Your Buggiest Game Experience

[Glitch Girl]

We've all encountered them: odd things that happen in video games that can only be described as a bug or glitch (heaven knows I've had more than my share ;) )

So I'm curious, what is the most buggy game you've played?  It can be a game that's still playable but has many odd... hiccups, or it can be a game that so ridden with problems that it was completely unplayable.  Just whatever you remember best and what was wrong with it.

Currently topping the list is Marvel Ultimate Alliance for the PS2. Only a few bugs affected gameplay but the sheer number of bugs makes this notable.

Here's the ever growing list set in spoilers as it occasionally deals with game plot.

[spoiler]
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* If you're playing multiplayer and do any of the training room missions, you will not get rewards unless you completely deactivate the other players.  It also makes it so the bosses do nothing but stand there and let you hit them.

* During a training mission with Blade, I stole one of the swords off a fire giant and took it to the boss battle with Dark spider-man.  You can't use your powers while wielding a weapon BTW so I decided to make the most of it and pound on Spidey until the weapon broke.  It did, but unfortunately, it left my powers still disabled which meant I was screwed.

* Several times for unknown reasons, buffs and debuffs will stop working.  The activation animation will run, but no effect will occur.

* Speaking of buffs/debuffs - during one of the group training missions, somehow iceman's freeze started freezing the boss (which it's not supposed to do I don't think, it had never done it before nor since).  It would not freeze minions however.

* During spider-man's training mission to fight Scorpion, something happened during the cutscene where you have to mash the right buttons to save Dugan.  Somehow Scorpion got wedged under a desk and couldn't move so he looked like he was hiding and wouldn't fight back as we gave him his final pounding.

* During the @#$%&* Pitfall game, characters will run rapidly in place for no good reason.

* In the Breakout game, the ball always vanished when it hits the bottom of the screen, except once when it inexplicably bounced and promptly killed the three characters who were hiding behind the paddle at the time.  It would have been a total PK if Storm's player hadn't been dorking around on the far side of the screen.

* During the sequence when you free the viking warrior from the chunk of ice by manipulating mirrors, the camera would cut to the frozen guy, and his block of ice would be about four scale feet to his left.  For the next three camera cuts, it's incorrect position would remain the same, even though it was doing the melting animation, and only returned to its correct position when the warrior broke free.

* During the fight against the magical armor, you have to locate Loki sealed in a block of unbreakable crystal or something.  For some reason, we were able to batter Loki out of the block o ice and started bopping him around the room like a hockey puck until the armor's attack destroyed the crystal which was several feet away from him by this point.

* After unlocking Silver Surfer, we were trying him out.  When he walked he walked like everyone else, but when he flew, a surfboard appeared.  The board didn't always disappear when he landed, which meant he would be walking around with this massive surfboard stuck to his front foot like a giant clown shoe. 

* Not quite a bug, but a bit of an oddity - If you unlock Nick Fury and use him in game, he will often "talk to himself" in mission briefings.  (My Two Nicks ;) )

* Almost forgot... on the frozen battlefield, there was a spot where if you had a flyer, you could fly up literally FOREVER.  And once you did it once, you could do it anywhere on the map, fly up until you could see the entire map sitting in blackness, then fly down and land pretty much anywhere that was considered "walkable".
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[/spoiler]


My #2 would be Daggarfall.  Only one bug but it was a doozey.  I liked the game, but occasionally, I'd end up in some kind of weird setting where all the polygon normals were reversed and it's be like being stuck in a pocket dimension, unable to do anything except walk around and try to figure out how to get out.  It happened so often I eventually had to give up before getting through the first mission which was a shame.

[Tomato]

For me: The remake of Mario 64 for the DS. About every fifth time I'd walk up to the door of the castle, Mario/whoever I was playing would slide underneath the door and die.

[Mr. Hamrick]

as much as I liked the game Oblivion for the xbox360, it was one of the most glitchie games I think i have played.  I'm not even listing all the problems i had with that game. 

[captainspud]

I don't fault Anachronox for being buggy. When they were 60% of the way through the development cycle, Eidos called and said, "Yeah, sorry, we're shutting your studio down in two months. Finish what you're working on." Thank god they were working on the missions in chronological order; they basically just ended the game halfway through, but at least the bits they strung together were SUPPOSED to be strung together that way.

But, yeah. The bugs. Hoo-boy. The game would sometimes lock up while saving. Think about that... when you play a glitchy game, it's common practice to save constantly in case you bug out. But in this one, if you do that, you raise the chance of locking up and corrupting your save.

This was the game that taught me the concept of "stagger your save files".

