Game Breaking Bug: Difference between revisions

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{{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 ''[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.

[[Game Breaking Bug|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.

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== Action Adventure ==

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

* ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess|The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess]]'' was [[Unwinnable|impossible to finish]] if the player saved and quit at the wrong time after crossing a bridge [[Broken Bridge|which subsequently gets broken]]. A required character would also turn invisible if the player saved and quit in the wrong area. He could still be utilized, so the game was not unbeatable, but this was still a frustrating bug.

** 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: Link's Awakening|The Legend of Zelda Links Awakening]]'', you can buy a shovel, then trade it for a boomerang. However, at that point, you can buy a second shovel, leaving you with both. Since the game's inventory is limited to ''exactly'' how many items you're actually supposed to pick up, carrying both shovel and 'rang leaves you unable to pick up the last item in the game, which of course is required to win. Oops. So you try to solve the problem by wasting all of your Magic Powder to free up that one extra space in your inventory. Now you can grab that final item! In turn, however, this does render the Final Nightmare's first form literally impossible to beat. Double oops. (''[[The Legend of Zelda Oracle Games]]'', which play very similarly to ''Link's Awakening'', including having an item system that works about the same way, avert this by seemingly having been made with the staff aware of this bug; this pair of games actually has enough spaces that several will ''never'' be filled, even when no items are equipped and everything is filling a slot.)

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** ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword|The Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword]]'' features a game breaker of its own--after completing the Thunder Dragon's portion of the song during the Song of the Hero quest, if you go and talk to Golo the Goron and have not started the other two quests yet, the event triggers will not happen and the game orginally could not be completed until in early 2012 when Nintendo released a patching program on the Wii that downloads the patch and fixes save files.

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

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

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

** As did ''[[Puyo Puyo]] 15th Anniversary'' -- the game stopped saving after [[Powers of Two Minus One|255]] auto-saves. This got fixed in a re-release of the game, however.

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== Action Game ==

* An entire page could be spent listing the various [[Game Breaking Bug|Game Breaking Bugs]] in ''Hidden And Dangerous''; fortunately, this got better with patches and an eventual free re-release.

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

** 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.

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

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

* The 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 method -- he would travel across the screen in a certain number of seconds no matter how slow the computer was. In one plot point, Rosella is in the ogre's house and must reach the door before he caught her, only possible on PCs which ran the game at the intended speed. The only way around this was to take the saved game file to a faster computer and play that scene there.

* 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).

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** 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 from Monkey Island]]'' has a nasty bug in the PC version of the game. At one point you're in a sushi restaurant, and you have to stick a fork in a track on a table to stop a sushi boat moving. This is intended to cause the chef to come out of the kitchen and if you are quick, you are able to grab something from the kitchen. In the [[PlayStation 2]] version, this is fine. In the PC version, however, you can hear the chef say his dialogue before you've actually done this task, and far worse, when you've done it there is nowhere near enough time to go into the kitchen and get what you need before you get thrown out. The game was originally designed for Windows 98/2000/ME with certain graphics cards, anything more powerful will run the game but likely cause issues.

** The [[PlayStation 2]] version had a nasty (and seemly random glitch) that causes Guybrush to be permanently rooted to the spot and nothing seems to get him moving again.

* 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.

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== Fighting Game ==

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

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

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

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

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

* A [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsowWUfMMWk glitch] that ends the round in a similar way exists in the early arcade version of ''[[Blaz Blue Calamity Trigger]]'', when grabbed as Rachel, if you break the throw and casts her wind drive downwards at the same time, her opponent remains completely frozen and invincible until the time runs out if a time limit is set. If her opponent is Carl, the Carl player can still move his puppet while being stuck in this state, though.

* A [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsowWUfMMWk glitch] that ends the round in a similar way exists in the early arcade version of ''[[Blaz Blue: Calamity Trigger]]'', when grabbed as Rachel, if you break the throw and casts her wind drive downwards at the same time, her opponent remains completely frozen and invincible until the time runs out if a time limit is set. If her opponent is Carl, the Carl player can still move his puppet while being stuck in this state, though.

