Glitches In Me Britches!

(courtesy of The Angry Video Game Nerd's Game Glitches episode for the title. Go watch it!)

Do you like glitches? No? Oh I don't blame you. Glitches can mean any number of sinister symptoms: a poorly designed game, a bad cartridge, a faulty machine, or a total affliction to a save file! All of that stuff sucks, man! But you know what? I love me some funny programming shenanigans, when they're mostly harmless. And hey, there's a crapton of known glitches out there that are so popular that they've spawned followings of their own. Like, for example, the case of MissingNo. Or the mysterious, catapulting swing-set in Grand Theft Auto IV. Or the legendary "Minus World" from the original Super Mario Bros.! I mean, jeeze, I'm sure you know about "heheuhehaheahueh." Point is, glitches can be funny! Or terrifying! Or infuriating! Or helpful! Or disgraceful! So, in honour of these bits gone wrong, I present to you some of my own personal stories of glitches gone wild. There's likely been more, but these are definitely my most memorable...


Skyrim -- Blissfully Unaware

Starting off with the most recent, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has been the host of many a wonderful (and not so wonderful) glitches in all of Tamriel. Particularly right after it launched, many of the glitches and bugs in Skyrim made their way to YouTube and the web with their popularity.
Things like getting hit with a Giant's hammer to fly to the sky, and putting a basket on someones head to steal an item, became memes unto themselves.

Like so many others, I too have a few unique stories from my travels across Skyrim. Mostly silly little things, though. There was one glitch (which I did have video of at one point) where the General, Tulius, was giving some rousing speech, but couldn't seem to keep still. His character in game kept bobbing up and down, and at different speeds, so it looked like he was trying to pass one enormous fart. Poor guy kept at it for a while. It honestly looked like a Zumba exercise.

And of course those stupid horses. My god. Imagine this. Well anyway, one time, I very carefully tried to redirect my horse (hereafter named Fears Nothing) away from an ensuing dragon battle, and at first, I thought I had succeeded. Well, get this. I happened to look up in order to maneuver the dragon, and who should be floating in the sky totally unharmed and unaware?...My horse. Yeah. The horse could apparently defeat gravity at it's own game. Well I never got my equestrian friend back, actually. He's still there. Still floating in the sky...alone and unaware...somewhere by the city of Markarth...(probably joined by the floating wheelbarrow, as a matter of fact. Tamriel seems to have an issue with it's gravity).

Castlevania -- The Blessed Glitch

This is one of the more minor glitches, but it's oh so significant. Anyway, for those unaware, the original Castlevania for the NES is one of the more dastardly difficult games that I know of. An utterly fantastic game, but a hard one. A while ago, I spent the better part of my day attempting to beat it, and I had gotten relatively far, about right before the second-last level. I was doing alright! Well Jesus Christ almighty. The last few sections are relentless. I'm talkin' Medusa Heads, Red Skeletons, flying axes, flying swords, bulky Knights, and, oh yeah, MORE Medusa Heads. But the worst part for me? Fighting Igor and Frankenstein on the level before Death. I could not beat them. Fighting the pair is tough, as Frankenstein is big and powerful, though beatable, but Igor is small and able to make a nuisance. This little fart nozzle runs around feverishly and tries to swat at you. And when you get hit, you flinch, and then YOU'RE DEAD. I swear something was awry when I kept entering the fight, because the angle I started at kept pushing me right into his path. There was a little jittery, jerky motion that didn't seem right. It was infuriating. But, finally, it seemed the game seemed to show mercy. Rapidly mashing buttons as I entered the fight, I managed to move below just enough that Igor couldn't hit me...except it looked like he could. It was tense, but, I barely managed to get Frankenstein out of the way. This meant I could go back and forth on the screen, and by a sliver of health, I defeated Igor with a jumping blow. I still don't know if that's actually what you're supposed to do, but in this case where the game cancels out (what I thought to be) a glitch, with another glitch, I think anything can happen.


Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas -- The Land of Sillyness

All of the Grand Theft Auto games are home to some of the most outrageous glitches imaginable. For me though, my experience with San Andreas is just too good. Usually in the company of someone else, many of these glitches I've found with the use of cheats. Oh those lovely cheats. Thing about San Andreas is, when different combinations of cheats are activated, there's a totally random outcome waiting to happen. For instance...

What has colloquially come to be known as "Granny Punching, " involves the use of a Super Punch cheat which, when enabled, sends anyone hit with a punch soaring into the distance. One time, I think the game literally failed to handle the direction and force of the punch. There was this poor old granny in the game whom we gave a slight walloping, and she, quite literally, disappeared before our eyes as she flew into the horizon. Of course, the sheer power of this caused lampposts and cars to dent in unison. Like gravity had somehow compressed.

