RPG]]s had a similar issue; in army combat, there were modifiers based on the troop numbers, but they were based on the ''absolute'' difference, not the ''relative'' difference. So a thousand-man advantage might give an unbeatable bonus...meaning that 20,000 undead knights couldn't beat 21,000 hobbits with sticks.
▲* On the ''[[Pyramid]]'' game show franchise (e.g. ''The $25,000 Pyramid''), if both teams were tied, each team would play a extra round apiece with the subject of "Words that begin with the letter '?'". Several times, the teams would get the same amount of points in each round, and ''still'' be tied after the tie-breaker. This has led to episodes where teams would be playing four or six rounds more than the usual six to decide who would play in the Winner's Circle. Sometimes, however, the producers would fix this by having BOTH of the day's celebrities play for both the day's contestants at the end of the week (as opposed to one celebrity and one contestant). This was later fixed in the 1980s versions by changing it so that whichever team got its seven tiebreaker words faster won.
▲* As written in the core book, there's no way to use skils in ''[[Rifts]]'', because there's no way to resolve skill checks.
▲* In the board game ''Hero Quest'', it is entirely possible to lock the game into an unwinnable state by making either the Elf or the Wizard use the spell "Pass Through Rock" then passing through one of the many boulders that are used specifically to stop you from going to rooms to have no way in and nothing of interest thus trapping you on one side of the board with no way out.
▲** "Empty" rooms in the board are considered to be solid rock. That being said, there are a couple of passages that close behind you in the game and which can be screwed by use of this spell.
* In-universe example: Nanny Noah's Treasure Hunt game in ''The Lost Crown: A Ghost-Hunting Adventure'' can only be completed if you visit {{spoiler|the museum's butterfly collection}}, but that building is closed on the day when it's supposedly being played by the local children. Fortunately, this doesn't stop Nigel from field-testing the hunt on the previous day, so it's ''only'' a Game Breaking Bug for NPCs within Saxton's Verse.
* In most NES games, using a a game genie device and entering the code
▲* In an early edition of ''[[Warhammer 40,000]]'', the Tau had a unit called the Devilfish. Due to a loophole, since they were technically flying units, they couldn't be shot at by ground forces, but you couldn't shoot under them or through them because they were low to the ground and flanking rules. Players of the Tau would move two Devilfish into a V-shaped wedge, and then move troops into it, creating an assault-proof bunker. Worse, the troops ''inside'' the bunker could shoot at you if you tried to rush it, and even with armies that had decent anti-tank weapons or artillery, the tactic was difficult at best to beat. The rules were modified so that Devilfish were attackable again, as well as several other changes that have made the "Fish Of Fury," tactic to be a much reduced threat.
▲* In most NES games, using a a game genie device and entering the code: "IKAAAE" corrupts important data in the cartridge, and as a result, the game becomes a total mess that's liable to crash.
** 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''.
▲* There were a few instances where this happened in ''[[Legends of the Hidden Temple]]'', specifically when they reached the temple itself and the game was rendered [[Unwinnable By Mistake]]. A few teams lost time because they couldn't open the door despite completing the obstacle. (Sometimes it didn't register a button press) However, one of the absolute ''worst'' cases was in "The war fan of the forty seven ronin", wherein a temple door closed and re-locked behind one contestant, who subsequently got ejected from the temple. Their partner came into the temple next, and was stopped by a door that their partner ''just'' passed through.
==
▲* In-unverse example presented in [[The World God Only Knows]] anime. During episode 4, the main character, Keima, is obsessed with trying to beat a [[Dating Sim]] game which is filled with bugs and glitches which causes a certain scene to replay over and over. Despite the game being very buggy and glitched, he vows to find a way to get out of that repeating scene bug via trying different options/selections. The game company released a lot of patches, but didn't fix everything, and eventually went bankrupt, so Keima feels that he's the only person left who can "save" her. He sort of manages to get past the repeating screen glitch, but then hilariously a bunch of random characters appear on the screen and the game freezes up. Despite that, he still vows to try to find a way to beat the game.
* [[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]].}}
* [[Powerpuff Girls]] has the Zelda clone that the mayor was playing in one episode. The mayor killed his fairy, which automatically treated him to a game over despite his character still having five hearts.▼
== [[Western Animation]] ==
▲* Having the cinematic rights to your game bought by Uwe Boll. [[Development Hell|He doesn't even have to make the film]]—it's going to be a disaster if he does, but his tying up the rights means no-one else can make a film of your franchise until the rights are wrested back away from him. {{spoiler|Just ask White Wolf about Hunter: The Reckoning!}}
▲* ''[[Powerpuff Girls]]'' has the Zelda clone that the mayor was playing in one episode. The mayor killed his fairy, which automatically treated him to a game over despite his character still having five hearts.
▲* In ''[[Gintama]]'', Gintoki and Kagura end up competing against Hijikata and Okita in a multiplayer virtual reality RPG to see who can clear a section of the game first. However, the game is a terribly glitchy beta version, and Gintoki starts off poisoned so he can't even walk to a shop to get an antidote without dying, and Hijikata starts with so little HP that he ends up killing himself by stubbing his toe on a sign accidentally. [[Gag Series|Predictably]], their partners end up ditching them, and the two are forced to find loopholes in the RPG's mechanics to progress without them.
{{reflist}}
[[Category:Fake Difficulty]]
[[Category:Bad Writing Index]]
[[Category:Videogame Culture]]
▲[[Category:Game Breaking Bug]]
[[Category:Error Index]]
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