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{{trope}}
[[File:
{{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."''
|William Cassidy of GameSpy on the Atari 7800 port of ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20040528151532/http://www.gamespy.com/articles/492/492996p1.html Impossible Mission]''}}
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>
'''Game Breaking Bugs''' were more prevalent in the earlier days of gaming. Many games that were made after [[The Nineties]] seem so much easier because of the reduction in such bugs on average. It was also [[The Problem with Licensed Games]] incarnate, since several licensed games actually may not have been as bad as many people say they were...if not for game breaking bugs that slipped past the beta testings ([[Obvious Beta|if there was one]]) and made them literally unplayable or [[Nintendo Hard]].
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.
The growing prevalence of [[Wreaking Havok]] (especially in the context of facilitating emergent gameplay) can often cause essential game entities to be launched or pushed into places outside the player's reach or destroyed through unexpected methods. The sheer number of possible outcomes makes this type of game breaking impossible to fully prevent and even the few games lauded for their stability have an occasional hiccup for which the developers can only suggest reloading a saved game.
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 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
{{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.
== [[Film]] ==
* 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.
== [[Tabletop Games]] ==
* 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.
== [[Video Games]] ==
=== 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
** 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 Legend of Zelda:
*** 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.
** ''[[The Legend of Zelda
*** 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 Legend of Zelda
*** 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
** As did ''[[Puyo Puyo]] 15th Anniversary''
* ''[[
** 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
* If you skip the cutscene after the first fight with Death in ''[[
** And speaking about ''Castlevania'', in ''[[Castlevania
* ''[[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
** It's also possible at one point to get yourself stuck by [http://www.metroid2002.com/fusion/other_the_tro_trap.php sequence breaking too hard]. Fortunately, you really have to go out of your way to do this.
* In ''[[Metroid Prime]] 2: Echoes'', you can render the game [[Unwinnable]] by triggering the floaty-jump glitch during the fight with Chykka, then using your glitched super-jump to leave the room. When you return,
** Similarly, the first North American version of ''[[Metroid Prime]]'' got careless with one of its Chozo Artifacts: you get the Artifact of Warrior by beating the Phazon Elite, but the door doesn't lock to make sure you do so. If you leave, save, and come back, the Elite and Artifact are gone for good, and you need all twelve Artifacts to win.
* 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.
** Many players have encountered
** ‘’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.
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** There was also a nasty oversight in the first print run that made the uninstaller wipe out parts of the directory it wasn't supposed to. The patch to fix this is prominently included in later editions.
* In [[Divine Divinity]] when one of the bosses died the staff they're supposed to drop could get stuck in a wall. As this staff is needed to complete the game the game becomes [[Unwinnable]]. The only way to resolve this is load and earlier save and ensure the boss wasn't near a wall when they died.
* The N64 version of ''[[
* 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.
** A particular example of a bug which renders the game impossible to win if you make the mistake of saving at the wrong
* [[
** 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.
** The multiplayer has become almost unplayable due to the recent flood of bugs. Players turning invisible or even invincible, Wanted gamemode not choosing a target and Manhunt rounds getting screwed up in one way or another. The servers are also exceptionally laggy, causing a lot of other game breaking problems.
* ''[[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 (
* ''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
** 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.
* ''[[X-Men Legends]] II:'' Too many items in your Hero Stash and it'll freeze upon taking out any [[Giant Mook]]. Keep it below 20.
* ''[[Max Payne (
** 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 the 2008 [[Alone in
=== 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.
* ''[[
* The original ''[[Quest for Glory]] IV: Shadows of Darkness'' was originally rushed out, bugs and all. Most of them were fixed in one way or another, but by the time the dust had settled, a few remained:
** The most infamous was the bane of gamers everywhere, '''Error 52'''. Midway through the game, thanks to issues in dealing with faster computers, one crucial area in the swamp became impossible to leave without crashing the game. ''QFG'' message boards then-and-forever had a new favorite topic.
** This is also one of the few Sierra games that has a bug that occurs at the end of the game. When fighting Ad Avis, the hero has a staff that turns into a spear; this spear sometimes turns into the now dead Ad Avis about halfway back to the player character, who then kills our hero with a spell shot from a different area of the screen. This bug appears to occur randomly.
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* [[Quest for Glory III]] didn't have quite as many, but a few irritants still showed up.
** 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.
* ''[[King's Quest]] IV'' had a bug that only showed up on slower computers, thanks to the odd way in which the game calculated time for various characters. Rosella and all the other characters moved slowly because the computer wasn't fast enough to draw everything at full speed. The game was still playable, just slow. The one exception was the ogre, which used a more real-time timing
* 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.
* In ''[[
** In copies of the game that ''don't'' have this bug, Guybrush just mistakes your intention and chastises you for suggesting he harm an innocent dog.
** ''[[Escape
** The [[
* The original 8-bit text adventure of ''[[The Hobbit]]'' was terminally bugged in early releases - among many weird glitches, Gollum would ask you riddles, but pay no attention to the answers, making it impossible to get the ring.
* ''[[Grim Fandango]]'' had an elevator which the player needs to stop at a certain point. However, if you had a computer with a fast CPU, the elevator would move too fast to be stopped, and the player won't even realize stopping it is possible. This was luckily fixed with a patch.
* In ''[[Putt
* The original ''[[Colossal Cave Adventure]]'' got ported to many, many systems. Somewhere along the way, one version picked up a couple of bugs, and then the bugged version got ported further by people who didn't check that the version they were copying could be completed. Several of them are potential game-breakers, but the simplest example is one of the many treasures you need to collect and store in order to unlock the endgame. The treasure is just lying in a remote chamber, and all you have to do is pick it up. In the bugged versions, typing "get spices" recieves the response "You can't be serious!" No spices means no endgame.
