Glitches/weird stuff in video games...what's your take on them?

[Knight of Time]

Hi guys,

I'm pretty sure I'm not the only gamer here who has attempted (or maybe even discovered) a bug/glitch in one of their favourite video games (such as the Select trick in Mega Man, the screen warp glitch in Link's Awakening, etc.), so I wanted to ask, what is everyone's opinion on glitches here?

I find they can sometimes be game-breaking (as in that certain glitches can crash a game, forcing a reset, or even worse, restarting the game from the very beginning for some of the more serious glitches), but then again, some of them can be helpful for tool-assisted speed runs in games.

On a side note, as I mentioned above, I just happened to discover a new glitch in Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels while playing it on my 3DS. In 7-2, right near the end of the level there is this red Koopa Paratroopa you have to bounce off of to get to a falling platform, and jump from that to a pipe that houses a red Piranha Plant...while playing this level as Luigi, I stomped on that Koopa Paratroopa, thinking he was going to fall off the screen. WRONG! Instead, the resulting Koopa Troopa began to walk on air to the right, where I noticed he can walk through the bricks below the pipe and continue walking on air...so yeah, that glitch was totally unexpected.

Anyway, has anyone else had unusual/unexpected experiences while playing a video game?

[Blademaster]

That glitch with the Koopa walking along the bottom of the screen is actually pretty well-documented. You know how the opposite edges of the screen overlap in the old SMB games (It's most obvious in SMB3 when you walk in one direction and see the colors at the edge of the screen that's behind you appear at the edge in front of you for a fraction of a second.)? The same is true of the top and bottom of the screen.

So, the anti-gravity Koopa Troopas? Yeah, for some reason the game has him NOT fall to his doom every once in awhile. Instead, he 'lands on' that invisible Pac-Man-style 'border' between the bottom of the screen and the top of it. In other words, he's walking along the very tippy top of the screen, and his sprite shows at the bottom as a result. On some older TV's you can actually see his pixelly little feet trotting along the top of the screen. Diligent turtles, ain't they?

[Mikachu Yukitatsu]

I have played Final Fantasy VII for 15 years using the W-Item trick. Should try to play fair at least once, huh?

[Crystal Tears]

In Pokemon Yellow I have no idea how I did it but my pikachu knew psychic. It actually took me years to realize that my dearest Shocker wasn’t supposed to learn that move. I’ve never been able to replicate the glitch, so I have honestly no idea what happened.

Another fairly common one is when HALO 4 first came out, one of the maps you could play on had a glitch in one of the bunkers where you could get up and hide in the walls. It was pretty annoying, thankfully they fixed it.

My friend was playing Uncharted 2, and there’s a portion where the boss fight is a tank. Well she managed to glitch the game so bad that the tank never came for the fight. She was running around asking me about where the tank was and I was so confused. She eventually found it back at the beginning of the map and promptly blew it up. It regenerated its health the first time but she destroyed it a second time and then the cut scene triggered.

She also played Tomb Raider: Underworld for the span of two minutes before she glitched so bad she broke the game and was forced to restart.

Fun times.

Oh, being a Vanguard class in Mass Effect can get you into some interesting places. I've gotten stuck up in the air a few times. And in Mass Effect 3 multiplayer I accidentally broke my character so she couldn't take cover and was apparently magically bound to a ladder. When I eventually got free of the ladder I was glitching all over the place and promptly died.

Mofos.


Most glitches I run into are seldom game-breaking (the friend I mentioned though? She has a habit of finding those type though), many are just amusing or annoying. Other then pikachu though, I don't think I've ever exploited a glitch to beat a game or help me out. Some are absolutely beautiful, like the glitch-world in the PS3 game Journey. A large part of me thinks using glitches for speed-runs, battle help, and item gathering is a cheat. But that's just me, I rarely used my pikachu's psychic because generally I'd only use 'er against types she had the advantage against - rendering psychic a bit moot unless I was in trouble.

[classy_cat18]

There have been a couple time when I was playing with my stepbrothers and we accidentally bump the console and send it to a level select cheat screen. That was...Rampage World Tour and Sonic 3D Blast.

