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Glitches

Flora

local hellion
Pronoun
they/he/ey
Ah, glitches. Oftentimes, the mortal enemy of video game nerds everywhere. Ranging from funny to cool to what can best be described as "what", glitches are cool to discover, document or whatever!

Sorta inspired by all the glitch talk in the SSB DLC thread. Let's talk about glitches, games and glitchy games! Post about glitches you've encountered, or anything about glitches, really.

Besides anything in our Pokemon games (holla, RBY! Also, holla @ Colosseum's infi-ball glitch, that helped up beat our run), we've had some...INTERESTING experiences with Mario Party games. It's mostly because our N64 is sloooowly dying, but our games tend to crash in the FUNNIEST WAYS.


  • Mario Party 3: My sister makes the grave error of passing the Koopa Bank. "Hello!" DEAFENING SCREECH AS THE GAME FREEZES.
  • Also MP3: I powered through Story Mode to unlock Waluigi Island and went back to the main menu to see if it was definitely available in Party Mode now. (I wasn't sure if you had to beat it first.) I go to the file select screen and am greeted with half-loaded things and the file select music in an INCREDIBLY WRONG, INCREDIBLY GLITCHY KEY. It eventually reverted to normal but nothing loaded right.
  • Mario Party 1: My older sis, her boyfriend, my younger sis, and I were all playing a game together. My older sis nabs the last bonus star, her boyfriend shouts "NO!" and slams his hands on the floor in exasperation. We hear this tiny little "krzzt," the game continues playing music, but the buttons do not work. Mario Party, man.
Other than that, we specifically abused Missingno in Blue, but other than that we've been relatively glitch-free at my house, I think.



Anyways! Talk about glitches!
 
There's something about the glitches in the early Pokémon games that other glitches can't really compare to. I think it's just how they've been around so long and people have been studying them so long that we know exactly how they work and there's tonnes of reading you can do on them. I'm a really big fan of the glitches that end in a purpose, like TASes that beat the game in 0:00, or ones that rewrite the game completely.

I can't think of many glitches I've experienced in more modern games. That's probably due to my not owning a computer good enough to play them, and I haven't bought Assassin's Creed Unity anyway.


Something I think about regarding glitches is when something becomes a glitch. Managing to walk through a wall is generally going to be a glitch, but what if instead of a wall it's a really long gap that you're not supposed to be able to jump over, but if you angle and time your jump juuust right, you can make it? Is that a glitch, or is it playing the game really well?
I'll admit that when it comes to speedruns I much prefer glitchless ones, but it's questions like that one that make me understand why ones with glitches are usually listed first when showing world records etc.
 
On my old Yellow version save file, I had a glitched Jolteon. When I viewed his stats, the screen would go blank and I had to press A again before it would show the actual stats, and once it did some bits of what was supposed to be on the screen were missing. To this day I have no idea what was going on there - it was just the Celadon City Eevee and I'd never used any cheats or glitches.

Once my cousin and I were having a link battle with our Gold versions, but the cable started to fall out on one side, and effectively, at some point a Pokémon fainted on the opponent's side on one game but not on the other. The game where the Pokémon had fainted promptly replaced it with a pink Butterfree named PSN. Then we turned the games off, worrying something bad would happen if we continued.
 
Once my cousin and I were having a link battle with our Gold versions, but the cable started to fall out on one side, and effectively, at some point a Pokémon fainted on the opponent's side on one game but not on the other. The game where the Pokémon had fainted promptly replaced it with a pink Butterfree named PSN. Then we turned the games off, worrying something bad would happen if we continued.

TRsRockin! has some great stories on the subject.
 
I remember once that I was playing Brother Bear for the PC (this was when I was like in first grade), and it started glitching terribly. I fell through the terrain and it started spiking. At least, that's what I remember.

There was also the huge Yoshi glitch on SSB4 3DS. In 10-Man Smash, the final enemy is always your fighter. If you played as Yoshi and spammed Egg Lay on the final Yoshi, it would eventually grow so huge it would just touch the stage barriers and die.
 