=== Card Battle Game ===
* The initial release of ''[[Capcom vs. Whatever|SNK vs. Capcom]] Card Fighters DS'' had a fatal bug during its [[New Game
* ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh!]]: Nightmare Troubadour'' has a glitch that can cause Pegasus to disappear from the game after a certain point, rendering [[
* ''[[Magic:
** 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.
** There was even one card ([http://www.magiccards.info/mi/en/36.html Fatespinner]) that was fairly mundane by the game's standards, calling on the opponent to pick a handicap each time they got a turn. The problem? When the card was first added to the online version of the game, it ''didn't provide them with a way to resolve that decision'', and they could do nothing but wait for their time to run out and automatically lose. Needless to say, decks built around doing nothing but getting that card into play became wildly popular over the next few days to the point that they had to ban the card online until they could fix it.
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=== Driving Game ===
* In the American version of ''[[Tokyo Xtreme Racer]] 3'', the game's money system is deflated
* In ''[[
* The arcade game ''[[Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune]]'' has a card cloning trick that doubles as a [[Good Bad Bugs|Good Bag Bug]] ''and'' this. Doing said trick is highly frowned upon because ''it literally breaks the game''
* 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''.
* The PC version of ''[[
=== 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; [[
** In the tournament scene, the infamous G-Step glitch, which allows one to immediately block after sidestepping, turned ''Soul Calibur II'' from an excellent tournament game to nigh unplayable at high levels due to it being really hard to hit anyone. A less game breaking version exists in every successive game, but it's still responsible for the dominance of turtling strategies.
* The initial version of ''[[Mortal Kombat]] 4'', which wasn't technically supposed to get out to the public (it had missing Fatalities, no Kombo Limiter, missing characters, no endings...) had a bug where one character could lift his opponent to the top of the screen by using a special move properly. The "lift" wouldn't wear off until the target was hit by something else, and nothing could get up that high, so the game was effectively stuck, especially if the game timer was disabled.
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** This is true of any game which has a battery save system. The second the battery fails, the save is lost. Some games were able to recharge the battery with regular play, so that as long as a game was played regularly, the player shouldn't notice any lost data. Of course if you lost the data, you had to start the game over. Even worse however, is that if the battery does completely go, and cannot be recharged, the game can never be saved and turned off, meaning that the only way to get to the end would be in one sitting. Playing an old 100+ hour game that ran on an internal clock to do everything, such as Pokémon Gold? Better have a plug for your Game Boy, or sucks to be you.
** This was quite a common problem with Pokemon Yellow due to cheap parts being used because of the demand.
* ''[[
* A [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsowWUfMMWk glitch] that ends the round in a similar way exists in the early arcade version of ''[[
* The 1.04 patch for ''[[
* ''[[Super Smash Bros.]]'' ''Ultimate'' has a big one once Piranha Plant has become available for the legible players that time. Playing as it in Classic or All-Star Mode/Century Smash has a chance of corrupting the game's save file.<ref>Apparently, Piranha Plant is not the only one to trigger this, as there are other reports that Duck Hunt and Mii Swordfighter can risk this as well.</ref> It has been reported that it also affects backup/cloud saves if automatic backup is on which allows it to update the fine save data with the corrupted one. Consider the sheer amount of unlockables and collectibles in this game...
** 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.
* ''[[Crysis (
** The stage "Relic" had one. When you fight the soldiers in the graveyard, sometimes the helicopter you are supposed to leave in never arrives. You have to replay the whole level again to fix it.
** ''Crysis'' had plenty of game ending flag bugs right from the very beginning: If you're playing a second time, you'll probably want to run straight to the action. Nope, sorry. Using your nano-suit abilities, given almost immediately after reaching the beach, if you get to the point where you meet your first teammate too quickly, he'll just stand up on the cliffs. Nothing you can do except starting over will get him to come down.
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* 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.
** The Mac version of ''[[Doom]] II'' had a bug in one of its MIDI files that
* ''[[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 the penultimate mission where you discover you were brainwashed, you get punched while running down a corridor, however this sequence would often break and after being punched, Mason would be stuck in place and Hudson would appear in his Vietnam gear complete with sunglasses, the unfunny part is you would be stuck and the level has no checkpoints as there's no combat in it so you have to start the entire mission again.
** ''Modern Warfare 3'' has the infamous "Reliable command buffer overflow" bug.
* ''[[
{{quote|- fixed: jaguar floats across screen at treetop level;
- fixed: size of the moon;|fixed: npc die on contact with grenades, and not from the actual explosion;}}
* ''[[First Encounter Assault Recon|F.E.A.R.]]'' had a little bit of an oversight that would render the game unbeatable. At one point, you're asked to download data from a laptop. However, there were laptops with downloadable data all around to get the backstory, and you're told to download this data way after you see this laptop. But once you download data from a machine, you can't do it again, even with that mission critical laptop. The mission objectives also didn't say that it was completed. You basically have to restart from the last save and wait for the objective to be given, then download the data.
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** In fact, just about every Survival map in both Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 contain spots like these where almost nothing can reach you. In some spots, literally nothing can reach you allowing for utterly absurd times (people have managed to survive for DAYS using some of these spots). The developers attempted to stop this from happening in Left 4 Dead 2 by spawning spitter acid in areas that the game considers out of bounds but the addition of the Grenade Launcher meant that you could launch people up to spots where the spitter acid can't spawn. And the thing is Valve can't patch this glitch; it would require completely retooling the physics engine, something that can't be done with a simple patch.
** In Left 4 Dead 2, throwing boomer bile into the safehouse at the start of a level, then having all but one person leave the saferoom, will cause all the zombies to go for the bile as usual. After the bile has run out, though, the zombies will try to kill the person inside, which they can't. With the massive group of zombies around the saferoom door, the game is unable to spawn anymore, allowing the remaining survivors to run through the rest of the level without any opposition, providing the person in the saferoom does not go idle. Special infected will still spawn, but otherwise, this makes every non-finale level pathetically easy.
