OK I guess maybe there isn’t a thread like this, so I’m making one. Let’s share cool and funny bugs in games!
Here’s a fun story:
When I got my first Game Boy as a kid, I played it absolutely too much - so much that eventually I wore out the directional pad in a weird way. Since most games had you walk to the right a lot, it got kinda wonky on that side, so if I’d press it a bit too intensively, the character would keep walking in that direction.
Anyway, the way this worked out meant that it would keep registering the right press even when I also pressed the left side of the pad. In all normal situations, that doesn’t do anything at all, but apparently for some quirk of programming, if I did that in Gargoyle’s Quest while my guy was auto-walking into a wall to the right, that somehow made him skip through the wall. That way you could bypass a lot of obstacles, but it also corrupted the immediate surroundings in totally weird ways, so sometimes you would end up in bad situations (especially in the levels where you had to go up or down).
I sent a letter (in the mail) to the local Nintendo magazine about it, as a cheat/secret, never mind you’d have to break your Game Boy a bit to make it work. I bet they thought I was full of crap, anyway.
But it’s real! You can actually do it in some emulators that allow registering the opposing directions simultaneously.
In Vampire: The Masquerade: Redemption, if you get diseased (or poisoned, don’t remember what it was named exactly) and then trigger a cutscene, you still lose health while it is running. This means you can die in a cutscene, but the game doesn’t interrupt it, so the main character continues the dialog collapsed on the floor. It even keeps playing the mouth animations when he talks. It’s especially funny when it happens in this scene:
In Wonder Boy III for Master System, attacking at just the right time while jumping into a ceiling makes you move back slightly. If you do it with your back against a wall:
You go for a ride. This is not a super exciting glitch but I had the GIFs already.
In pokemon red/blue, talk to the old man in who gives a tutorial for catching a weedle, fly to cinnabar island, and surf in the coast. You’ll end up fighting a MissingNo. and get 128 copies of whatever is in your 6th item slot (like master balls or rare candies)
I think this one exploit has probably done more than any other to change people’s relationship with games. Before I did it I was very immersed in the story and gameplay as the primary fascination. Afterward it opened my eyes to conceive of it as a piece of technology full of secrets and mystery. It later led me to borrow a friend’s GameShark and I became a little obsessed with the idea of how cool it would be to randomize Pokemon - which I later did with roms.
I haven’t chased down a missingno, but when I did a let’s play of the obscure iPhone rpg Missing Bro I drew this at the point where you fight the elusive Bro:
Your mention of getting a bunch of items from it reminded me of the Wild Arms item duplication glitch (from memory, you select to use an item in battle then cancel and it adds the item back to your inventory without having first removed it) which I used to make heaps of stat boost items and trivialise the game.
One time my Manshep was knocked down some stairs by a push and ended up getting stuck on them. Somehow his upper body and legs kept slowly drifting to the right, while his ass was fixed in place, resulting in this abomination (only got some low definition photos of this cause I was Xboxing on my old CRT at the time):
Apropos of the recent re-release of The Thing - the original game was built around a mechanic in which your squad dudes could get infected and suddenly turn The Thing on you, but you could use scarce testing supplies to get a handle on this. Neat idea to lend a sense of tension to the game in line with the Carpenter film inspiration. However on release this mechanic was bugged so that the testing process could return false negatives, meaning that in effect any AI character could screeching blood explode and try to kill you at any time, so the game was even more tense and startling than intended
Lol I haven’t seen Skate 3 played “properly” but from this video it looks like they attempted a lot of ambitious animation tech that just doesn’t quite stick the landing.
Parts of it remind me how sometimes your shots would catapult enemies a couple hundred feet in the air in Fallout 4. (not to open the barrel of worms that is Bethesda RPGs…)
side note, but it seems relevant, but some of those glitches are reminding me of alan resnick’s “this house has people in it” (same guy behind “unedited footage of a bear”) which is one of the most unsettling things i’ve ever seen – technically it’s horror but not in the texas chainsaw or hereditary sense, there’s no gore or violence or singular villians, it’s just… dreadful and eerie and creepy and i love it SO much.
i’m not one of those people who are like “oh yeah i watch horror all the time and it takes a lot to get to me” because horror movies can for sure get to me easy, but this one little youtube flick really hit me so so so hard the first time i saw it and it still goes hard.
mods, is this too much of a tangent for this thread ?
My daughter has been playing fox-em-up Spirit of the North, in which you jump perpendicular to the surface on which you’re standing (unless you’re moving). You then return to ground by the same path. I don’t have a gif or anything, so here’s a crude diagram in my phone’s notes app:
TBH I’m not entirely sure if I’m imagining it right from the sketch, but I think I grabbed that game when Epic gave it out for free, so I might find out if I ever end up playing it.
I had something similar happen with this dino on my playthrough of Jurassic Park Trespasser:
