Gaming
Games
The 10 most awkward bugs in gaming history
From faceless AC: Unity characters to GTA IV’s swing glitch, meet the gremlins that made it past QA.
Assassin's Creed: Unity
© Ubisoft/Retro_Apocalypse
Bugs, errors or gremlins – whatever you call them, these sometimes game-breaking glitches can also offer a hilarious insight into what a developer’s worst nightmares must look like. Case in point: the latest game in the long running Assassin’s Creed franchise, Unity, launched last November, but it wasn’t quite the polished AAA title fans were expecting.
Instead, it was absolutely riddled with bugs. Ubisoft has been working round the clock since launch to fix the problems, but it’s too little, too late: the “faceless” character screenshots that made the Internet collectively laugh and weep has immortalised Unity as a game forever marred by its glitches. Unity’s not the only game to suffer some embarrassing bugs, though. Far from it. Join us as we take a look at some of the gaming’s awkward glitches ever.
Assassin’s Creed: Unity
Assassin’s Creed: Unity is a gorgeous-looking game, giving you a huge virtual version of Paris to traverse. However, it’s been plagued by ridiculous errors since it launched, with the most infamous being those creepy faceless characters, as evidenced by Retro_Apocalypse’s Steam screenshots. Assassins without faces? Floating eyes and jagged teeth? We’ll wait for the patches thanks, Ubisoft.
Madden 15 – Tiny Titan
There’s an odd bug in the latest Madden NFL title where Cleveland Browns linebacker Christian Kirksey sometimes shows up on the field as a tiny player. Instead of Kirksey measuring up at his usual 6’2”, 235 pounds, the game transforms him to a miniscule 1’2”. But despite his shrunken size, he’s still capable of making tackles and nailing touchdowns. It could have been really embarrassing for both Kirksey and EA Sports, but thankfully they’ve seen the lighter side of things and have each truly embraced the glitch, even urging players to challenge the ‘Tiny Titan’.
FIFA 15 – Centre circle frenzy
It looks like Madden wasn’t the only sports title that was plagued by bugs this year - FIFA 15 suffered from a fair few too. And as the video above shows, the result is pretty much every manager’s worst fear. As one intrepid gamer spotted, the PC version had this rather entertaining glitch buried within its code that causes all the players on the field to spontaneously start running like crazy into the centre of the pitch. Heck, even the goalies get involved – not exactly Premier League behaviour.
Grand Theft Auto IV – Swing glitch
Grand Theft Auto IV was the first GTA title on high-definition hardware, and it let us explore the seedy underworld of a HD Liberty City through the eyes of Niko Bellic. Rockstar Games’ open-world games have always had a few bugs under the hood, though, and this is our favourite: if you drive your car into a swing set in the game you’ll be slingshotted high into the heavens. It’s pretty fun, so we can totally see QA intentionally letting this one slide.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion – 10,000 Watermelons
Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls games are all epic, po-faced adventures, but they’re not without their amusing bugs. The first HD-era title, Oblivion, which launched on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC, contained a neat glitch that let you duplicate items. Given that power, why wouldn’t you duplicate 10,000 identical watermelons and see if the game can handle it? Hit play above to see exactly that in action.
Age of Empires: The Age of Kings – Breaker of games
Strategy gaming fans must have been pleased to finally be able to take Age of Empires on the go when the game graced the Nintendo DS back in 2006, but it had a slew of technical issues, including one that could totally brick the cartridge itself. Using a name that’s less than four characters in your profile could cause the game to suffer from some serious problems – leading publisher Majesco to pop a slip of paper into game boxes with a warning – but that’s not all. Games usually warn you to not turn your console off while it’s saving, right? Standard practice. But regardless of your actions, The Age of Kings was known for habitually freezing while saving, potentially ruining your entire game. Talk about awkward.
Skate 3 – When physics go wrong
EA’s boarding series Skate gave gamers a much more chilled, grounded take on the genre, but the third title still managed to ship with plenty of hilarious physics-based faux pas. Hit play on the video above to see some of the best glitches in action – from getting impossibly stuck in unusual places, to being blasted far into the skies with nothing more than your skateboard and your thoughts for company. Awkward? Or gloriously entertaining? You be the judge.
NBA 2K15 – Face scanning fails
NBA 2K15 is easily one of the best basketball sims of all time, and it contains a pretty innovative face scanning feature on PS4 and Xbox One to help put you right into the game. Unfortunately, it might be an idea that’s still a bit ahead of its time. Scans can be distorted by anything from bad angles to dim lighting, and the results are borderline horrifying, with many players looking more like orcs from the Lord of the Rings than actual human beings – and those are some of the better-looking ones. Hit play on the video above to see the worst that the community has come up with. Simply embarrassing, right?
Dragon Age: Inquisition – The Banter Bug
Dragon Age: Inquisition
© EA/BioWare
Dragon Age: Inquisition is one of the current-gen’s top RPGs, but even the mighty BioWare can’t keep all the gremlins out of the kitchen. Known online as the Banter Bug, this harmless sounding glitch doesn’t sound like it’d affect your game too much, but the most awkward thing about it is that you might not even know you’ve been bitten. The characters in your party should joke among themselves and trade banter as you explore the vast game world, but the Banter Bug stops that from happening. Without knowing any better, you might play for hours and hours without noticing that your party seems unusually bereft of chat. It’s great being able to hear your team interact with each other, and really helps with immersion, but the bug’s existence causes another problem altogether: paranoia. You might start asking yourself if you have the bug, or that your party just wants some quiet time. Maybe you have it, or maybe you don’t. Maybe you like peace and quiet anyway? Either way, missing out on some top notch content isn’t ideal – and BioWare’s hard at work at fixing it.
Pokémon Red & Blue – MissingNo.
The infamous backwards L that would pop up in Pokémon Red and Blue if you sought it out has many game-breaking qualities, and while both cartridges had many other glitches to their name, MissingNo. is the most famous. The jumbled, pixelated mess strikes fear into plenty of gamers, as it has the ability fully break the game and distort the graphics. But it had its uses, too. A side effect of finding the glitchy Pokémon is that whatever the sixth item in your inventory was would magically be multiplied, making it an easy way to get a hundred Master Balls or Hyper Potions. We’d say the bug was more infamous than embarrassing, as MissingNo. was likely the first kind of major game-altering glitch that many young gamers had come across – and who wouldn’t want hundreds of Master Balls?