* ''[[
* ''[[Medal of Honor]]'' Allied Assault had a rather nasty bug in the Destroyed Village map. With some careful jumping, a sly player could actually scale the [[Invisible Wall]] and go ''under'' the map in a feat called Landsharking. The landsharker is completely invulnerable to damage, but can still shoot other players. Plus, since they're under the map, it's impossible to hide from them unless you're on a second story. This would essentially make the team with the landsharker unstoppable. The problem was ''eventually'' fixed.
* The original release of ''[[Quake (
* In ''[[
* While rare, it was possible in the first ''[[Halo]]'' to checkpoint right at a point of inevitable death. (Hello, sticky-grenade). This would trap your character in a [[Cycle of Hurting]] and force you to go back to the start of the level. Future games had a failsafe feature that reverted the game to an earlier checkpoint after a certain number of deaths in such a situation.
* ''[[Half Life|Half-Life: Opposing Force]]'' has a door about 2/3 of the way through the game which, if opened, may crash the game. Unfortunately, opening this door is also the ONLY way to progress. There are a number of tutorials online on how to engage noclip and skip straight to the next working point in the game - it seems that whatever is behind the door is what crashes the game, not the act of opening it, because even looking in that direction while noclipping triggers the crash, hence the need for tutorials instructing how to noclip to the next area.
** There's also a bug where you get stuck inside an elevator platform, making it impossible to move, the only way out being either a noclip cheat, or reloading the game and hopping like a complete idiot while riding the elevator in hopes that this will prevent the bug.
* ''[[
** The May 2010 mega-update (which ported the whole game and Episode One over to their newer game engine) introduced, among many other bugs that have yet to be fixed, one that causes the scripted sequence to not run, trapping you in the back room with an inert Alyx. They did patch this a week or so in, but apparently every copy of the game was susceptible.
** Another issue that Valve apparently hadn't planned for (and that mods sometimes activate without knowing it) is that the nasty but slow poison headcrab zombie shouldn't appear in a level where there are also barnacles around. Most NPCs that blunder into barnacles get pulled up and eaten by the monster, but the game crashes if a poison zombie is grabbed, as they hadn't programmed in any sort of code to handle a poison zombie being attacked by a barnacle.
* At one point in ''[[Shogo: Mobile Armor Division]]'', you're supposed to take an elevator down along with your partner. Unfortunately, 90% of the time your partner would inexplicably explode into bloody chunks while riding the elevator with you (presumably the game somehow thought she was crushed by the very elevator she was inside.) Oh, and this was an [[Escort Mission]], so it's game over if it happens to you.
* ''[[
** The second level of the first episode has a large door that is opened by a ghost in the cutscene that starts the level. Cutscenes are removed from co-op mode, resulting in the first episode being unbeatable in co-op without cheating.
* ''[[House of the Dead|House Of The Dead: Overkill]]'' hits the player with one during the Crawler boss fight. The only way to avoid taking damage from Crawler's swipes is to shoot its claw as it prepares to attack. However, on occasion, Crawler won't take damage even if you shoot the marked weak spot. The result: you're forced to take several hits until Crawler switches locations.
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* In ''Call of Cthulhu: [[Dark Corners of the Earth]]'' there is one infamous sequence in which you must fire at several enemies using a deck-mounted cannon. The problem is while the enemies are still there, you can't see them. Nobody knows what causes this bug, and the only known solution is to use the savegame of somebody fortunate enough to not encounter it.
** In another part of the game, there is a cart you are supposed to get onto. On some games, the game just plain refuses to let you advance. In a rage, people realized that shooting a specific point on the cart will let you on.
* ''[[
* The first release of ''[[Sin]]'' had a rather nasty bug during the Chambers of Darwin trials. After the second chamber, a guard is supposed to open a tunnel passage for the third one. Actually, the soldier keeps redirecting you to the tube, without opening it: more frustration comes through the fact that ''you're slowly dying during the tests''. A couple of months later, Ritual released a patch to cure this glitch.
* ''[[Marathon
* On that note, the original ''[[Marathon
* 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 ''[[
* In ''[[Sniper Path Of Vengeance]]'', towards the end of the game there is a level where you must board an elevator to get to the next level. The game auto-saves after each level, and on the first attempt at conquering the next level, there are no problems - but if you reload from the auto-save, the elevator doors will never open again, and you get stuck in the elevator. Thankfully, the autosave feature creates a new save for each level, so you only need to replay one level if you forgot to save right after exiting the elevator.
* The PC port of ''[[Turok]] 2'' seems to have a major memory leak, causing it to slow down to slideshow levels (even on fast computers) after playing a few minutes, and possibly crash.
=== Massively Multiplayer Online RPG ===
* The initial release of the ''[[
** 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.
* In April 2009, ''[[City of Heroes]]'' had an incredibly nasty bug in its new Mission Architect feature: the Ninjitsu powerset that players can use to create custom enemy groups has a major damage buff given when the user attacks while stealthed. It's supposed to work only for that one attack and then the stealth wears off, as usual with the Stalker archetype. It didn't quite work as intended: custom enemies got that enormous damage buff ''for all their powers, whether or not they're stealthed''. It meant even [[Mighty Glacier|Tankers]] and [[The Brute|Brutes]] could very, ''very'' easily be killed very quickly by any enemy, even standard [[Mooks|minions]], that had the powerset.
* ''[[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.
* ''[[Meridian 59]]'': [[Word of God]] says that one of the early expansions had a new zone that required a special spell to access. However, the components to cast the new spell were exclusive to the new area, producing a kind of key-locked-in-chest scenario. The developers caught it and swiftly threw in a [[Giant Space Flea From Nowhere]] guarding enough of the components to cast the spell.
* ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' experienced a nearly-game breaking bug in its early days. A boss in Zul'Gurub released a bad disease (called Corrupted Blood) that could spread, but only to players nearby. The disease was not meant to get out of the instance the boss was in, but a clever player could release a pet, give the pet the disease, put the pet away, travel to a major city, release the pet, and begin the MMO equivalency of the Black Plague. Luckily, it only seriously affected one server, and Blizzard fixed it. Of note, the same technique of a diseased pet carrier could also be used for several other, much less severe jerk moves (like releasing high level mobs on low level players) but the cake goes to the [[Exactly What It Says
** In what may qualify as a [[Crowning Moment of Awesome]] (or at least a Crowning Moment Of Geeky) for the researcher involved, the [
** Blizzard later recreated this intentionally as part of the lead-in for the ''Wrath of the Lich King'' expansion, introducing a disease that could be carried by players and that would result in transformation into a zombie (who could then infect other players, as well as nearly any NPC in the game they could catch) if not cured by one of many healer NPCs added to the towns for the event. Although many players were annoyed at the disruption - on some servers, the game was nearly unplayable due to the mass infection of service NPCs - the event ran its course as planned. (Popular rumor claims that it ended early because of the complaints; the devs claim otherwise.)
*** 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]].
=== 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.
* The famous Attic Bug in ''[[
** 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.
* ''[[Space Station Silicon Valley]]'' on N64 is impossible to win with [[
* 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.
** ''Jak X'' has an even worse glitch which apparently occurs mostly on black slim [[
* 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.
** A rather irritating glitch can sometimes occur in ''Dawn Of The Dragon'', where even if you've completed the game, and [[Gotta Catch Em All|collected everything]]/[[Elite Mooks|defeated all the Elite Enemies]]/[[Elemental Powers|upgraded all your elements to their maximum]], the file will only read 99%, meaning you can't open the final gallery.
* The ''[[Sonic the Hedgehog]]'' games have a few of them, most of which are caused by [[Too Fast to Stop|Sonic going so fast he breaks the game]]. In [[Sonic the Hedgehog (
** An additional glitch in ''Sonic The Hedgehog 3''; in Marble Garden, while playing as Sonic with Tails, you could actually scroll Tails off the screen permanently. While this would be good (since Tails is a [[Stop Helping Me!]] annoyance in this mode), it also prevents him from showing up during the end-Zone boss, a boss that ''requires'' you to have Tails fly you up to meet. This means you're permanently stuck off-screen and unable to complete the game.
*** 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''.
** The Quiz Lady bug in ''[[
** The first [[
** [[Obvious Beta|Let's not get started]] with [[Sonic the Hedgehog (2006
** [[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 the Genesis game ''[[Garfield]]: Caught in the Act'', occasionally the third boss would walk off the right side of the screen and never return, forcing the player to restart the game and start all over.
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** One in ''Sands of Time'' would stop the platforms in the observatory from correctly lifting (may have had something to do with Farah triggering the switch instead of the player). A more infamous one occurred in ''Warrior Within'', where the game would randomly teleport ahead when loading to a part far later, {{spoiler|when the Prince becomes the Sand Wraith}}. The only way to fix it would be to load an earlier save. Don't have one? Sucks to be you!
** Then there was a horrible bug right at the end of the game where you'd try to run through the last sand portal to face the end boss and the portal would simply refuse to work. We still have no idea what causes it so your best bet? ''Play the entire game over from the beginning!''
*** SOLUTION! It involves the life upgrades. You MUST get the upgrades in a different order than you are presented with availability to reach them in game. This means that as soon as you could reach the upgrades, you must not get one, returning when you are at the end of the game, before going into the final boss room.
**** As of this posting, it is certain that skipping the first upgrade, as you enter the castle, and returning just before the final boss, WILL make this bypass the glitch. Unknown if other orders will work.
** Another oversight allowed you to reach an unreachable door and bypass a decent chunk of the game. Said occurrence forced you to run a massive disintegrating obstacle course, only to arrive at a wall which can only be broken with a sword you don't own yet. And unless you avoided the two saves along the nigh-impossible road to failure, you were forced into starting a new game. Worse still, you can stumble into this by complete accident with no indication.
** And then there's ‘’Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame’’ [[Porting Disaster|on the Super NES.]] One specific standard enemy, when killed, ''crashes the game''. Then again, it can be argued that the port is a giant bug with bits of game in it.
** In the often loathed "Prince of Persia 3D", there was a spot late in the game where a moving platform would not be moving. It causes excessive frustration the first time around, since the player has no idea it is supposed to move. To make matters worse, once the player reaches the area, the platform will not move unless the level is restarted and the player gets lucky.
* Not a Game Breaking Bug in the true sense of the term, but one that applies to [[One Hundred Percent Completion]]. In the original N64 version of ''[[Banjo
* The NTSC Atari 7800 port of ''[[Impossible Mission (
* In ''[[Sly Cooper|Sly 2: Band of Thieves]]'', saving and quitting during the Canada Games section of of the game makes it impossible to complete the level, rendering the game [[Unwinnable]]. This has a fix built-in, though you do have to backstep a few missions. Just head to the house that contains the safe, and head to said safe. Once Jean Bison yells at his lackeys, you should be able to pull a switch and redo the laser mission.
* In ''[[
** 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.
** The "moon" on the right, which gauges your Play, Create, and Share points (among other things) is completely non-operational, and has remained this way to this day (curiously, it was working fine before the official launch, I.E. before the servers were up).
** Still prancing around is the bug that makes your file completely unable to save new data (and gives no error indicating this. The game only autosaves), apparently brought on by having too many custom/community objects, and it supposedly fixable by deleting all of that and avoiding community objects like the plague. Obviously nobody wants to do this either.
* A [[
* In the PC version of the 1994 platformer ''[[Video Game/Lion King|Lion King]]'', the second level requires you to roar at some monkeys so that you can get them to turn around , allowing you to solve a puzzle. Unfortunately, 90% of the time you enter this level, a bug manifests where your "roar meter" never fills up, thus making it impossible to affect anything with your roar.