[Blademaster]

Just because of where we are, obligatory:

MISSINGNO.

I say that meaning ALL the glitchy Cinnabar coastline Pokemon. There's many of them. 'M' is another one, as are a few with 'Egg' in their name that I forget off-hand.

My take on them? Programming is clever, but in a dumb-ish way. In the old Pokemon games, the hexidecimal data was arranged in a way that your name 'overlapped' with the hexidecimal numbers assigned to each Pokemon. Sometimes your name would have a hexidecimal meaning that doesn't sync up well, but other times your name would match the code for a Pokemon, which results in you encountering it.

That's why you need to use specific names to get these kinds of glitches to work. Once you start the glitch (usually by talking to the old guy in Viridian City or Route 8 or whatnot), there's no way you can encounter a Pokemon since you're in... well, what I half-seriously call a cutscene. But then you go to Cinnabar, where no Pokemon can be found. So the part of the code that says "You'll encounter (Pokemon names) here." is still blank... But then you surf on the coast and a random encounter happens.

At this point, the game's code basically says "You'll encounter no Pokemon here." and "You have encountered a Pokemon." at the same time. Cue paradox that blows up the Game Boy. Or not. Just go to a hex value that the game already always has stored... like your name. Your name is now a Pokemon, and it appears in the random encounter as one. Whether your name equates to MISSINGNO., Mew, or Magikarp, that's how it happens.

Fascinating, innit?

[Jeff]

Back in the days of Gameshark, I remember helping a friend use his Gameshark to turn one of the starters to Mew. The code seemed to work perfectly, that is, until we transferred the Mew to Stadium and it turned back into a Squirtle, still with all the moves it had learned as a Mew. He decided to continue raising the Squirtle and eventually ended up with a Blastioise that knew Psychic. I later found a Game Genie code on TPM that did the same thing, but the Mew it created worked just fine on Stadium.

[Pokemaster Ash]

Well, there's a pretty interesting...well, you can't exactly call it a glitch or a bug. More like just plain BAD programming in Rockman/Mega Man X6.

...Okay, there's a LOT of things wrong with X6, but bear with me on this one. This is a doozy.

One of the staple tricks of the 32-bit era Mega Man X games was the ability to get secret armors for X and Zero (the ever popular Ultimate Armor and Black Zero). Usually, this was done with cheat codes (the only way you could get them in X4, quick but costly way to get them in X5 (since iirc X loses the Force Armor with either one you use)), but in X5 you could get both during the course of the game so the codes were kinda just there if you were impatient.

X6 was no different in this respect. Using a code, you could start with X's Ultimate Armor (this time not sacrificing another armor), or eventually get Zero's Black Armor after you get him to show up.

...But while there's still no known way to get the Ultimate Armor through the course of X6, there was supposed to be a way to get Black Zero:


(Note that the guy who made this vid was very obviously toying with Nightmare Zero and enjoying the music)

Yes, you were supposed to be able to get Black Zero by fighting Nightmare Zero at a "high" level. Unfortunately, to get him to said power level, you needed to collect at least 5000 Nightmare Souls (an item found in X6 that, basically, the more of it you collected, the more stuff you could do...and it made bosses stronger in the meantime). The reason this is unfortunate: Capcom programmed the game to take you straight to the final levels if you collected 3000 (thus making you unable to fight Nightmare Zero anymore). This pretty much means the only way to do this trick is with a GameShark.

tl;dr version: Capcom screwed up on this one.

[ChobiChibi]

Last night, whilst trying to enjoy a game of Left 4 Dead 2, we all seemed to be having connection issues. The lag was so bad, that we'd attempt to move but couldn't go anywhere, so when the game caught up we'd be in a random location. George ended up on a ledge, apparently falling into water, but he wasn't losing any health. I got stuck by a tree, and from where George was, he could see me running, but not moving, even though I wasn't pressing a direction. At one point, I got stuck next to a zombie that was stuck in a tree, just moving his mouth like he was trying to nom me. From that position, I managed to run through a building and into a Witch, whom I promptly smacked with an axe (first time it had worked in a while), and then she took forever to actually floor me.