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

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** 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.

* ''[[Daikatana]]'' has a host of these, including a glitch in the Lair of Medusa level where, when played in co-op, the player can get stuck to the floor when spawning, and get stuck in an infinite loop of respawns and telefrags by the other players. The only way to get out of it is to noclip past that spot.

** 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 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.

* ''[[GoldenEye 007 (1997 video game)|GoldenEye]]'' has one with the Invisible Bond cheat. When activated, enemies can't see you, but neither can NPCs. Because of this, they can't give Bond crucial items or other things to complete objectives, making the level unwinnable. However, since it is a cheat you can turn on and off at will, it doesn't pose much of a problem, and most players would be using cheats to screw around anyway.

* 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 Trilogy|Marathon]] Eternal'' is a [[Game Mod|fan-made game]] using the open source version the engine. On the level "Roots and Radicals", there's a medium-sized room which spawns endless amounts of Enemy and Weapons sprites, not to mention unlimited Helpful Drones. Now, there is a wall next to the spawning pad which can not only be switched on to block off the troopers but smash them during their short run outside that area. Let them spawn instead of blocking off the path can make the game Unwinnable because Alephone will block off Hit Detection due to memory usage exceeding limits.

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

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

* The Activision PC game ''Revolution'' had a level that actually could not be beaten without a cheat code. A patch supposedly fixed it, but it would not work on existing saves (requiring that the game be completely started over). [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.

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* ''[[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 on the Tin|Living Bomb]] debuff cast by Baron Geddon in Molten Core which causes the victim to violently explode, obliterating everything in range of the blast. Needless to say, a crafty warlock quickly got his pet infected and released it in a crowded auction house...

** In what may qualify as a [[Crowning Moment of Awesome]] (or at least a Crowning Moment Of Geeky) for the researcher involved, the [[wikipedia:Corrupted Blood incident|Corrupted Blood Incident]] was the subject of an article in the real-world scientific journal ''Epidemiology'', examining the spread of the disease through the virtual world, complete with analysis of the effects of NPC "carriers" and "terrorists" who deliberately spread it for malicious reasons. The CDC contacted Blizzard on the subject. So the spread of a fictional disease among digital characters in a game made it into a scientific journal as a possible model for the spread of real-world diseases.

** 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.

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* ''[[Space Station Silicon Valley]]'' on N64 is impossible to win with [[Hundred-Percent Completion]] because a required item couldn't be picked up.

* 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 [[PlayStation 2|PS2s]]; it's possible for your game save to randomly become corrupt whenever you try to save. If you're lucky, you can overwrite the save and keep going. If you're unlucky, ''the whole save file becomes corrupt,'' leaving you with an undeletable file that the game tries to read but can't. [http://boardsus.playstation.com/playstation/board/message?board.id=jak3&thread.id=122179 There are ways to avoid it], but fixing the latter is out of the question, short of buying a different model of [[PlayStation 2]], buying a cheat device or doing some modding to fix/delete the data.

* 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]].

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** The first [[Sonic Adventure]] had [[Game Breaking Bug|Game Breaking Bugs]] that doubled as [[Good Bad Bugs]], and vice versa. These bugs allowed characters to access levels or parts of levels that they normally couldn't, and could also access stages out of order. However, doing this could cause glitches that, at best, made the level unbeatable, and at worst, made the game unbeatable. One of these is the bug that allows Knuckles to enter Casinopolis early. While you can play through the level without a incident, the problem occurs when you beat it; Tikal whisks Knuckles away to the past . . . and he's stuck there. The game doesn't necessarily freeze, as Knuckles is still able to move around and explore. However, Tikal and her father are glitched in a way that has them standing in midair. This prevents the cutscene that ends this sequence from playing, making it literally impossible for Knuckles to ever leave the past.

** [[Obvious Beta|Let's not get started]] with [[Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 (video game)|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.

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** 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 [[PlayStation 2]] demo version of ''[[Viewtiful Joe]] 2'' had a severe bug that caused all other data on the memory card to be erased by just playing the demo.

* 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.