* ''[[
* The computer game ''[[
** 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 [[
* An extremely serious glitch can occur in ''[[Donkey Kong Country (video game)|Donkey Kong Country 2]]'' on the vertically-scrolling Castle Crush stage. There is a barrel near the beginning which can be grabbed and broken without being thrown. A demonstration of the glitch can be seen [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1D95R9h7Jqw here]. The glitch can cause the game to crash in some cases, but this could end up being worse than a simple restart or even losing save files (which is another potential result of the glitch). In some cases, the glitch's effects are so severe that they damage the ''game'' beyond repair. An example of the broken ROM can be seen ([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS623XTmr04 here]). Some accounts suggest that this damage even extends to the system or emulator itself. The same issues do not appear to occur in the Virtual Console version.
** 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.
* In ''[[Super Mario Bros. (
* In the earliest copies of ''[[Rayman|Rayman 2]]'' for the PC, at the beginning of the level "The Top of the World", a message will pop up telling you the CD is missing and that you have to insert it to play on, even if it's not. The worst part about this is that the message features a huge picture of a [[Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot|robot pirate]]'s face, so it's [[Jump Scare|pretty much a screamer without the screaming]]. [[Nightmare Fuel]], anyone?
* In ''[[
** Unless there are some copies of the game that aren't functioning properly, all you ever had to do was push the jump button while holding down to let go of the ceiling, just like you would in the first ZX.
* In ''[[Cool World]]'' on NES there's a glitch where if you manage to store up at least ten lives and then die it's an instant game over.
* Due to a poorly designed physics engine, some levels in ''[[Meat Boy
* [[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
** 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.
*''[[The Horde]]'' for the [[
* ''[[Command
* Similarly to the ''[[XCOM Terror From The Deep]]'' example below, ''[[UFO: After Blank|UFO: Aftershock]]'' has a particularly nasty bug that prevents one of the research topics from appearing, making the game [[Unwinnable]]. It was never patched - instead, you had to e-mail your save to the company to fix it. The company went bankrupt. Now the only way of fixing this is finding the forum post that describes editing your save with a hex editor to trigger the appropriate flag.
** ''Aftershock'' can also uninstall anything that runs in the background.
=== 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 skipping
* 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
* ''[[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.
** The auto-dungeon generator in Daggerfall was so buggy that Bethestha finally just threw up their hands and released a patch that turned on the debugging
* 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.
* ''[[The Elder Scrolls|The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion]]'' also has its fair share of bugs, but one notorious one in the [[
** 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...
* [[The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim]] shipped with a rather nasty bug on the [[
* ''[[
** In the PAL version, due to a problem with conversion from NTSC, talking to a certain character in the Haunted House level would cause the disk to freeze and [[Most Annoying Sound|buzz]] [[Hell Is That Noise|endlessly]] until the Wii was turned off completely. Luckily, Nintendo would let you get a new copy, free of charge, but some people just turn their language setting to German and it works fine.
* 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.]]
* Similarly, the original release of ''[[Final Fantasy VI]]'' had the infamous "Sketch bug"—one of your character's commands, when it failed, would have unpredictable results, often rendering the game unplayable. This was quietly repaired, and most cartridges of the game don't have this particular error. The game does have other bugs, but thankfully, they're not as severe or as easy to trigger. Of course, if the game didn't become unplayable after that, you could end up with a bounty of items. Beware using "Sort" afterward, though, because you can lose items in your inventory. The 1.1 release fixed the bug with an [[Obvious Rule Patch]] that can be disabled with a single Pro Action Replay code.
** 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
** The Greatest Hits release of ''Final Fantasy Chronicles'' (which includes [[
** 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
* In ''[[Star Ocean:
* 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.
** The game had several other popular
** 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.
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* 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 the [[
* In ''[[
** 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
* Almost all of the infamous [[Good Bad Bugs|"Glitch Pokémon"]] in [[Pokémon Red and Blue|Pokémon Red/Blue]] that the normal player will encounter are more or less "safe", despite their infamous effect on the player's Hall of Fame data. However, by using the more complicated "Mew Glitch", it's possible to encounter glitched
** Probably the best example is the hang that occurs if you encounter a ♀. In theory, the battle might just go
** 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.
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** 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]].
* In Japan, ''[[Atelier
** The PAL version (or at least, some versions of the PAL version) of ''[[Atelier
* ''[[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 ''[[
* In ''[[
* ''[[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].
* ''[[Wild
** The PAL release of ''[[Wild
* The English release of ''[[Ar
** 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.
* In the obscure 1997 Macintosh-only game ''[[Task Maker]]'', a starving player will eventually die and be sent to Hell. Unless the player can find food ''very'' fast, he will get stuck in an infinite death loop. This carried over to the 1998 sequel ''The Tomb of the Taskmaker'', which never made it past version 1.0 due to the developer's collapse. It was ''finally'' fixed when one of the programmers released an update on his homepage...in ''July 2008''.
* In ''[[
* Some versions of ''[[
* In the first ''[[
* ''[[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.
* ''[[Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al
** Also in [[Mana
* ''[[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''.
* ''[[
* In ''[[Phantasy Star IV]]'', after the fight with Zio, two of your party members leave the group to pursue other things. This frees up enough space for the next two to join up. However, the fight with Zio can be extremely difficult, and the two characters who leave are the ones with the most HP and highest defense (assuming you didn't just equip Rune with two shields), meaning there is a very decent chance that Chaz, Rika, and Rune will all be Near Death when the fight ends. After the cutscene where Gryz and Demi leave, up pops a "Chaz was defeated!" message on the worldmap, and the game ends.
** Also in ''Phantasy Star IV'', there is the legendary "Level 99" glitch, which makes it so that leveling any character to 99 will actually make them ''lose'' skills. While this is true, the actual glitch starts activating around level 96 or so, with characters like Rika suddenly losing hundreds of technique points, and Wren losing the Positron Bolt skill (it still appears in the menu, but has zero uses available). The androids even start gaining a Mental stat (which, being machines, they normally do not), and Demi gains an impressive number of technique points (but no techniques to use them with.)