There was an encounter with a young lady whose face seemed to prefer the ground, rather than being on her head. It was an odd and terrifying glitch, with a mess of pixels stretching from the poor girls face to the ground. She was completely unaware, and even took time out of her day to raise her middle finger at us. Charming. We were only trying to help.

When "Cars Can Fly" is activated, things get unreal. Delightfully so. It seems the game does what it wants to at this point. Like, for example, dropping the husk of a burnt out jet through several buildings and landing on multiple flying cop cars in the vicinity.

The most infamous one I've witnessed though is this: There's an enormous commercial plane, the largest one in the game, that you can fly if you can find it. Well, as it happens, this plane was going over the city when the buildings failed to load. Only coming into reality at the last second, we jumped from the plane as it hurdled towards the tallest building around...and didn't hear anything. No explosion. Nothing. Strange. We ventured up the building in curiosity only to find the largest plane in the game stuck and barely balanced on the tallest tower in the game. It could never be repeated.


The Sims 3 -- Where Did The Blur Go?

I had a rather humorous, and slightly disturbing, incident with the third Sims game not too long ago. Ah, the story of Flibbity Flim-Flam. As sims go, Flibbity was pretty average. He had a job at a diner, lived in a quaint, but cozy apartment, and had a few friends to call his own. But one day...he decided to walk to work naked. As if in protest and defiance of clothes, Flibbity non-nonchalantly walked into work as if nothing was wrong. The sims around him said nothing, yet there was a visible sense of confusion in their eyes. Wondering who this strange sim named Flibbity was, and why he was naked.

Here's what happened. I directed Flibbity to the shower before he went to work, because, you know, sims need to smell good too. Now normally the sim who enters the shower is "blurred" out, so no naughty bits or anything is shown. It's...kind of tongue-in-cheek. After the sim is done showering, they exit the shower and "spin" into their normal clothing. Well, in this particular case, the blur around Flibbity was still there, but it was fluctuating between a black and brown colour palette, even though it still functioned. But when Flibbity exited the shower and proceeded to "spin" into his new clothes, only the blur was removed, and nothing was added. There was only Flibbity standing there, baring all. Well, actually, it's not nearly as R-rated as it sounds. See, I think the character models of the sims are done in a style similar to that of a Barbie or Ken doll. There's a little sim bum, but not much else. It's strange, but kind of funny! Thankfully, after Flibbity left work, I just had him change his clothes manually and it seemed to fix the issue.


Mercenaries 2 -- Don't Nuke Yourself

 

Mercenaries is a series that isn't exactly known for it's polished gameplay. But for me, that just adds to their appeal! Especially in the case of the second game, which is so chalk-full of glitches and bugs that it basically makes up half the fun of the game. One defining example I have is of sightseeing gone wrong. In Mercenaries 2, you have at your disposal a plethora of air-strikes and bombing runs to use at your leisure to destroy the destructible buildings. Later on, you receive what is effectively a miniature nuke to use as you please. I really wanted to see the extent of it's damage, and it's spectacle, so I decided to fly a helicopter onto a roof, and call in the nuke what I though to be a decent distance away. Well, I was wrong. The radius just eclipsed where I was, and I felt the building collapse as I was on the top. Everything just went wrong after that. I fell into the rubble, but was completely stuck. The screen continued to shake for no discernible reason, and on top of it all, the helicopter I arrived in came crashing down and pushed me through the map, and into the glitchy abyss. That was a mistake.


Star Wars: Jedi Outcast -- Too Much Cheating

This is a lesson in restraint. I think this applies to a few other previous games I mentioned as well. Basic lesson: don't put too many cheat codes into certain games, lest you're wary of the outcome. This time, the game in question was the third game in the Dark Forces series: Jedi Outcast. This game kicks ass! But it really gets into gear when you activate a few key cheats, such as a dismemberment cheat, and one that grants early-access to your lightsaber. Along with this, you can find a multitude of others, like invulnerability, loading a separate level, changing character models/skins, and more. I was playing through the game one time and was completely, and foolishly, messing around with the cheats. A certain level a little over halfway has you below Cloud City, and making your way up. This involves several elevators, as well as several air jets that you must jump from. Now here's the thing: the game relies on auto-saves that occur as you enter a level. You have the option to quick-save and save manually, but I, in my infinite wisdom, always forget to do so. And of course, the one time that I mess around with the level loader, it screws up the auto-saving. However, I didn't realize this until I had made my way through the majority of the level and came to the air jets. I had the invulnerability cheat on, among others, so death could not find me...or so I thought. Turns out, that if you miss the jump, you will fall...and land in a pit of darkness, of which you would normally die in. Well, everything I had going on seemed to be too much for the game to handle, and it effectively killed me...and the rest of the game along with it. Remember before what I said about the auto-save? Well it turns out that many of the loads around it were gone, or corrupted. That brought my playthrough to a premature end...even though I could still technically load each level individually. But I was a little too miffed to bother with it. This story may not constitute a "glitch" so much, but hey, the end result was similar.