We stopped playing and went back to Borderlands after that.

The most irritating glitch was the Borderlands one that stripped you of your badass rank. It was a glitch from the very start that took nearly 3 months to fix. They gave people 10 golden keys in compensation. I now have 14 >w>

[CaptainJigglypuff]

In LOZ Ocarina of time 3D, while fighting the Water Temple boss, the music NEVER changed. It was REALLY Weird because I was fighting the amoeba for like half an hour and kept hearing the Water Temple dungeon music.

[CaptainJigglypuff]

In LOZ Ocarina of time 3D, while fighting the Water Temple boss, the music NEVER changed. It was REALLY Weird because I was fighting the amoeba for like half an hour and kept hearing the Water Temple dungeon music. And it happened only during THAT particular boss!

[Knight of Time]

Well, I was playing SMB: TLL once again today, and while playing on 8-2 as Luigi in my latest run-through of the game (for the record, I've beaten 8-4 five times, alternating between Mario and Luigi each time), I discovered another weird glitch...after jumping up to the high pipe that houses a Red Piranha Plant (jumping directly to this pipe from the left side is not possible with Mario unless you somehow get to do the double jump glitch), I watched as the Buzzy Beetle on the ledge of brick blocks walked off to the right and landed in the same exact spot as a Green Koopa Troopa, making the two enemies overlap one another as they kept moving in the same direction...so, I had Luigi jump on both of the shelled enemies, which sent them into their shells simultaneously, then I had Luigi attempt to kick them to the right...oddly enough, trying to kick them from either side caused both of them to kill each other, thus knocking both of them off the screen...collision or clipping issue much?

[Blademaster]

Yes. They're both programmed to kill whatever enemies they hit, up to and including other shelled enemies. You hit them at the same time, the unstoppable shells of death are fired simultaneously, strike one another due to their overlapping, and instantly kill one another.

[Knight of Time]

Wow, I have to admit, you definitely know more about the Super Mario games than I realized, Blademaster.

Anyway, I just found yet another oddity in Lost Levels, in 9-1, you have to swim to the part with the elevators, and get on one of them. If you let it go all the way down while you're on it and you don't go off the elevator on either side, it is possible for a looping effect to happen, where instead of dying in the pit when the elevator that Mario/Luigi is on falls off the screen, Mario/Luigi will do a wraparound and end up near the top of the screen...but it's rather tricky to do.

[Blademaster]

It's not Mario knowledge so much as programming knowledge. Programming is like math in that certain behaviors refuse to change and certain conditions cancel each other out.

Not that I know much of anything about programming, but I know logic. So I can get by, sorta.

[Pichu Luver]

Normally I've never been much of one for glitches. I took advantage of the ones for Pokémon, like get Mew and replicating Poké's for multiple Master Balls and such. Otherwise I never used and/or heard of many. Until Journey that is (for the PS3)

That game is so breakable in the most fun and spectacular ways it's awesome. The normal game is great, (basically you travel to the top of a mountain, with the possibility of meeting a random person, and you can FLY[yes I know it sounds boring but it's not! _-_]) but almost every level you can get out and behind the walls and explore. Yes there is a point to when the screen goes black, but sometimes you can even get out of that.

The game developers even realized there were holes and left them where they are. You have to be REALLY trying to get into them, and some of the views there are spectacular. With a few tricks you can also rocket around like a maniac and with a great partner, get ridiculously high. While technically perhaps not a glitch, you can make your traveller trip over their own feet and faceplant.

Here's some pics.

Pic 1
Pic 2
Pic 3
Pic 4
Pic 5
Pic 6
Pic 7

All of those are areas of the game you cannot access without technically 'breaking it' and getting outside the proper level walls.

As for glitches in general, I obviously don't mind them. Most are funny and generally speaking I don't get angry or disappointed in them unless they end in me dying in Halo (lol). Otherwise, its been my experience glitches are fun, can be useful and result in hilarity.

[Blademaster]

I dunno if this is glitch abuse so much as it is opening the console and putting some... interesting... commands in, but either way I feel it's relevant:



You'll lose it by 0:45, guaranteed.