* The first ''[[
** First, if you do a full save in Beregost (quicksaves and autosaves are fine), it is possible that your file will become corrupted. Thankfully, there's an application that can undo this.
** The second, and arguably more frustrating of the two, is that, after leaving Beregost for the first time, it is possible that from then on, re-entering Beregost in any way, including the console, will cause the game to immediatly crash. Again, there's a workaround to this, but it requires a little bit more effort than the first one.
* ''[[Mass Effect]]'' was rumored to have been tested on one kind of video card and one kind of sound card since it was a port to the PC from the [[
** The background music on the Citadel devolving into a medley of snapping, crackling, hissing and popping.
** {{spoiler|Matriarch Benezia's}} use of Biotic powers would toss the main character ''through the wall'' and out into the empty void surrounding the rendered game area. With the character trapped in the throw animation there was no way to recover or reload and the game had to be force quit.
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** 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.
* [[Mass Effect 2]] would at times send the party floating above the map on the other side of the [[Invisible Wall]] that surrounded normally accessible areas. In effect, you could walk freely where you were not meant to, but there was no way to get back and progress the game, save from performing a biotic charge on a ground bound
** 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.
* ''[[Dragon Age II]]'' has a "stat-leak" bug: if Sebastian and/or Isabela are removed from the party without going through the party organization screen, their Friendship bonuses (+5% damage resistance and attack speed, respectively) are removed from your base score.
** There's also a bug that can make Isabella [[Lost Forever]]. While doing her quest, after you kill the guys that try to ambush you, she'll tell you to loot a guy and find a key. It's quite possible to loot the key before she tells you to, and so the game acts as if you don't have it. Without the key, you can't enter the Chantry and finish her quest; the doors just don't react with you no matter what you try. Saved it after looting the key and don't have a backup? Too bad, you just lost your Rogue. It's still very possible to complete the game without her, so it doesn't become unwinnable, but you miss out on a strong party member.
** Patch 1.04 seems to have introduced more bugs than it fixed...most notably endless load screens that freeze the game during Sebastian's personal quests ("Repentance" and "Faith"). [[Nice Job Breaking It, Hero|Nice job breaking it, BioWare....]]
* There are quite a few bugs in ''[[Lufia 2 Rise of the Sinistrals]]'', both in Japan and in the U.S. The most complicated one is the Submarine Shrine, where a graphics screw-up makes the inside of the shrine almost completely black; however, you can still go up until you stop at {{spoiler|Dual Blade}}, but you just won't see it OR {{spoiler|the [[Big Bad]] himself, Daos}}. Thankfully, this glitch is fixed along with all the other glitches in the Europe/Australia PAL region version.
* [[Fatal Labyrinth]], one of the earlier titles on the [[Sega Genesis]], requires you to venture to the top of a tower with randomly generated floors. To move up to the next floor, you have to search the current floor for the staircase that leads you there. However, because of the randomly generated (and shitty) nature of the game, sometimes it will forget to spawn a staircase. Search the floor all you want. It’s just plain not there, sometimes. Nothing can be done now but to hit the reset button.
* ''[[
* The Game Boy Advance port of ''[[Phantasy Star]] Collection'' is hampered by a bug that will cause everything but the music to freeze after a very short period of play - sometimes, as quick as 15 seconds. It's possible to very slowly make progress in the game by saving frequently (like every minute or so) and hoping it didn't freeze during the save this time, but even in the best case scenario, the game will freeze about 3 minutes after starting every time. While saving that frequently could theoretically allow someone to beat the games, it'd take the patience of a bodhisattva.
=== 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
** 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.]
* ''[[Sigma Star Saga]]'' has the Forgotten Planet bug. Normally, when you are pulled into a battle, you must shoot down a certain number of enemies to win and continue the main story, and the stage will loop until you do. But killing a "tombstone" enemy occasionally bypasses the "end battle" trigger, meaning the stage will endlessly loop but no new enemies will spawn, making it [[Unwinnable]]. The "endless loop" bug was also present in the Forgotten Planet's boss level. Word of advice: don't level up during it.
* [[Star Fox (
* ''[[Gradius]] Gaiden'''s 7th stage, a [[Nostalgia Level|volcano stage]] [[Subverted Trope|that gets sucked into a black hole]], slows down horribly on a PS2. Hope you have a PS1 lying around somewhere...
* The Commodore64 port of ''[[R
=== 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.
** A lesser, but similar glitch (since fixed) occurred in ''Harvest Moon DS'', where errors in the way the game kept certain stats and missing unbuyable items made it impossible to unlock the Harvest Goddess or Witch Princess as eligible brides. The game may also randomly freeze and the save file randomly corrupt. The fixed version still suffers from the occasional, but rare, freezing.
** In ''[[Harvest Moon]]: Tree Of Tranquility'', the player cannot marry Calvin due to a glitch (fixed in newer copies of the game) that freezes the game for the five-heart event, which the player must complete before marrying him. The company recommends "not getting his heart level too high" if you want to go into the mine (as that's where his event takes place). If you are a male or already married, there is no longer a problem.
** 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.
* ''[[The Sims]] 2'' and its expansions tend to be buggy. Most of them aren't game-breakers, but then you get the things like object-corrupting RC cars, self-deleting portals whenever a player character juggles something, and repeatedly spawning NPCs. To EA's credit, they ''did'' fix that latter one quickly, but the modders got to it first. MATY & Simbology > EAxis. Also, there are [https://web.archive.org/web/20111230061951/http://dozerfleetwiki2.wiki-site.com/index.php/List_of_conditions_that_can_lock_up_The_Sims_2 multitudes of reasons] not to abuse the game's cheat codes.
