Glitches have always been a part of video games.
It's kind of a modern miracle that today's games, as ridiculously complex as they are,
don't bug out constantly.
A few pixels out of place is one thing, but the realism of today's games can produce bugs
that run the gamut from weird and quirky to scream-your-face-off scary.
Take, for instance, Assassin's Creed Unity!
But that's just the beginning.
Here are some of the most bizarre visual glitches you'll find today.
MLB The Show 17: The Wicker Man
Like many ultra-customizable games, MLB The Show 17 allows you to create baseball players
from the ground up.
Its interface uses sliders to let gamers adjust their virtual-ballplayers' features.
Want a dude with an Amish beard, Steve Buscemi's come-hither eyes, and crippling male pattern
baldness?
That sexy dream is within your grasp.
While most glitches are usually discovered by players, it was Sony themselves who revealed
that this very slider system can glitch out.
The unaltered results?
A nightmarish, Lovecraftian horror.
Behold!
"Ahhhh!"
So if you want a baseball player whose head essentially becomes a skull-shaped bundle
of dry spaghetti, it's all yours.
You want human eyes crying sadly from within a nest of ground beef?
Well, isn't that really what baseball is all about?
"Are you crying?
Are you crying?!
There's no crying.
There's no crying in baseball!"
Sony San Diego's Twitch streams leading up to the game's release unveiled the glitch,
and said that it was something the team has been "working on."
It's a bit unclear if this means that they're working on fixing it, or if they decided to
make MLB The Show a survival horror series without telling anyone.
The Sims 4: Demon babies
As far as reality simulators go, The Sims series is a little more realistic than, say,
Goat Simulator.
And it's great if you're really into….
Bathroom design?
But it still has its share of surreal moments, and many of them come in the form of babies.
Terrifying, horrible monster babies.
Sure, the birth of a baby is usually a joyous occasion for your Sim, but in The Sims 4,
you may just want to kill it with fire.
One little glitch and your bundle of joy can come out deformed in ways that no actual human
could ever survive: eyeballs stuck to the end of antennae, or twisted, misshapen bodies
that kinda just make you want to barf forever.
Yes, the developers came along with a patch fixed the glitch, but the internet never forgets.
Overwatch: The vanishing oasis
The Oasis map in Overwatch has a distinct, futuristic-art-deco meets Middle Eastern style.
It forces players to deal with traffic hazards, in addition to the usual hail of lasers and
bullets.
It's a brilliant design, as long as it sticks around.
Which it doesn't always do.
The Oasis map glitch can give players an existential crisis.
Repeatedly jumping in a certain spot causes the ground to completely disappear.
Cars plummet into the abyss, and your character is left hanging in endless space as the game's
physics go out the window.
Fortunately, if you just wait it out long enough, you'll die.
Easy fix.
Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze: Secret Swimming
If you're one of the millions of gamers who passed on the Wii U, you missed the most punishingly
difficult entry in the entire Donkey Kong Country series: Tropical Freeze.
You'll probably be killed hundreds of times, but you also won't be able to stop playing.
The game's water levels are among its most brutal, but a glitch in Shipwreck Shore allows
you to pretty much bypass the whole thing, allowing you to access a weird, watery, parallel
universe underneath the level, where the surface world sometimes appears upside down.
Swimming along in the Upside Down is the strangest watery weirdness since Super Mario's minus
world.
Fallout 4: Insane horrors
It sold truckloads of copies, earned rave reviews, and won a ton of awards.
But no one's going to deny that Fallout 4 is also incredibly buggy.
And when it glitches out, it goes all in.
The game is creepy enough as is, but the accidental faceless horrors that the game produces defy
anything that designers could have come up with on purpose.
One glitch causes animals to merge with objects and start multiplying while hovering demonically
in the air.
Another can cause your character's death animation to spiral wildly out of control, sending your
floppy corpse pirouetting hundreds of feet in the air.
Of course, while game publisher Bethesda has done its best to patch all of these bugs out
of existence, they've all been logged for posterity.
Because the future needs to remember that horrible, deformed mutants are people too.
Red Dead Redemption: Manimals
Another excellent game plagued by bugs, Red Dead Redemption had some notorious animal
problems — and they weren't the kind an exterminator could fix.
Not only could your trusty horse basically become a rocket sled, but animal avatars occasionally
got mixed up with humans.
And the results were not pretty.
Players could famously encounter a woman whose head was mashed up with that of a donkey...
who you could then hop on and ride around.
The same glitch could also spawn roaming cougar-men, elk-horses, and flying bird people.
"Hahaha!"
Sometimes, the game would even let a human ride another, or a horse briefly ride its
human, which is illegal in 42 states.
We're not saying Red Dead Redemption 2 should exclusively feature human-riding horses…
except it totally should.
Grand Theft Auto V: Drowning in paperwork
Rockstar's hugely popular Grand Theft Auto series isn't without its share of memorable
glitches, either.
And Grand Theft Auto V kept the tradition alive admirably.
One glitch in particular may just make you want to quit your day job.
If you spawn as Michael on the film set, you'll be standing next to a guy holding a clipboard.
Startle him, and another clipboard will pop out of nowhere.
If you happen to be using, say, an especially terrifying gun, this can result in a rapid
and ongoing series of startles, and a fountain of clipboards, which begin piling up around
the hapless man.
Keep at this long enough, and the guy will fall screaming into this pool of clipboards
and vanish.
Forever.
Which is only slightly more horrific than working in a real office.
Madden 15: Tiny titan
Gamers who love imaginary football eagerly await the latest edition of Madden every year,
and rookies can't wait to see how they're represented by the beloved franchise.
But when it came to middle linebacker Christian Kirksey, Madden 15 may have gotten his physical
stats just a little bit wrong.
Kirksey, drafted by the Browns in 2014, is listed in the game at 1 foot, 2 inches tall
and 235 pounds.
"This, we didn't make this up, this is real.
Here he is, in action, in the video game.
Lot of people talking about this.
There he… hey guys!"
It's as much of a disadvantage as you would think.
While he has no trouble keeping up with opposing players, his tackling leaves a little to be
desired.
But he can handle the ball just fine…so long as it's really close to the ground.
The real Kirksey had a great sense of humor about the whole thing, tweeting that he found
it "hilarious" and taking the opportunity to offer words of encouragement.
"No matter how small, have big dreams and live big!"
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