* ''[[LostWinds]]'' is unfortunately affected with a bug where Toku occasionally gets stuck in the ground after a long fall. Effects can range from him being unable to jump (either over small ledges or with Gust) to being completely stuck. Sadly, the only way to get out is to reset. If you haven't saved recently, sucks to be you...fortunately, the game does autosave at various points in the game, and the game is short, so even if you don't use the save pillars, you'll probably never go that far back.

* The computer game ''[[Jazz Jackrabbit]]'' had a bug or level design error that allowed you to get stuck in walls and ceilings, either by jumping or being spring-boarded into them. The cheat code for teleporting could also transport you into them. With cheat codes, it was possible to escape; otherwise, all you could do was restart.

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* An extremely serious glitch can occur in ''[[Donkey Kong Country|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. (video game)|Super Mario Bros]]. Deluxe'' for [[Game Boy Color]], if you earn the Yoshi Medal at the same time as the Red Coins or High Score medals in Challenge mode, you'll only get the Yoshi medal, and the others will be [[Lost Forever]].

* 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?

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*** 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 [[Three DO Interactive Multiplayer|3DO]] was infamous at the time for deleting all your save files of other games. A fixed version was released after great outcry.

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

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

* Similarly to the ''[[XCOM Terror From The Deep]]'' example below, ''[[UFO Afterblank|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.

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

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

* ''[[Makai Toushi SaGa]]'', released in the US as ''The Final Fantasy Legend'' had a lot of strange bugs, including warps, area glitches, character corruption, extreme increases in travel speed, and a [[Good Bad Bugs|one-hit-kill that works even on the final boss]], which [http://magweasel.com/2009/07/06/the-final-fantasy-legend/ when exploited ruthlessly] make it possible to [http://www.destructoid.com/this-is-how-you-beat-final-fantasy-legend-in-two-minutes-138937.phtml finish the game in under two minutes]. That's less time than the ending credits take.

* In ''[[Star Ocean: The Last Hope]]'', sometimes when the player or the CPU-controlled partner casts the spell Silence on an enemy, if the spell misses, "Miss !" will remain displayed on the top of the foe until the battle ends, and after that, the game freezes, forcing the player to reset. Fortunately, the player can manually prevent the IA from casting that spell, which is a [[Useless Useful Spell]] anyway. In the [[PlayStation 3]] port of this game, the glitch still remains. It was also reported that playing the [[PlayStation 3]] version with the Playstation Network still running in the background occasionally freezes the game, so the player better has to play the game 100% offline, as it doesn't feature any online mode anyway.

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

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

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

* 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 Pokémon -- and glitched ''Trainers'' -- who can severely mess up in battle, crashing your game. The upside is that the crashes are frequently so spectacular, [[Good Bad Bugs|they might just be worth seeing anyway.]]

** Probably the best example is the hang that occurs if you encounter a ♀. In theory, the battle might just go fine -- but we'll never know, because ♀'s cry never completes. The music code that gets loaded is an infinite loop. The cool thing is that it doesn't ''sound'' like an infinite loop, because it actually spans portions of the audio chip's RAM, which can get changed between cycles.

** 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.

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* In Japan, ''[[Atelier Series|Atelier Liese]]'' shipped with an ''absolutely terrifying'' number of game-wrecking bugs; it was the worst QA job in Gust Inc.'s history. The full bug list is available [http://www.atelier-lise.jp here] (in Japanese). A corrected version of the game was shipped out, but by then the press had already eviscerated the game publicly.

** The PAL version (or at least, some versions of the PAL version) of ''[[Atelier Series|Atelier Iris [[Eternal Mana]]]]'' had an irritating bug ''right'' at the very end of the game where it would crash during the ending sequence. This was doubly annoying as not only was it impossible to see the entire ending, but you also couldn't get a completed save file as a result, preventing you from playing the [[New Game+]].

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

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

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

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* In the first ''[[Mega Man Star Force]]'' game, it was possible to get stuck between an NPC and a wall. If you did this while not on a Wave Road, the only way to get out was to reset and load from your last save, and hopefully you knew better than to save while stuck. Later games fixed this problem by briefly allowing you to run ''through'' NPCs if you get stuck.