** 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.
** In The Sims 3: World Adventures, it is highly recommended that one make a backup of their save file before going on a vacation since returning back to your neighborhood has been known to do things like make your Sim be married or be the parent to some random Townies or just outright corrupting the entire save file. And who could forget, in the early patches at least, [http://www.modthesims.info/wiki.php?title=Game_Help:Sims_3_Blue_Lots_Issue Blue Lot Syndrome]?
** The Sims 3 is generally like this whenever a new EP is released. EA will usually release a patch within a few weeks to combat the problem . . . [[Serial Escalation|but then said patch usually causes 5 more problems to spring up in its place.]] It's like an endless wack-a-mole game for the programmers and makes one wonder if they actually bothered to test these expansions properly before releasing them to the public.
* ''[[Animal Crossing]]'', of all games, has some in its handheld incarnation. Most notable is a glitch that would make the game freeze upon visiting an animal's birthday party, forcing a reset and an earful from Resetti. While this particular glitch may not show up for years, once it starts happening it's impossible to STOP it happening, meaning that you can never visit one of these parties again.
** Also from the handheld version, one can obtain broken items that, if dropped, can never be picked back up, can create buildings, change the terrain, or ''prevent the game from loading past the title screen''. Needless to say, [[Jerkass|certain people]] take great pride in deliberately sabotaging peoples' games through the Internet. Although only people on your friend list could enter your town via friend codes (the games don't allow towns to be visited by anyone not on your list), you had no way of telling if someone was nice or a griefer until it's either too late or you watched them like a hawk.
* ''[[Black and White|Black And White 2]]'' was impossible to even ''start'' playing if you didn't have a mouse that had a scroll wheel, ''and'' was made by either Microsoft or Logitech. The initial release of the game wouldn't let you skip the tutorial, which at one point requires you to use your mouse's scroll wheel to zoom in or out to continue. That's right - ''they didn't test the game on any laptops or PCs with older/cheaper mice.'' Moreover, the box gives you no indication that you need a scroll-wheel mouse in the "System Requirements" section. They finally "fixed" it in the first patch by letting you skip the tutorial...but it penalized you for doing so, which caused people to wonder just whether the developers were in cahoots with Microsoft and/or Logitech to sell more of their mice.
** Wouldn't surprise me if Lionhead really was back then. Lionhead these days pretty much exclusively works for Microsoft (either the Xbox platform or Windows). As for their Logitech connection: both ''Black and White'' and ''Black and White 2'' had bonus quests and additional dialogue if you owned a Logitech iFeel Mouseman, a mouse with [[Force Feedback]] technology.
* In [[Trauma Center]], Mature Kyriaki gets upset if the first slice is sutured too quickly, and basically "says" ''[[Screw This, I'm Outta Here|Fuck this I'm going home.]]'' And then it fails to spawn, making the operation unwinnable.
* The original ''[[Creatures]]'' had "Sudden Import Death Syndrome", which is exactly what it sounds like: occasionally, for no apparent reason, a creature would simply die on import.
** ''[[Creatures|Creatures 2]],'' perhaps due to its rushed release, was full of bugs both minor and game-crashing. "One Hour Stupidity Syndrome", caused by a problem with the orignal genome (the simulation itself was working ''exactly as it was supposed to'',) was especially infamous for making afflicted Norns essentially unable to survive after a while as they'd refuse to eat or sleep.
=== 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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* 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.
** ''NCAA Football 12'' includes showstopping bugs in Online Dynasty mode whereby the game can sometimes override a user game's score with a simmed game, resulting in a loss where there once was a win. It can even ''create'' a game out of whole cloth, showing a loss for a user ''on a bye week.'' This in a sport where even a single loss can cost you a National Championship bid. Then there is the possibility that the game might refuse to advance the week at all, a
* ''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.
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=== Stealth Based Game ===
* An enemy in a certain room in ''[[Beyond Good
** 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.
* In ''[[Clock Tower (
* There's a bug like this in [[System Shock]] 2, where, near the end of the game, you're required to {{spoiler|blow up some shuttles on SHODAN's orders.}} The only problem is, you need a resonator in order to take down the shuttles' shields; you can purchase one from a replicator nearby, but the problem is that a lot of people have recorded hacking the replicator at the 'wrong time' only to be completely unable to purchase the resonator. This makes it impossible to progress, as you need that resonator to proceed with the rest of the story. Thankfully, there is a cheat code that can summon the resonator and ameliorate things somewhat.
* In ''[[Resident Evil Outbreak]]'', occasionally a player using Alyssa's ad-libs during the very first scenario would cause the game to hang. Thankfully averted when an AI-controlled Alyssa use them...which is [[Most Annoying Sound|all the time]].
=== 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.
* The Gamecube version of ''[[True Crime: Streets of LA]]'' had several hives' worth of bugs. The worst was one that would corrupt your memory card; essentially, it would wipe ALL your saves, and make it impossible to save anything ELSE on the same card.
* In ''[[Star Wars Battlefront]] II'', you can randomly fall through the ground. It's rare, and you can respawn, but you lose a soldier/reinforcement point on your side every time you respawn. Granted, it doesn't ''really'' break the game, but it's supremely annoying.
** A particularly annoying one pops up on occasion when using Han Solo, if you have the points for or have permanently unlocked the [[Sniper Pistol|precision pistol]]: you switch from his pistol to his repair gear, and ''cannot switch back''. This leaves you with no damage-dealing capacity beyond five remote-detonate bombs until you die.
* [[
* 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.
* ''[[Ghostbusters the Video Game]]'' for both the 360 and the [[
=== 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]].
* ''[[Fire Emblem:
** ''[[Fire Emblem Jugdral|Fire Emblem: Genealogy of Holy War]]'' has a nasty bug that can
** 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.
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* 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 ''[[Super Robot Wars Destiny]]'', a programming error makes it so that Super Robot-types end up raising their armor stats by 50 points, making it so that, when they reach max level, their armor is still pathetic. This makes machines such as [[Mazinger Z]], [[Great Mazinger]], [[UFO Robo Grendizer]] and ''[[
=== Wide Open Sandbox ===
* [[Dwarf Fortress]]
** In older versions, if you happen to be on a map containing a stream with [[Legendary Carp|carp]] in it, you are doomed. Carp were [[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. Much worse in an Evil place: undead creatures randomly appear in evil areas and 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''.
