Every video game should be awesome, but...we know that’s not the case.
So, we’ll usually just settle for video games at least being functional.
Unfortunately, many video games ship with glitches that make them impassable, or just
outright ridiculous.
Here are a few bugs that destroyed perfectly good games, and should have sent their programmers
looking for new work.
Ducked up
It's a simple game about hunting delicious birds for sport, but even Nintendo’s Duck
Hunt was published with a game-breaking glitch.
If you can endure your snickering dog for 99 levels of bird-murdering fun, that's it.
There's nothing there.
Your reward is "Round 0," a foul purgatory where immortal birds disappear and reappear
at random.
The game ends, proving that there's no reward for duck genocide, in real life or in Nintendo.
Now for the real challenge: loading those thousands of duck corpses into your pickup
truck.
The missing Pokemon
In the olden days, there were only 151 Pokémon, and that was good enough.
Because of programming limitations, the original Game Boy games left spots for 256 different
encounters in Pokémon Red and Blue.
151 slots were filled with Pokémon, others with trainers, and 39 spots were left empty.
If you follow a specific sequence of actions, you'll encounter the mess of code called "MissingNo"
and be able to capture it.
But doing so can cause game-breaking errors in other parts of your save.
Sometimes, you shouldn't catch 'em all.
Crappy holidays
Back in the day, Sony's video game magazine, PlayStation Underground, would regularly send
out preview discs to their subscribers, but around Christmas of 2004, PlayStation 2 owners
were in for a pretty terrible surprise.
Unfortunately, the PlayStation Underground Holiday 2004 Demo disc would destroy the save
data on any memory card still plugged into its system, regardless of the game.
Sony sent out warnings, but it was too late.
“Stop, don’t, come back”
Gamers lost thousands of hours of playtime data when their memory cards were blanked
out.
For many players, those hours had been invested in the recently-shipped Grand Theft Auto:
San Andreas.
Just think of all those un-murdered civilians.
Boss loss
Bubble Bobble Revolution on the Nintendo DS includes one of the dumbest bugs ever released.
What should have been a simple remake of a hundred-level game was accidentally cut short
at Level 30, for no other reason than the programmers forgot to put in a boss.
Because the boss battle was an essential trigger to move on to Level 31, the game was simply
unbeatable.
Codemasters eventually replaced the bugged carts, but they’ll never live down the unmitigated
duncery of their mistake.
Object overload
The massive glitch found in The Elder Scrolls 4: Shivering Isles is also pretty simple:
if you play too much of this Oblivion expansion, your game will crash.
Because of a programming issue, the PC version of the expansion would freeze once its memory
was full of background data.
This was because that data wasn’t being recycled when it was no longer in use.
Bethesda pushed out a fix after about a month, and the irony that a game expansion called
Shivering Isles had severe freezing issues was lost on no one.
Don't change a thing
The SoulCalibur series includes a pretty solid string of fighting games, but a terrible bug
in the third installment nearly derailed the whole thing for PlayStation 2 users.
The error doesn't manifest as part of the game itself, but rather when players attempt
to change, move, copy, or delete any of their older save data associated with any their
games.
The glitch can potentially destroy or corrupt all of the data on a player's memory card.
While gamers have been able to figure out workarounds, like saving on a separate memory
card for just this one game, no amount of jiggle physics is worth losing all of your
games.
Infinitely easy
Players may furiously debate whether or not the introduction of "infinite spin" to Tetris
Worlds was a glitch or not, but it's game-breaking enough to be considered a travesty either
way.
By repeatedly hitting the "spin" button, a player can keep a Tetris piece in the air
indefinitely, which is a totally cheap move.
The official Tetris company unconvincingly denies that the inclusion of this cheater
move is a glitch, but the easy spin was made optional in subsequent games.
But still, it’s not the worst thing to ever happen to Tetris.
That credit goes to appearing in Pixels.
No signal
Batman already has it tough enough, but in Batman: Dark Tomorrow, he’s pretty much
doomed from the start.
The only way to really beat villain R'as al Ghul is to find a signal device hidden somewhere…
Except the game never tells you where it is, or that it even exists.
While it's one of the most Kafkaesque video game twists of all time, no one plays video
games to feel like a giant, helpless bug.
And making a game with no direction about how to actually win is a pretty big bug, indeed.
Faceoff
Ubisoft should've taken its time to give Assassin's Creed Unity a proper debut as the first next-gen
exclusive of the series.
Instead, it was rushed out the door with a plethora of glitches, clipping issues, and
animation hiccups, which is a bad look considering the countless number of Assassin's Creed titles
before it.
Even after the patches, Unity still has more bugs than the courtesans of Paris.
The worst offense?
A glitch during cutscenes that caused faces to disappear, resulting in a horrifying, grotesque
visage of hair, eyeballs, teeth, and gums floating above characters' clothes.
We hope someone at Ubisoft got the guillotine for deciding to ship this ugly, unfinished
product.
Every part of Superman 64
When a game starts out by covering everything in a "Kryptonite fog" because it can't render
its own graphics, you know you're off to a bad start.
Regarded as one of the worst games of all time, Superman: The New Adventures found an
audience among small, stupid children, but is so full of game-crushing glitches that
it's considered unplayable.
Here’s the catch, though: The whole game takes place in a virtual reality programmed
by Lex Luthor, so maybe Lex is just a really, really terrible programmer.
From that perspective, this is actually the most clever game of all time.
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