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Bugs and glitches that made a game better for you

In a lot of old NES games, you could inch forward until an enemy barely appears onscreen, back up to scroll it off the screen, and then move forward again to have the enemy no longer be there. My friends and I used to call it "despawning," and I used it a lot in TMNT and Rygar.
 
Already mentioned but bunnyhopping and strafe jumping are the OG glitches that had a significant affect on gameplay. And the great thing about half-life 1 is that it was built on top of the quake 1 engine so an entire generation of half-life mods had access to bunnyhopping (not all though some took it out). It's too bad when HL2 was made they redid the physics and took it out...
 
The sketch glitch in FF3/6 and duping items in FF2/4. Some of the more memorable ones I can remember. Oh and the orb glitch in Secret of Mana. Each glitch made secondary play-through great.
 
Super Smash Bros. Melee by far. Literally became a whole new game once you learn all the mechanics.

Also, Ocarina of Time and SM64. I remember reading somewhere that you can get your triforce in the start menu filled up in OoT and I was searching everywhere, trying a whole ton of glitches I found online to make it work. Of course, it was all a hoax but back then, anything was possible! SM64 I remember glitching on to the other side of the door opening cut scene (i don't know what to call it). I remember I thought for some reason that there was a hidden world after all 120 stars where it had mushroom houses and a bunch of developer left overs somewhere. Again, also turned out to not exist unfortunately.
 
Fallout 4, "oh you want me to have a jet pack to reach the top of this building or high out of reach room hiding a legendary item? Nah, ill just pull out some junk, hold it, crouch, look down, and crouch walk up your wall. Whats gravity righf?"
 
New Vegas has a good xp glitch at the very start of the game, in Goodsprings, that you can exploit to quickly get to level 20+ if you so choose. Really good for repeated play-throughs where you want to try out different character builds without all the early grinding.
 
Shotgun Kiss said:
The exploit that let you permanently keep Professor Pester out of your garden in Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise.

Q2Xp56b.jpg


Normally he'll come into your garden every so often (roughly every half an hour if I had to guess), and destroy your most valuable Pinata. If you spotted him in time, you could pay him off, but if not, you'd lose your Pinata with no way of recovering it.

Building a wall in this way kept him out (he gets confused and leaves after a bit). In my opinion, this fixed a terrible design choice that may have completely put me off playing the game otherwise
Click to expand...

Having a Limeoceros was the better deterrent. Always funny to see it barrelling at Professor Pester and fucking his shit up instead.
 
Subzero mk3 corner juggle. I owned so many people and tournaments with this lol. 1 mistake is all it took for about 50-60% damage.

Subzero pre-patch was a God amongst men.
 
Dragon Age Inquisition's merchant/item duplicate glitch.

Makes the whole dressing-up-my-party thing a loooot more manageable, hahah. Also saves a looooot of time otherwise spent on brain-dead farming.
 
Septimus Prime said:
In a lot of old NES games, you could inch forward until an enemy barely appears onscreen, back up to scroll it off the screen, and then move forward again to have the enemy no longer be there. My friends and I used to call it "despawning," and I used it a lot in TMNT and Rygar.
Click to expand...

yeah, but it was called screening. :)
 
I guess it doesn't qualify as bugs or glitches, but the sequence breaking in Metroid Prime is a lot of fun. Ignoring some if the harder ones, it turns the game into a Super Metroid-esque experience but in 3D.
 
GreatNumber said:
Sonic Boom, having tried it over at a cousin's house Knuckles being able to infinitely fly using a glitch where you pause after every jump was literally the best thing that game had going for it.
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This. The only reason I bought the game at launch was because of the glitches, and boy did it deliver. Without them it would have been a complete waste of money.
 
Slow Down in shmups and run n gun games made certain parts much easier by basically giving you bullet time. It was a god-send on arcade and 8/16-bit consoles back in the day. I still kinda hope for them on newer games cuz it also gives the game a nostalgic kick which I so love.
 
Shotgun Kiss said:
The exploit that let you permanently keep Professor Pester out of your garden in Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise.

Q2Xp56b.jpg


Normally he'll come into your garden every so often (roughly every half an hour if I had to guess), and destroy your most valuable Pinata. If you spotted him in time, you could pay him off, but if not, you'd lose your Pinata with no way of recovering it.