There were lots of other things... a taxi service that worked except that you couldn't talk to the NPC needed to get on. Quests that couldn't be completed. Display issues on a lot of vid cards.

Thankfully, one of the game's coders made two patches on his own time after they shipped the final game code, so if you ever see a copy of Anox in a bargain bin, you can install those and have a virtually bug-free playthrough.

Sigh... I wish Eidos would let Tom Hall have the rights back. I want to see how the game ends. ;_;

[captainspud]

Also, there's a huge bug in Escape from Monkey Island: they forgot to include jokes.

[TheMarvell]

Also, there's a huge bug in Escape from Monkey Island: they forgot to include jokes.

LOL! aww cmon now, EFMI wasn't that bad. Easily the least favorite of the series, but when it did have funny moments, they were usually downright hilarious. It just wasn't nearly as consistent as the previous 3, Curse being one of my all-time favorite games.

Anyways, buggiest game? There's 3 games that immediately come to mind:

-Blood Omen 2 on the PS2
-Star Wars Jedi Power Battles on the PS1
-Star Wars Episode 1 on the PS1

I'm a huge fan of the Legacy of Kain series, but Blood Omen 2 is easily the black sheep of the series. Plot holes and inconsistent character designs aside, this game has about 40 documented glitches big and small alike. I made a topic about on GameFAQs once, asking everyone to post their glitches, and the list went to about 40 and was still growing. The most obvious bug is the lip syncing issue. During story cut scenes, character dialog would not match up to their mouths, reminding me of old Godzilla movies with the English dubbing. Sometimes you'd kill an enemy and his death sound file would not stop playing until you reboot it. Sometimes sound effects will drown out all other audio during cut scenes, particularly a scene where a waterfall is. One of the most notorious ones is when Kain has to jump through a window to get to the next area and he just ends up falling through the entire map in a sea of gray. That's just the tip of the iceberg. There's also a TON of frame rate problems, and I consider the massive plot holes to be a bug too.

The two Star Wars games suffer from glitches to the point where it's almost unplayable (even though I enjoyed Power Battles quite a bit). The biggest fault in both games is simply falling through the game. You could be walking around minding your own business and *OOPS!* next thing you know you're no longer walking around Tattooine, you're falling down an endless pit of googly graphics. You can also get stuck on corners, freezing problems, and just a plague of glitches.

[BWPS]

I don't fault Anachronox for being buggy. When they were 60% of the way through the development cycle, Eidos called and said, "Yeah, sorry, we're shutting your studio down in two months. Finish what you're working on." Thank god they were working on the missions in chronological order; they basically just ended the game halfway through, but at least the bits they strung together were SUPPOSED to be strung together that way.

But, yeah. The bugs. Hoo-boy. The game would sometimes lock up while saving. Think about that... when you play a glitchy game, it's common practice to save constantly in case you bug out. But in this one, if you do that, you raise the chance of locking up and corrupting your save.

This was the game that taught me the concept of "stagger your save files".

There were lots of other things... a taxi service that worked except that you couldn't talk to the NPC needed to get on. Quests that couldn't be completed. Display issues on a lot of vid cards.

Thankfully, one of the game's coders made two patches on his own time after they shipped the final game code, so if you ever see a copy of Anox in a bargain bin, you can install those and have a virtually bug-free playthrough.

Sigh... I wish Eidos would let Tom Hall have the rights back. I want to see how the game ends. ;_;

Me too, It's amazing that a game with mediocre gameplay could be that much fun. I'd love a sequel/rest of game. But yeah, it was buggy, one of the vending machines early on sold something for free and bought it back for money. So that was an infinite cash machine, yay?  That actually may have been the buggiest game ever but it was still great. And you can't be mad at Eidos, they had to focus on Tomb Raider III. Thank god, because if TR3 hadn't been the amazing game it was we wouldn't have the priceless Tomb Raider films and instead maybe Anachronox would've caught on and we'd have a movie of that and then I'd have to sit through interesting characters and plot instead of Jon Voight Jr. doing flips and being super-tough.

Also, there's a huge bug in Escape from Monkey Island: they forgot to include jokes.

I still liked it even if it wasn't as amazing as the others. I really wish we still had LucasArts. I love adventure.

Another rough glitch occured in the GBA version of Broken Sword. Somehow I went to England way before I was supposed to and had to restart. And then I bought The Sleeping Dragon and it wouldn't work on Vista. Damn it.

[zuludelta]

Currently topping the list is Marvel Ultimate Alliance for the PS2. Only a few bugs affected gameplay but the sheer number of bugs makes this notable.

Here's the ever growing list set in spoilers as it occasionally deals with game plot.

