Video Game Glitches Someone Should've Been Fired For
In theory, every video game should be playable until the end. If players have the sheer thumb-power to make their way through an epic journey and defeat a final boss, they should be handsomely rewarded, even if it's only with a splash screen. Unfortunately, many video games ship with glitches that make them either impassable or just outright ridiculous. Here are a few glitches that have destroyed perfectly good games, and should have cost these programmers their jobs.
Duck Hunt (NES) - Ducked up
It's a simple game about hunting living creatures for sport, but even Duck Hunt was published with a game-breaking glitch. If you can endure your snickering dog for 99 levels of bird-murdering fun, that's it. There's nothing there but a "Level 0," a foul purgatory where immortal birds disappear and reappear at random. The game ends, proving that there's no reward for duck genocide, in real life or in Nintendo. Now for the real challenge: loading those thousands of duck corpses into your pickup.
Pokemon Red/Blue (Game Boy) - The missing Pokemon
In the olden days, there were only 151 Pokémon to encounter, and that was good enough. Because of programming limitations, the original Game Boy games left spots for 256 different encounters; 151 were filled with Pokémon, others with trainers, and 39 spots were left empty. By following a specific sequence of events, you'll encounter the mess of code called "MissingNo" and be able to capture it. But doing so can cause errors in other parts of your game. Better not catch 'em all.
PlayStation Underground Holiday 2004 Demo (PS2) - Crappy holidays
Sony Computer Entertainment America's video game magazine regularly sent out a preview disc to their subscribers. Unfortunately, it was discovered that its 2004 holiday demo disc would completely destroy the save data on any memory card still in the system, regardless of the game. Sony sent out warnings, but it was too late. Gamers lost tens of thousands of gaming hours when their memory cards were razed, many of whom invested in the recently-shipped Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Just think of all those un-murdered random civilians.
Bubble Bobble Revolution (Nintendo DS) - Boss loss
Bubble Bobble Revolution includes one of the stupidest bugs ever released. What should have been a simple remake of a 100-level game was accidentally cut short at Level 30, for no other reason than the programmers forgot to put in a boss to defeat. Because the boss battle was an essential trigger to move on to level 31, the game was simply unbeatable. Codemasters eventually replaced the bugged carts, but they will never live down the unmitigated duncery of their mistake.
Oblivion: Shivering Isles (PC) - Object overload
The glitch found in Shivering Isles is a simple one: if you play too much, your game will crash. Because of a memory allotment issue, the PC version of the game would freeze once its memory was chock full of extra numbers which were generated for no good reason. Bethesda pushed out a fix as quickly as possible, and the irony that a game called Shivering Isles had freezing issues was lost on no one.
SoulCalibur III (PS2) - Don't change a thing
The SoulCalibur series is a great collection of fighting games, but a terrible bug appeared in the third installment. The error doesn't manifest as part of the game itself, but rather when players attempt to change any of the save data associated with their games. Set off by any number of conditions, the glitch can potentially destroy all of the data on a memory card. While gamers have been able to figure out workarounds, no amount of jiggle physics are worth losing all of your games.
Tetris Worlds (Multiple Systems) - Infinitely easy
Players may furiously debate whether or not the introduction of "infinite spin" to Tetris Worlds was a glitch or not, but it's game-breaking enough to be considered a travesty either way. By repeatedly hitting the "spin" button, a player can keep a Tetris piece in the air indefinitely, which is a totally cheap move, bro. Tetris HQ unconvincingly denies that the inclusion of this cheater move is a glitch, and it was made optional in subsequent games. But it's surely the worst thing to ever happen to Tetris. Next to appearing in Pixels, that is.
Batman: Dark Tomorrow (Xbox, GameCube) - No signal
Even the Riddler leaves some clues for Batman about how to defeat him, but in Dark Tomorrow, the only way to really beat villain R'as al Ghul is by finding a signal device hidden somewhere... except the game never tells you where it is, or even that it exists. While it's one of the most Kafkaesque video game twists of all time, no one plays video games to feel like a giant, helpless bug. And making a game with no direction about how to actually win is a pretty big bug, indeed.
Superman: The New Adventures (Nintendo 64) - Everything. Every single part.
When a game starts out by covering everything in a "Kryptonite fog" because it can't render anything too far away, you know you're off to a bad start. Regarded as one of the worst games of all time, Superman found an audience among small, stupid children, but is so full of game-crushing glitches that it's considered unplayable. Granted, the whole game takes place in a virtual reality programmed by Lex Luthor, so maybe Lex is just a really, really terrible programmer. From that perspective, this is actually the most clever game of all time.
Assassin's Creed Unity (PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC) - Face/Off
After numerous spinoffs and annual sequels retreading the same gameplay mechanics we've seen since the 2007 original, Ubisoft should've taken its time to give Assassin's Creed Unity a proper debut as the first next-gen exclusive of the series. Instead, it was rushed out alongside AC Rogue (for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3) as two different games launching on the same day. Surprisingly, Rogue is the superior title of the two. Sure, the French Revolution provides an intriguing (and massive) backdrop, but trying to get through Unity was like trying to eat a moldy baguette with no butter.
All gripes against Unity's repetitive gameplay and stagnant setup aside, Ubisoft shipped this one out the door with a plethora of glitches, clipping issues, and animation hiccups, which is a bad look considering the countless Assassin's Creed titles before it. Even after the patches, Unity still has more bugs than the courtesans of Paris. The worst offense? A glitch during cutscenes that caused faces to disappear, resulting in a horrifying, grotesque visage of hair, eyeballs, teeth, and gums floating above characters' clothes. We hope someone at Ubisoft got the guillotine for deciding to ship this ugly, unfinished product.