Building a wall in this way kept him out (he gets confused and leaves after a bit). In my opinion, this fixed a terrible design choice that may have completely put me off playing the game otherwise
Click to expand...

It makes me very sad I didn't know about this back in the day because I basically stopped playing after Pester became too much of a chore. I just wanted to spend time with all the tiny details of making my farm look amazing and natural but this guy always took up way too much time dealing with stuff and would ruin expensive animals and features in your garden, basically he shouldnt've even been in the game. What a nuisance!
 
Bunny hopping in quake engine games.

It completely changed the meta online once you learned it. Half life 2 tried to change it, but it's back hopping was even worse.
 
The Albatross said:
Was thinking this and I've never been sure if it's intentionally. Quake's rocket jump and it's affect on Team Fortress Classic with rocket jumping, concussion jumping, depo man jumping, bunny hopping, and basically every other advanced maneuver completely changed the game for the better.
Click to expand...

Explosive jumping in quake was intentional. E4M4 (?) has a horizontal warp gate that you can only reach via rocket/explosive jumping. they even put a little hole in the ground underneath it to tuck a grenade in there.
Maybe they didn't intend explosive jumping to break the game as badly as speedrunners did, and bunny hopping was likely not intentional, but rocket/grenade jumping was definitely in there.

Hell, there's a secret room in Doom II that can only be reached by pushing yourself into it with the rocket launcher.
 
Insert Coin said:
I just exploited my first glitch in over 30 years of gaming two nights ago. I've never liked the idea of using them before and it still feels dirty to me!

Ratchet and Clank HD I used the racetrack glitch to get on to the track without starting a race, and racked up a million bolts by breaking open respawning boxes. I can now afford everything in the game without even trying!

I need a shower.
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Yeah I taped my button down on a semi busted controller to do that lol.
 
There was a book in Skyrim that gave you a skill point. It would get used up when you looked at it, but if you threw it down as you were opening it, you could pick it up and use it again as many times as you wanted.

This was great for second play through.
 
I admit, I found the rosenqueen duping bug in Disgaea 4 useful.

They nerfed too much the Puppy Paw Stick, and with the bug, it still took me more than 300h to create a perfect team, I can't imagine how tedious it would have been without it.



Also, I love sequence-breaking in games.
 
RZqCk7Q.jpg


This was one of my favorite games of the 90's. I don't know many if any actually preferred it to the first SNES Griffey game, but I did. I recently thought about why that is, and I believe it came down to the way I exploited the game.

1) The game's trading system worked based on points. All players started with a default value depending on their skill, and that goes up or down based on in-game performance. My two favorite teams at the time were the White Sox and the Mariners. Coincidentally, both of these teams had the sole game of opening day on the season schedule. What that meant was, I'd pick one of them, play extremely well with lots of the hitters to boost their trade value, then trade them for much better players of other teams who had yet to play a game. It was very easy to assemble an all-star roster like this (Grifffey wasn't tradeable though), and because my favorite teams could do this very easily, it made me enjoy the game that much more.

2) There was another glitch I found where, if you used a pitcher who was left handed, had a Super Changeup specialty pitch, stood in the correct spot on the mound, and threw the ball in the exact same way each time (it's very easy to do), you could make the CPU batter not swing at the ball 99.9% of the time. Sometimes they would swing and foul or miss, but getting hits is impossible. I *think* there were two starting pitchers in the whole game who were left handed and had a super changeup, and coincidentally one of them played for the White Sox, which is how I found this out.

Armed with this knowledge (that I found on my own as a kid, no internet or guides to help me!) I built super teams that hit so many home runs that the game would eventually lose count at random spots over 100, and I think my best season was 160-2. Love love love that game. I'm pretty proud of myself for having found that stuff since I don't typically play one game enough anymore to find things like that.
 
Blast Corps has a ton of weird glitches and bugs which make speedrunning the game fun and those ridiculous platinum times a little bit easier (or even possible? I'm sure I read somewhere that Rare just shoved in some plat times at the last minute without playtesting if they were even doable)

Ranging from the mundane (letting go of A before hitting rough terrain lets you keep your max speed) to the quirky yet useful (the NTSC-only Z-Trick, where holding Z next to a building (and therefore obstructing your guy from exiting the vehicle) made it blow up after a few seconds) all the way to things like the street shark.

Also plenty of examples of out of bounds and/or clipping, which are generally pretty useful and/or amusing.
 