Glitch demonstration videos (not so much full runs/speedruns, those just don't interest me as much for whatever reason) are pretty much the only things I normally bother to watch online. I have some strange mental block that makes me not care about 99% of online videos of any sort, but the minute you say "look at how hilariously broken and exploitable this game is" I am there.

Anyone feel like tossing out any recommendations? I would assume most people who like Pokémon glitches are familiar with ChickasaurusGL's videos, but I binge-watched pretty much all of them earlier this year and he's added a lot of interesting stuff recently. I'll probably be going back to work through all the recommended similar videos at some point, heh.

For all my love of reading about and watching glitches I do surprisingly little actual experimentation with them, so I can't think of anything interesting that I've caused to happen on purpose. I do remember this one incident from when I was much younger, though:

I was at my cousin's house, relaxing on the floor by the window and playing yet another file on Blue Version. I was battling Blaine, and his growlithe and ponyta went down without incident. Out came his rapidash... and then everything went haywire. Out of nowhere, the music faded out and was replaced by the occasional "thump, thump" of a shaking poké ball. Blaine's rapidash had spontaneously acquired a burn or some other status condition that I'm pretty sure I hadn't inflicted upon it, its name had glitched out, and its HP bar (and possibly my own pokémon's?) had wrapped around the screen. When I tried to act, the game claimed that the gibberish rapidash was "frozen solid", then that it was "burned"; then the skull-and-crossbones used to indicate burn damage flashed over its head and its massive HP drained down to nothing over the course of what felt like almost a minute.

Blaine sent out a gibberish arcanine next, which was immediately afflicted by the same combination frozen/burned status condition and ungodly huge HP bar as its predecessor. I tried to attack, and its freezer burn sapped all its HP before the attack went off. I'd won! Hell if I knew how, but I wasn't complaining (though I was wondering whether the game would continue its little freakout). The game gave me money, the screen faded out to return to the gym map... and then it froze. I restarted and was presumably plonked back into the gym right in front of Blaine, or wherever it was I'd last saved. I tentatively tried battling Blaine again, expecting his rapidash to cause the game to throw another fit once it was sent out... but nothing happened. The battle progressed normally, and I was allowed to receive my badge and TM and continue the rest of the file without incident. Baffling, slightly disappointing—although at least it meant that nothing was permanently screwed up—and I've never seen it happen since.

Years later, now that people have done all their experimenting and I've done all that reading, I can identify that sequence of events as what's known as the "TMTRAINER effect", or at least something closely related. What I can't identify is how on God's green earth it happened. I don't remember having performed any glitches on that particular file at all. It's possible that I might've done some missingno. item cloning, but I'm not aware of any way that missingno. or M' could've caused this effect. I didn't know about any of the glitches that are known to cause this effect—really, I doubt anyone knew about them, since this was well before any serious English-language glitch research had surfaced—and I'd probably have been too chicken to try them if I had known. I do own a cheating device that's tailored to first-gen Pokémon games, but I don't know if I owned it at that time; even if I did, that "tailoring" means that it locks you in to only changing sensible things via lists and menus, so it's harder to make a mistake or an intentional substitution (e.g., enter the index number for an invalid pokémon in a wild modifier code) than it is via GameShark or Game Genie. As far as I can recall I was using perfectly normal pokémon with perfectly normal moves in a perfectly normal battle up until that rapidash went bananas for no discernible reason.

The only slightly strange thing I can recall is that for some reason I could swear the pokémon I was using was an oddish; that doesn't make sense, since I'm not normally interested in that line, there's no reason for it to have been an oddish instead of a vileplume, and why would it have been sent out against Blaine of all people? I might be misremembering that part. Not hard, I guess, given how muddy the backsprites were back in the day. Maybe it was a poli-something, since they're also black and round and blobby; I've never been terribly interested in them, either, but at least they're not grass-types. Whatever it was, surely it can't have caused this on its own.