Assassin's Creed II -- The Clone Wars

I find the Assassin's Creed series to have it's fair share of bugs...but I never expected this one. In the second game, I was roaming around the rooftops of Venice as Ezio, and accidentally angered a nearby guard, who was none too thrilled with my gallivanting around the city. I made my escape, but misjudged a jump and landed on a slightly lower roof on a different building. There was a ladder there for accessibility, but as I turned around to use it, I found the guard had come down...with another guard in tow. ...And another guard. And another. And another. Except the guards weren't coming from anywhere else...they were being duplicated. It was the most bizarre thing, and in fact, it looked like something you'd find cells do in the human body. Duplicate, replicate, and repeat. Weirder still, they were no longer chasing me. They simply fell off the roof to their death. As each guard continued to duplicate, and then repeat the process, the screen was eventually filling up with this same Venetian guard occupying the same rooftop. Nothing could stop it, and I let the game continue as long as I could. Eventually, the game did crash, but not before there was practically an army of look-alike Venetian guards just standing around aimlessly. Talk about an experiment gone wrong.


The Simpson's Hit & Run -- The Undercity

Hit & Run is such a goofy game (and a dang good one!) that it was begging for a spot on this list. My cousins and I were messing around in the game, looking for secrets or glitches and the like, just to see what we could find. We had put in a cheat (heh, notice a pattern?) where if you honked your horn while in a car, you and the car would soar into the air. So, here we are, honking our horn and jumping around Springfield, when our car effectively falls through the road, and by extension, the game world. But the cool thing was, unlike other games where you might continue falling to a crashed game, Hit & Run stopped just below the city. And better still, we were able to drive around beneath the city, and were able to travel from the top to the bottom, and vice versa, with a honk of the horn. This was a fun diversion, as it basically opened up a whole new area beneath the city to try out different things. The game never crashed, either! I think it's a glitch easily repeatable too, if you want to try it yourself!


Fallout 3 -- The Giant Ant

This is, hands down, the most terrifying glitch I've ever encountered. Bar none. This is the story of poor Donlevy, and the Giant Ant.

Quick backstory: the Fallout games are post-apocalyptic RPG's, that have you, usually from a safe-house-like Vault, venture into the Wasteland to make your way in life. One fateful day, I took upon a quest that involved the eradication of mutated ant eggs within a cavern. Something of note: I HATE insects. Especially giant freaking ants. Nasty.
So I weighed my options: do I brave the hive, and get some XP and loot out of it? Or do I ignore the quest, and run far, far away from the cavern. As fate would have it, I chose the former, and entered the cavern with my gun, and my pride, at the ready. Things started out okay; there were a few quest items and some smaller, simpler ants early on, but as I continued on, it seemed like there was a lack of insects. It was fairly unexpected, since, you know, it's a freaking den for ants. Weird. So anyway, I make my way into the main chamber, and complete the quest involving the eggs. Okay, cool. Now to leave. Well...not so fast. As I prepare to leave, a lone red arrow appears on my compass, alerting me to the presence of an enemy. Shit, I thought, I guess this is where the ants come. Well...no ants appeared. What the hell...? All the while, the one lone arrow stayed on the compass. I started searching the main area for the cause, and started circling a large mound of rock in the centre. Nothing was there. So, I decided to turn around to leave, but as I do so, the red arrow began to move. I turn around and see that a name in red (which is used to describe the name and health of an enemy or character) appeared on my screen. It simply said "Queen Ant."

Oh.

As soon as I read it, the biggest f**king ant in Fallout GLITCHES THROUGH THE CENTRE ROCK, RIGHT AT MY FACE. That's right, the stupid Queen was somehow now only visible as it jumped through a freaking rock as it began to attack me. This literally made me jump in my seat, and is one of only a handful of times I've ever paused a game in fright. This was not a fun experience for Donlevy.

And yes, I still hate ants.


So that's a few glitchy glitches that I've happened upon over the years, at least the ones that I immediately remember. Do you have any memorable game glitches to share? Let me know!

Thanks for reading!