* Several times for unknown reasons, buffs and debuffs will stop working.  The activation animation will run, but no effect will occur.

I'm not sure if this is the exact same reason but this also happens in X-Men Legends I and II if you use multiple buffs or debuffs that use the same fx.

* During the @#$%&* Pitfall game, characters will run rapidly in place for no good reason.

Yeah, that has to do with the controller input. The Pitfall mini-game doesn't "recognize" diagonal directional input from the left analog stick so unless you actually move the analog stick in a near-perfect perpendicular angle, your character will occasionally run in place.

Personally, I thought X-Men Legends I and II were worse in terms of bugginess. The "too many items" bug in those games were a game-breaker.

Still, the buggiest game I've ever played in the last few years had to be X2: Wolverine's Revenge... the thing was obviously rushed so that its release could coincide with the movie. It had missing textures, unfinished models, gaps in the stage maps that you could fall through into video game limbo... too bad, since it had some pretty decent voice-acting (Mark Hamill does the best Wolverine I've ever heard), an above average story for a licensed game, and what models they had were excellent.

[Pyroclasm]

I'd have to agree with GG on M:UA, except mine was on X-box.  Besides sharing several of the same bugs, there were others:
* Many typos.  Though not a gameplay issue, it's really annoying to see transposed letters and character's names being misspelled.
* Invisible enemies that took no damage.  There were some statue guys that apparently did not move to attack you.  But apparently sent out their "spirits" to hit you ecause you just kept getting "hit".  You took little damage and could not attack them, so it was an annoyance.
* Apparently completing the game would not keep any of the bonuses you earned.  So, when I tried to continue earning the training rooms and the like, I discovered I had to start from scratch.  It didn't affect characters' development though.

But, the game I regret being so problematic is Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines.
It unfortunately was released using a somewhat buggy version of the Half-Life 2 engine.  To make matters worse, the company was being shut down, so they were told to release the game with the problems and use the consumer base to weed out the glitches.  Once the reports started rolling in, they were told to release a patch, but by that point they had already laid off all of their crew except the three owners.  They managed to release a basic patch, but it nowhere near fixes the severe memory leaks and graphics issues.  They then closed their doors for good, so the game has been relying on unofficial fan-created patches.

[JKCarrier]

* Not quite a bug, but a bit of an oddity - If you unlock Nick Fury and use him in game, he will often "talk to himself" in mission briefings.  (My Two Nicks ;) )

Reminds me of a clever bit in X-Men Legends II...

[spoiler]If you unlock Deadpool, then take him along on the mission where you fight Deadpool as an enemy, the two Deadpools will argue over which one of them is the real one.  :lol:[/spoiler]

[lugaru]

as much as I liked the game Oblivion for the xbox360, it was one of the most glitchie games I think i have played.  I'm not even listing all the problems i had with that game. 

The PC version was pretty awful too, my favorite mods ended up being fan patches and polygon reduction mods.

Vampire: Bloodlines is a game I really enjoy but the bugs and memory leak really hinder it.

Still nothing beats a pirate version of street fighter that would make rounds in the arcades in Mexico (and probably most third world countries).

[Previsionary]

GG, once again you're the only person I know to get THAT many bugs in a game. I know activision isn't the best at cleaning up their errors, but I never got that many errors whenever I played their games and I just replayed MUA and XML2 yesterday. Your glitch aura does wonders. :P

I don't really have a glitchy/buggy game to add at this time. I'd have to actually go through my collection. The ones that immediately pops into mind is Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2. On Dreamcast, they were bad enough, but on gamecube, as I hear, it got much worse. Falling through maps when moving too fast, flying off the map, homing in on a target, missing them, and flying over a ledge, being trapped in a homing circle (IE: you'd spin endlessly around your target until you, an object, or the target broke it), slowing down randomly, camera problems, etc. etc.

[thalaw2]

MUA for the PC didn't have so many bugs....no wonder I seem to be the only one who finished the game. 

Buggy for me was GTA III when cops could get you by shooting through some walls

[bredon7777]

Bloodrayne for XBox-

In the Nazi level, it was possible to make all the wall/floor/ceiling textures DISSAPPEAR. I was running around an invisible maze on a black screen.

*(Bloodlines is an AWESOME game, as long as you patch it up the hilt, first. Just thought I'd mention it)

[thalaw2]

Still nothing beats a pirate version of street fighter that would make rounds in the arcades in Mexico (and probably most third world countries).

Which one was that?  I remember there was a store across from my high school that had a really strange version of Street Fighter II....it made Guile almost unbeatable...he could throw multiple guided Sonic Booms.

[lugaru]

Still nothing beats a pirate version of street fighter that would make rounds in the arcades in Mexico (and probably most third world countries).

