Who says a video game has to actually work to be unforgettable?
No matter how many hours developers spend making a game as polished as possible, some
technical bugs are bound to make it through.
Newer games, like the PC version of Arkham Knight, may take those glitches to a new level,
but sometimes, the most unbelievable errors can be found in the games of yesterday.
Make sure to let us know in the comments below if we missed any big ones!
Here are Screen Rant’s 10 Worst Video Game Glitches.
Dragon’s Dogma
These days, no triple-A role playing game is complete without the chance to romance
an in-game character.
But not all games deal with love the way you would think.
The RPG Dragon’s Dogma let players choose who would be their romantic target, only to
see them taken hostage before the final battle.
What players didn’t know was that no matter how many hours spent chatting up a local barmaid,
the game just chose a romance based on time spent in conversation.
Players were stunned when the final battle saw a general store owner, blacksmith, or
even court jester revealed as their true love – the love scene that followed made this
mistake one for the ages.
Assassin’s Creed Unity
No next-gen game is without some flaws, but AC Unity’s mistakes ranged from tiny to
game-breaking.
Players could laugh when enraged NPCs stumbled into dramatic cut scenes, but the most widespread
glitch had to do with character’s faces… or the lack of them.
It eventually became a famous online joke among players, but no player will forget the
first time they witnessed the real horrors of the digital French Revolution.
Red Dead Redemption
As open worlds get bigger and bigger, the unpredictable mistakes become more and more
frequent.
For Rockstar Games western mega-hit, the most unforgettable glitch occurred when, an animal
in the world wouldn’t be rendered with its own skin, but appear with a human model grafted
onto it.
The result was donkey women that could be ridden through the countryside, human beings
flying like birds, and our personal favorite, the hilarious but deadly man-cougar.
They’re freakish, but Red Dead’s “Manimals” are the kind of glitch we can live with.
Call of Duty
In the world of Call of Duty multiplayer, anything that CAN happen, WILL happen.
But players of Modern Warfare 3 were confused to realize that if a flag carrier in an online
match managed to kill an opposing player, they would respawn without their head.
That was a funny enough glitch, but the other soldiers clearly disagreed.
Apparently the horror of the headless soldier was too much for his teammates to handle:
ANY player who witnessed him without a head was booted from the game.
Not all battle scars are physical.
Madden NFL 15
Sports simulations pride themselves on recreating a game down to blades of grass, but somehow,
Christian Kirksey, the rookie linebacker for the Cleveland Browns was too much to handle.
For some reason, the 6’2”, 235-pound player was rendered just shy of a foot tall in one
of the game’s online challenge.
Rather than fix the bug, the developers embraced the tale of the Tiny Titan, and so did Kirksey.
The glitch was taken with a sense of humor, probably due to the fact that despite his
size, the Tiny Titan still had the hitting power of his real-life counterpart.
Minecraft
No video game has skyrocketed to global popularity like Minecraft, where players build entire
empires on randomly-generated and populated online servers.
But as simple as the cube-based game may be, thing start to get a bit…
weird when you head to the game world’s borders.
Early players who headed for the edges of the game’s map – now known as the Far
Lands – soon saw reality itself start to break, as layers of Earth hovered in the air,
constantly, flowing sand from the sky made frame rates drop to game-breaking levels,
and every step risked dropping players into the black Void below.
There’s never been an Inception game, but Minecraft’s outer limits come pretty darn
close.
Battlefield 3
EA claimed it had a true rival for Call of Duty when it began to roll out Battlefield
3 for beta testers around the world.
But it wasn’t the graphics, the physics, or even the game modes that captured the spotlight.
It was a strange glitch that occurred when players crawled.
One second they were deadly soldiers, the next, they were long-necked, grotesquely proportioned
human worms.
The developers eventually patched out the bug in the animation, but as far as we’re
concerned they should have probably left it in.
Destiny
The developers of this stellar online shooter may have put hours into the lore behind the
game’s races and Guardians, but players had other priorities.
Able to make their characters dance, and ride their Sparrow hover vehicles across the game’s
maps, it was only a matter of time before the two were combined into one ridiculous
time-killer.
“Sparrow surfing” was every troll’s dream, but honestly, who would care about
saving humanity from the brink, or taking on epic Raids when there are enemies on Mars
who haven’t seen a Guardian bust a move at 50 miles an hour?
We’re surprised the game survived at all.
Grand Theft Auto 5
In game design, ever perk comes at a price.
In the case of GTA5, that meant the decision to keep every cut-scene playing in real time,
in the real, active game world had a surprise hitch.
If players triggered a cut-scene while the police were on their tail, the cops didn’t
back off until their scene was over.
Players watched through tears of laughter as intense scenes played out as cops fired
round after round into the on-screen figures.
Where glitches like these can break the tone of serious games, it all fit inside the madness
of Grand Theft Auto, becoming a glitch to hope for, not one to avoid.
N64 Cartridge Tilting
Modern glitches may have complicated routines and AI to blame, but in the days of the Nintendo
64, just tilting the game cartridge was enough to create some instant glitch entertainment.
By misaligning the pins with those of the system, entire games became hellish nightmares.
GoldenEye turned people into writhing masses of limbs.
Mario 64 became a limbless jumper set to the sounds of limbo.
But the Legend of Zelda was the worst.
Forget glitches – the game began to scream in terror, before a black screen revealed
messages of “I love you” hidden between lines of code.
We’ll take broken physics over these nightmares any day.
So what do you think of our list?
Did we miss any of your favorite video game glitches, errors, or game-breaking bugs?
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