** 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]].
** In a later 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.
*** 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.
** 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.
** In fact, using cheat codes in some games in the series will cause some hidden packages to disappear, making it impossible to get [[One Hundred Percent Completion]]. This is done intentionally, but it would have been nice to have some in-game warning first.
** The Malibu crash (for lack of a better name), exclusive to the PC version (and possibly the [[
* 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.
** Also, if you attempt to play basketball in Madd Dogg's mansion, all basketballs on the world map will be deleted from the game, meaning you can't play it again in that particular save. This one is minor, since basketball is not needed for [[
** 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.
* On lower-end systems that are well within the demands on the back of the box, the PC version of ''GTA 4'' occasionally fails to load surfaces and objects. At speed, you can slam into concrete barriers that simply didn't appear until you hit them. It's also possible to go down a ramp into nothing because the walls, floor, and ceiling failed to load. Also, doing anything to the music (such as changing radio station, skipping a track on the user track player, the user track player simply loading another track) can cause a short section of music to repeat endlessly, with the game crashing shortly afterwards. You have a good minute of knowing that no matter what you do, your progress since the last save is gone.
** Also in ''[[Grand Theft Auto IV|GTA4]]'' it was entirely possible to end up under the game map, especially in the western harbor part of Algonquin island. People would not see you, but you could see them. And shoot them. It required a jump in the water and swimming/hugging a part of the docks at the right angle, if you get lucky and the waves hit a low spot, you are phased through the walls.
* ''[[Bully (
** Another glitch in the game, while not game breaking per se, it completely ANNOYING. After finding all 75 rubberbands for the rubberband ball, the game is prone to breaking and [even though you still have it in your inventory] the rubberband ball is inaccessable.
* 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|
** More fun from ''Mercenaries 2:'' After March
* ''[[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...
** If you attempt to skip either of the two migration cutscenes in said stage, your creature will be stuck in its egg and won't hatch. You're forced to go back to your last save and lose your progress.
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** Spore creates files in your documents folder for the things you create that you can copy and give to your friends. The common dangers of force-shutting-down your computer while a game is running become worse because of this. When reinstalling Spore, you HAVE to tell it to get rid of your old creations, because they are now corrupt and their presence prevents Spore from running. Imagine you had made hundreds of creations on that thing...
** A few gamers complained that Planet Editor on Galactic Adventures crashed their computer. Completely. Every time they tried to use it.
** It is possible for your starting nest in the creature stage (Where you first spawn), to appear wrongly, namely underwater. This in itself is not game-breaking, but the problem is that if you try to go on land, the [sea monster Border Patrol] comes and kills you, making the only way to progress be to search the coast in the hope that some creature is swimming.
* The US release of ''[[Way of the Samurai]] 3'' has an irritating bug with respect to the Records screen. Said screen is the only way to check what you have and have not done successfully. It's also where you see what you did to get the title you just got. One of the stats is Favourite Weapon. If it's a custom-made (forged) weapon, the game goes into an infinite loop, requiring the power button on the console to be pressed to turn it off. Fortunately, it doesn't cripple save data, and it can be fixed simply by starting a run, grabbing a randomly dropped sword, going to your house, pulling it out, leaving the console on overnight (unpaused), and then leaving Amana.
** Alternatively, if you've used that forged sword for over 24 hours of game time, you may be better off starting a new game on the save file, discarding the sword, abusing the forging system to make a roughly-equal sword out of a random sword, and then leave Amana, as this will guarantee that the stat will default to another weapon.
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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 ===
* 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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* 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.''
** Tricking the player is half the fun in ''[[Eternal Darkness]]''. Most of the
* 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.
** There was a similar bug in an early version of Mac OS (c. 1995 or so) that also came packaged with a generic Chess game. If you tried to lure the computer into a Fool's Mate the computer would not only ignore the checkmate, but would move twice before letting the game continue as normal.
** It could be an urban legend but it is said that one of the early chess supercomputers was programmed to make the best move. Unfortunately this meant that where it could deliver mate in more than one way it would go into a loop to decide which was 'best' and lose on time.
* ''[[Action 52]]'' has games which have tons and tons of these bugs. Actually, it's more like a big bug with bits of games in it.
** The most infamous one is the NES version of Ooze. Active Enterprises held a contest saying that the first person who could get past level 5 wins $104,000. Sadly, the game freezes near the end of level 3 making it [[Unwinnable|impossible to win.]]
** On the third level of Lollipops, the Glitch Gremlin invades the soundchip and [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHMOorKpIKM permanently messes up the music].
** ''Alfredo'' and ''Jigsaw'' completely fail to load most of the time, even on emulators.
* One of the minigames in the first ''[[Raving Rabbids
** There's another minigame where, at least on the Wii version, you're required to find a hidden Rabbid using the sound coming out of your Wiimote's speaker. However, there's a bug that happens 9 times out of ten where all you'll hear coming out of the Wiimote's speaker is static.
* ''[[
* In ''[[Backyard Sports|Backyard Football 2006]]'', if you throw the ball backward, the camera just zooms out...and zooms out...and zooms out without calling an incomplete pass. Then you have to start the season game all over again.
* ''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.
** ‘’Cooking Mama’’ has this if you use cheat systems. Normally, infinite time is great because it allows you to get very good every time unless you cock up in some other way. But if you are in a task where time is essential to winning (like seperating egg yolks) thus rendering you to get bronze, which ruins your chances of [[
* ''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.
* ''[[Portal (
* ''[[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).
* 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 "IKAAAE"<ref>Changes the value at address $8080 to $4D</ref> 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''.
==
* [[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]].}}
== [[Western Animation]] ==
* ''[[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.
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