Sooooo yeah! Still no clue as to what inexplicable hiccup brought all that about, but it was quite the experience for little mini-me, and it's fun to reminisce about even now. Glitches! Good times, man.
 
Once I was playing 2v2 teams in Brawl with three friends. My team was two Bowsers, and the other team doesn't matter. Team attack was off.

My friend grabbed someone with Bowser's Side-B, and attempted a Bowsercide. As he was jumping up I caught the person he was grabbing in my Up-smash. This ended up freeing the victim from his Side-B, and my teammate went plummeting off the stage by himself.

Except he didn't die. He just kinda...got stuck under the lower blast line, falling forever. And he stayed like this until the person he was attempting to Side-B died, at which point the game allowed my friend-teammate-Bowser to be KO'd. I'm assuming how this worked is that, because Bowser's Side-B in Brawl is coded to kill the enemy before it kills Bowser if they plummet off of the stage, the game wouldn't let my friend die until his target had died. Even though he wasn't actually grabbing his target anymore.

There was also a time when my friends were fighting 1v1 - Dedede v. Snake. Dedede tried grabbing one of Snake's grenades, and in doing so fell through the stage. (Both this glitch and the one above happened on Castle Siege. Weird.)

Also, one time I let my cousin play the MOTHER 3 English-translated ROM on my laptop, and he somehow glitched the game in a way that rendered it impossible to enter Ohsoe Castle at the start of Chapter 2. I think he may have died during the forced zombie fight in the graveyard? And, like, hadn't saved in a while? Whatever happened, it was suddenly day during the chapter, even though my cousin hadn't even entered the castle. And if he tried going back to Wes's house, Wes just gave his big "You must find the sacred treasure" speech again.

Also, one time in Pokemon Pearl I fought a level 0 Wurmple. That was weird. My game crashed.
 
Anyone feel like tossing out any recommendations?

if you've ever played PS1-era spyro, justafriensda has a playthrough of both spyro 2 and 3 in which he goes through and breaks the game. it's great.

I haven't come across any memorable glitches aside from everything that happens in Harvest Moon DS, which is perhaps the most poorly put-together harvest moon game. There's a thing where you can get the harvest sprites to go fishing in the ocean in the middle of winter and you'll randomly get like a million dollars (and you can keep doing this all winter; i got it three times in one winter once). a lot of help sites refer to it as like 'the fishing lottery' but considering it's never mentioned by anyone in game, i'm fairly sure it's a glitch.

there's also the thing that happens in G/S sometimes where something will use Thunder Wave and the sound effect persists for the rest of the battle and in the overworld until you turn off your game. That's not fun.
 
Did you mean: Bethesda games

Seriously though, I've had some... interesting things happen on Skyrim. One that really stuck with me was when I was just playing - in a perfectly normal way, mind you - with my Nord character and after fast traveling to a location, I noticed something weird. His arms would kinda flop when I turned him, and if I crouched and stood back up, his head would droop down. I entered a house, and at first I didn't even see the character, and then he just appeared from a doorway inside the house, all limp, kind of like something invisible was dragging him and he was just sliding on the floor on his knees. It was kind of horrifying and hilarious at the same time. :P

He eventually got back to the third person camera about where he should've been normally (he was still ragdoll-y though). I think I went back outside after that and he disappeared entirely (I'm willing to bet he was being dragged by the same invisible force somewhere in the wilderness though). I ended up loading an older save for obvious reasons. It never happened to me after that but it was an interesting experience nonetheless :D
 
Something I think about regarding glitches is when something becomes a glitch. Managing to walk through a wall is generally going to be a glitch, but what if instead of a wall it's a really long gap that you're not supposed to be able to jump over, but if you angle and time your jump juuust right, you can make it? Is that a glitch, or is it playing the game really well?

I'd say it's more a level design oversight than a glitch, provided it's a supposedly unjumpable gap that can be cleared with a regular jump from an approach the devs simply didn't consider.
 