* ''[[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 Revis]]'' has this in the bonus dungeon. Any monster past a certain floor except the bosses have a high chance of freezing the game over any little thing either they or you do, combined with how long a fight with them can be due to their insane stats and it is pure luck if you can get 100% completion. Also in part 2 there is a bonus boss in the first chapter on your second play through who has an attack that freezes the game as well. As with the ''[[Ar tonelico II: Melody of Metafalica]]'' example above, NISA is very bad at playtesting their localizations.

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

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

* ''[[Mega Man Battle Network]] 5'' had a nasty bug that would render you unable to plug-in or start a Liberate Mission (both vital to storyline progress) after the end of a Liberate Mission if the last two digits of your maximum HP in hexadecimal format were 01 or 02. For example, if your max HP was 2562, in hexadecimal it would be 0A02, which would trigger the bug. Meanwhile, a max HP of 306 would be 0132 in hexadecimal, which would be safe. Thankfully, max HP increased in increments of 20, so only two such max HP values (770 and 2050; 0302 and 0802 in hexadecimal respectively) were possible to achieve without the -1 penalty to max HP from each direct use of Dark Chips (which were far inferior to using them for Chaos Soul Unison anyways), and both required you to have an odd number of HP+ 50s equipped.

* 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 ''[[Baldur's Gate]]'' has the now infamous Beregost Bug, which comes in two frustrating flavors:

** 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 [[Xbox]] 360. The result was a buggy crashy mess that generated tons of complaints and took months to fix through a combination of game and driver patches. Examples include:

** The background music on the Citadel devolving into a medley of snapping, crackling, hissing and popping.

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** 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.

* ''[[Dungeons of Dredmor]]'' is a fairly buggy game, but usually it's something minor like stats not applying or the [[Player Character]] accidentally eating their own belt. But when Wand Lore was overhauled so you could craft your own magic wands, the tool you needed would crash the game most of the time. At least you got an achievement for it!

* 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.

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** 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 (series)|Star ~~Fox~~]] 64 has a very rare heartbreaker; after beating Star Wolf on Hard Venom (the last level of the game), Fox decides to go it alone from here. The CPU will control Fox's ship to the tunnel that leads to Andross. Problem is, if you're at ''exactly'' the wrong distance or angle away from the tunnel, the ship will just keep calmly circling around the tunnel and never get any closer. Video [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0o3h6Moi0k here.] Round and round we go!

* [[Star Fox (series)|Star FOX]] 64 has a very rare heartbreaker; after beating Star Wolf on Hard Venom (the last level of the game), Fox decides to go it alone from here. The CPU will control Fox's ship to the tunnel that leads to Andross. Problem is, if you're at ''exactly'' the wrong distance or angle away from the tunnel, the ship will just keep calmly circling around the tunnel and never get any closer. Video [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0o3h6Moi0k here.] Round and round we go!

* ''[[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-Type]]'' has a bug that makes the first boss [[Unwinnable By Mistake|unbeatable]].

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** 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 [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.

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** 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.

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

** More fun from ''Mercenaries 2:'' After March 17th, 2010, the game no longer plays if you have an internet connection, because ''EA has shut down all of its servers for Mercenaries 2.'' Instead of simply giving an error message, the game gets stuck "Connecting to EA server" ''forever'' and freezes up completely. Thanks, EA.

* ''[[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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* 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.]]

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*** 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.

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* In most NES games, using a a game genie device and entering the code: "IKAAAE" corrupts important data in the cartridge, and as a result, the game becomes a total mess that's liable to crash.

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

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

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

* There were a few instances where this happened in ''[[Legends of the Hidden Temple]]'', specifically when they reached the temple itself and the game was rendered [[Unwinnable By Mistake]]. A few teams lost time because they couldn't open the door despite completing the obstacle. (Sometimes it didn't register a button press) However, one of the absolute ''worst'' cases was in "The war fan of the forty seven ronin", wherein a temple door closed and re-locked behind one contestant, who subsequently got ejected from the temple. Their partner came into the temple next, and was stopped by a door that their partner ''just'' passed through.