Just about any item-duplication glitch in JRPGs.

FFIV's was great. Throw as many Excaliburs as you want!

FFVII's was nice.

Heck, recently Etrian Odyssey Untold had one and I used that glitch in the middle of the final boss fight to dupe enough TP restoring items to last the fight.

There's plenty more item dupe glitches that I forgot about, but those are a classic to me.
 
Monkeylord said:
Having a Limeoceros was the better deterrent. Always funny to see it barrelling at Professor Pester and fucking his shit up instead.
Click to expand...

No it wasn't; the Limeoceros would trample all smaller Pinata and make them unhappy. Not to mention it spoiled the atmosphere of any garden not specifically designed with it in mind. It also takes a while to get a Limeoceros. And worst of all, when Limeoceros does attack Pester, Pester then runs out of the garden and destroys any trees/buildings/decoarations he charges through.

The wall is by far the best deterrent, as there are no negative side effects. He's circumvented my wall a couple of times (out of the literally hundreds of times it's stopped him), so I also build a decoy Pinata on the other side of the wall to ensure that even if he does make it through, none of my Pinata will be lost.


Snaggle said:
It makes me very sad I didn't know about this back in the day because I basically stopped playing after Pester became too much of a chore. I just wanted to spend time with all the tiny details of making my farm look amazing and natural but this guy always took up way too much time dealing with stuff and would ruin expensive animals and features in your garden, basically he shouldnt've even been in the game. What a nuisance!
Click to expand...

Yup. As I said, this glitch doesn't simply "improve" the game; it saves it entirely. Professor Pester is a terrible design choice. In the first game, the Captain's Cutlass item kept out both Ruffians and Pester, so once you bought it, you never had to worry about either. In Trouble in paradise, it no longer keeps Pester out, which was a terrible decision by the developers. This wall exploit makes the game playable again.

I'd strongly recommend going back and playing it again. It hasn't aged at all; it's a wonderful game. I still go back to it and get hooked every year or so.




I definitely agree with people saying Melee. The exploits in that game carved out a whole e-sports scene; one of the most prevalent in the world.
 
For me it's GTA IV with it's what I call "pa-twing-swing" that sends you flying if you drive into it. My friends and I used to have contests on who could go furthest, not blow up etc.

On mobile so I'm too lazy to get a link of it :P
 
Back in the early days of the 360 I played a ton of CoD 3. There were quite a few different glitches you could perform on various different maps and pretty much just cheat the game and other players. There was one map that had this wall that if you jumped at the right angle you would land inside it. Then you were pretty much invincible till you ran out of ammo, but man could you rack up the kills!
 
Granted it didn't have exactly a high-budget, but Pizza Dude had some very amusing glitches that entertained more than the game itself.

Going to the highest point in the game, which was far outside the city and jumping in the air allowed you to see much of the world(which wasn't much). Or making the vehicle run into a gas station where it exploded. Or watching the traffic jams with cars up in the air.

For what could have been such a standard and mediocre game, the glitches and bugs sure brought it up a few notches.
YfXF2JC.jpg
 
Shotgun Kiss said:
No it wasn't; the Limeoceros would trample all smaller Pinata and make them unhappy. Not to mention it spoiled the atmosphere of any garden not specifically designed with it in mind. It also takes a while to get a Limeoceros. And worst of all, when Limeoceros does attack Pester, Pester then runs out of the garden and destroys any trees/buildings/decoarations he charges through.
Click to expand...

I never had a problem with the Limeoceros trampling other Pinata (maybe I just never noticed), and when he attacks Pester he basically rams him into the stratosphere, twinkly star an' all. I *think* I just kept the Limeoceros in storage until I needed him. It's been a while since I've played it. I always mailed 2 of each Pinata to myself so I could always have them handy.
 
My favourite was in the first Hitman, like the sawed off shotgun having the same amnout of ammo in the clip as the weapon you're double wielding. Imagine it combining with the Desert Eagle, you'd just see bodies flying!
 
The Item Duplication glitch in Demon's Souls. I want to create and level this weapon. Now I could do an additional playthough and grind rare chunks for hours on end. Or I could spend a minute duping and be done with it.

Yeah I duped upgrade materials and Boss Souls happily. Grinding and farming are the two worst things in games and if I can cut out hours of worthless content to save time I'll always pick that option as long as it isn't game breaking. It lets me spend more time on the things that matter.
 
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