My trainer became a GHOOooSST in bw2 (at least that's how I like to think of it)

So, outside Lacunosa town, there are these hills with karate / battle people walking around on them, right? They walk up and down the hills. I was just walking around when I found this - if you run up the hill from the bottom at the exact same time that the battle girl is coming, so you would theoretically run into her, you will go straight through her - and, in fact, her overworld sprite becomes merged with yours for a split second. She keeps walking like nothing just happened. Nothing else out of the ordinary has happened because of that.

Maybe because the 3d ness is not able to be handled by the DS lite somehow? Like the game is too preoccupied with keeping up with your placement on the hill that it cant realize there's a person there. That's not a good statement, maybe because it just simply doesn't realize that the square you are on next to her when running is, in fact, next to her to stop you, so it just lets you keep going.

I've never heard any other documentation of it so it's pretty cool! Yay, I have a personal glitch!
 
The only glitches I'm really aware of to the point where I can exploit them are the ones in the original Super Mario Bros., and only then because my dad knows them all and he taught them to me. Other than that, I'm not really that big on exploiting glitches because more often than not, they're done less for function and more for the novelty. Like Kratos said, though, I do love watching people bug a game out, and the very best game to watch bug out is Super Mario 64. Just this morning I stumbled upon this video, and it's the most fun I've had in weeks. Oh my god, my life really is falling apart, isn't it.
 
Recently found a glitch in Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance. I was in Prankster's Paradise as Sora (before the underwater area), and I got knocked downward by an enemy, and fell downward, into a black background, and somehow made it back at the entrance.
 
I also vaguely remember a glitch in the Sims where the icons with their faces on it an the bar at the bottom of the screen changed to upside-down faces of someone who looked like a mad professor.

Looking around the internet it seems like a few other people have had it. I can't remember the glitch affecting the game beyond that, but I remember it freaked me out enough that I deleted the family.
 
I love pokemon glitches!!! They're...interesting!

I used to catch missingno. on my brother's blue a bunch of times XD Then i'd check his pc box, and, yes....catch too many missingno, AND IT DOES MESS YOUR GAME UP. We kept getting all these weird messed up pokemon in his later pc boxes! including charizard m. it was so weird, we had to restart his file....

Only to suffer the same fate in the newer file o_O; after i, again, caught a bunch of missingno. on him. Freaky, isn't it?
 
I found a glitch while playing New Super Mario Bros Wii (or was it U?) - I was in one of the boss castle levels, went through the stage and got hit by something while small. I expected to die, of course, but somehow I didn't die and just heard the "power down" sound, while still being small like before. Weird, but happy I survived that
 
So, while playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, I encountered a glitch in the level “A Quiet End”. In some of the cutscenes, Quiet’s model was missing, so there was nothing but a floating sniper rifle. At the time I thought it was strange, but didn’t suspect it was a glitch, because Quiet can turn invisible. Anyway, when it came time to fight off the Soviet tanks, it took me like two hours and a lot of rage to beat, as I kept dying from the onslaught. I had to use a rocket launcher and a bunch of supply drops (and believe me, hitting the snipers with rockets isn’t easy) and had to keep ducking in and out of the ruins while being bombarded by the tanks. Finally, when I beat the Soviet mechanized unit, another cutscene triggered where the invisible Quiet collapses, and Snake puts her over his shoulders to carry her through a sandstorm to the helicopter landing zone. Anyway, after this cutscene, I discovered to my dismay that Quiet… wasn’t there. D-Dog was, somehow, but Quiet was nowhere to be found. This made it impossible to finish the level.

At this point, at 2 AM, I wanted to ragequit and never play again, but I decided to just try restarting the level and see what happened. This time, however, Quiet was there, and she was actually fighting. This time around the fight was so much easier. I hadn’t realized that the first time, she was completely absent from the level, making my job much, much harder. I was able to finish the level at last.

So, after like two and a half hours of trying to beat one level, I was both extremely pissed, and rather proud of myself for managing to beat a level that should have actually been impossible without Quiet’s cover fire.
 
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