Gaming
Games
Glitchfest: The buggiest games of all time
These games don't just go wrong. They go AWOL.
Fallout: New Vegas
© Bathesda Softworks
The official video game of the Ashes cricket tour made the headlines last week - but for all the wrong reasons.
Arriving months after its original release date, the sports sim was bursting with bugs. Fielders would hop, skip and teleport. Balls would magically vanish or pass through people, if they hadn’t inexplicably fallen over first. The reviews were so poor, the complaints so scathing, that not only was the game pulled from PC download service Steam, but publisher 505 Games pledged to refund everyone who purchased the game - and cancelled the planned console versions.
It’s a disaster for the England and Wales Cricket Board - but it’s not unprecedented. Gaming history is littered with rushed out releases that clearly spent too much in development hell and not enough in QA (quality assurance). Here are a few that aren’t just bad, but comically so.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Bethesda’s sprawling RPG covers so much ground it’s hardly surprising it doesn’t always work perfectly. Still, the sheer number of times the game goes wrong is impressive. You can slay enemies who will then freeze on the spot. Sometimes the screen will go gray, just because. You can even use paint brushes in the game to build floating staircases, a tactic speedrunners have mastered to clock the game in under 20 minutes. Bethesda’s next installment, Skyrim, was plagued by similar issues - the PS3 version was so buggy that entire games got eaten, and the studio delayed DLC for the platform by a year. Not that a few kinks stopped both games from storming their way to success.
Enter the Matrix
What should have been an awesome interactive experience with a storyline that weaved into the Matrix Reloaded, launched the same week, was instead let down by truly terrible driving, and some of the most atrocious collision detection and enemy AI in any 3D game. Jump to 0:34 in the video to see one SWAT trooper pirouetting like a ballerina. We’re pretty sure that wasn’t intended.
Dragon Age 2
Dragon Age 2
© BioWare
Dragon Age 2 took a lot less than an age to create, and it shows. The game arrived in early 2013 just 16 months afters the original, stripped of its PC strategy gameplay and hurriedly ported into a hack-and-slash for consoles after the success of Mass Effect 2. We’re not just talking glitchy battles here either: important cinematic scenes will sometimes just loop over, giving you a disturbing sense of déjà vu.
Superman 64
Widely considered not just the worst Nintendo 64 game of all time, but the worst game of all time full stop, you don’t have to have super powers to find the buggy flaws in Superman 64. You just need to move around slightly and watch Clark Kent fail to walk through doors properly, or crash underneath bridges even when he’s flying nowhere near them. Developer Titus was reportedly forced to change much of the game at the last minute, and work in the bizarre ring collecting element which has little or nothing to do with the Man of Steel. Not that that was much consolation for gamers at the time.
Fallout: New Vegas
Another game felled by its vast ambitions and world map, Obsidian’s Fallout: New Vegas is riddled with bugs. Shooting an enemy sometimes causes nothing to happen, you can walk out into thin air, and sometimes you’ll just bump into floating heads on the post-apocalyptic wasteland. Jump to 0:30 to see for yourself.
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness
We agree
© Eidos Interactive
Enough said, really. Either the developers of the 2003 Lara Croft game have had some interesting run ins with the law, or they didn’t spot these bugs before kicking the game out of the temple door.
Too Human
Sometimes the games that take the longest can also be the buggiest - Xbox 360 RPG Too Human was stuck in development hell for a decade, but finally arrived on Microsoft’s console in 2008. Character clipping is par for the course - as are these surprisingly docile enemies.
Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing
This big truck PC racing game has a rather fundamental flaw - sometimes, your fellow competitors won’t race with you, parking up on the starting grid and staying there. At the other extreme, an infinite speed glitch lets you reverse at up to one quadrillion miles per hour. Strange how nobody spotted that one.
The Skate trilogy
You’d have thought at some point, the developers of Skate, EA Black Box, would have decided that they needed to get a lock on their quality control. But no, even the third game in the series is jam packed full of bugs and glitches: even today’s top skaters can’t defy physics like this.
Sonic The Hedgehog (2006)
2006 saw the arrival of Sonic the Hedgehog for the first time on current-gen consoles, but it wasn’t a triumphant entrance. The game met with negative reviews from fans and critics alike - mostly thanks to its horrendous gameplay, extremely long loading times, and multitude of glitches. Getting stuck in walls, flying around on a box and walking through closed doors were just some of the more common ones - it only gets worse.