Which one was that?  I remember there was a store across from my high school that had a really strange version of Street Fighter II....it made Guile almost unbeatable...he could throw multiple guided Sonic Booms.

That's gotta be the same one... also you could fill the screen with hadokens when you did an uppercut (shoryuken) as ryu or ken. And E Honda would move across the screen doing his palm attack...

Edit: this may have been the first appearance of a teleporting Dhalsim too!

The game was a mess but I'm glad to have seen somebody else play it.

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

I generally only play PC games, and only after they've been out a while and have most of the bugs corrected, so keep that in mind.

That being said, the most memorable bug experience I had was with the PC version of KOTOR.  While none of the bugs stopped me from completing and thoroughly enjoying the game, some of the features just plain didn't work, and a few places the plot wouldn't advance until I reloaded an earlier save and played through that part again.

[Zippo]

Lord of the Rings for Gameboy Advance is the buggiest game I've ever played.

There were many bugs that would do things like prevent NPC's from moving out of the way when they're blocking a path after you talk to them. The game would freeze every 20 mins or so, badguys would randomly not take damage. Just terrible. I never made it out of the shire...

[Glitch Girl]

GG, once again you're the only person I know to get THAT many bugs in a game. I know activision isn't the best at cleaning up their errors, but I never got that many errors whenever I played their games and I just replayed MUA and XML2 yesterday. Your glitch aura does wonders. :P

What can I say, it's a gift.  ;)

Added one more bug I forgot about (fly to orbit). 

As for XL2, I encountered a few bugs (some kinda bad), but not to the sheer number in MUA so far.  None of MUAs have been truly game breaking except for the Blade incident.  In XL2, I had two instances of unfinishable boss fights where some trigger wouldn't trigger, leaving you stuck and unable to continue beyond a reload. (The Holocost bug and the Stryfe bug)


My personal favorite wasn't exactly a bug but was a timing glitch - I'd been using Gambit and his card mines right before I went through any door.  I started to open a door, managed to drop some cards just a split second before the in game cutscene cut in.  One of the baddies walked towards me, got blown up into the air, fell, and got back up, all while never missing a line.  :)

[Viking]

The original, unpatched Freedom Force.  In which Patriot City's motorists just would not stop for justice.  I swear, the average motorist was often deadlier than the standard villains on the map!

Not as deadly, however, as one's own teammates trying to throw explosive objects.  Those were often exercises in amusing seppukku.

[Verfall]

Ultima 9. The game was so buggy it would not actually start up on any PC I tried to install it on. And I remember the first official patch was released concurrently with the game itself. Judging by the feedback on the internet the game wasn't worth playing anyway, but nothing pisses a person off more than blowing 60 bucks on a game that can't actually be played.....

[bat1987]

Batman:Vengeance for PC!

Bugs are too numerous to count them all.

[Pyroclasm]

Still nothing beats a pirate version of street fighter that would make rounds in the arcades in Mexico (and probably most third world countries).

That would be Street Fighter II: Rainbow Edition.  It was a black market, illegally hacked version of Championship edition.  I played it at several different arcades at the time (in the US).  I believe I read somewhere that it is called "Rainbow Edition" because each machine was modifiable, thus being a "different flavor".  It was unofficial and not endorsed by Capcom, but they took many of the most popular settings people were using and incorporated it into Turbo edition.  (Things like the dhalsim's 'port, Chun Li's fireball, the multi-fireball, the hyperspeed, etc.)

[daerdevil]

Daggerfall had the grandaddy of all glitches for me.  I encountered the game killing dungeon glitch of death (OK, that was a bit over the top).  The dungeons were randomly generated, and I encountered a glitch where the dungeon was not made right, and the game would crash.  As I had saved in that particular dungeon, I was unable to load the game w/o crashing it.  Game Killer.

[TheMarvell]

I heard the PS2 version of Spider-Man 3 is supposed to be one of the buggiest games ever made.

[Glitch Girl]

Not exactly a bug, but I just HAD to post this one...

My friend and I were playing Marvel Ultimate Alliance (yeah, I know, again, but it's the favorite group play game of this bunch despite the bugs) and were near the end...

(minor plot spoiler to follow)

We finally face Dr. Doom, and managed to syphon off a little bit of his uber power.  A cut scene starts and Doom says "So, you've stolen some of my power, but can you handle the POWER OF A GOD?!"

Apaprently not, because at that exact moment, the power went out in the entire neighborhood and stayed out for the next two hours.

Doom: 1, Glitch Girl: 0.

[BlueBard]

LOL, and that's what you get when you mix Glitch Aura with DC* power.

*Doom Current