As a result of a Youtube rabbit hole, I stumbled upon a glitch in Zelda where you can get in Ganondorfs castle as Young Link in OoT. It's a massive faff and you've got to do some things absolutely perfectly to get it but it's bloody fascinating. 

Got me thinking about what some of the other truly brilliant game glitches are, share them here folks.

Do bugs count? The Assassin's Creed: Unity missing faces thing has to be a thing of beauty.

Dark Souls II - When you parry an enemies attack, dodge and attack in a very specific way it's possible to fly through certain sections of the game skipping a vast majority of the in-game content.

Donkey Kong 64 - Maybe one of the most broken games on the N64, which comes as no surprise since Nintendo had to package extra RAM for reasons they still can't figure out. Basically you can jump through walls and float in the air skipping you straight to the final fight of the game. You can also use the technique to skip having to pay the banana toll to fight bosses' among a litany of other glitches.

I don't really have a favorite game glitch but one that I encountered recently tripped me out was the last boss battle in Ecco The Dolphin. I'm surprised to read a lot of reviewers of the game say how much it creeped them out almost like a survival horror game. I actually never really got that feeling from the game until I played the last boss battle, which I had to use the cheat code for invincibility because the final stage before the boss fight was damn near impossible for me. The boss is a creepy ass looking alien looking like something from HR Giger artwork or the Alien movies and the sounds it makes and the way it moves kinda creeped me out. What gave me the heebie geebies was the way the game glitches out because of the invincibility cheat code. Normally the alien would suck you into his mouth and chew you up and you would have to go back a level to work your way back. When the alien sucks you into his mouth with the invincibility cheat the screen just turns red and scrolls and distorts in the weirdest way and it just goes on and on, you can still move around a little bit but you can't really do anything, you have to reset the game(or go back to your last save state like what I did). Just a weird little glitch that kinda weirded me out a little bit.

Skyrim has by far some of the most enjoyable glitches of all time. Bethesda will actually leave them in the game if they think they are funny.

-Placing baskets over shopkeeper's heads and robbing them
-Getting punted into orbit by giants
-Mammoth walking around in mid-air.
-Dead dragons falling out of the sky.
-Meridia dropping you out of the sky during her quest(they did fix this one, but it was pretty damn funny)

Those are just off the top of my head.

Back when the creator of WWE games didn't think people could handle freedom to put logos anywhere their use to have a crotch blur. Which hurt making characters a lot since most wrestlers have designs on their trunks either on the front or the back. And there was a glitch that let you bypass that.

I watch a lot of speedruns and all of them exploit glitches. Some small, some large. The majority of glitches are out of bounds glitches, where the character is able to "clip" through the wall in a clever way and walk out of bounds to skip a ton of content. Those glitches are kinda boring, although the execution may require skill.

Modifying the game's memory content while playing the game itself is an insane glitch that requires both phenomenal gameplay skill and a ton of research to figure out how to maniplate the memory to do something useful. The most famous cases of these are Super Mario World and Pokemon 1st gen. There's a good video explanation of the Mario one below for the interested.



And here it is in action, used to complete the game in about six minutes:




However, this is not my favourite glitch. That would have to be killing Kefka in one hit with Possess:



Why is this so good? Well, Possess is not something you should be able to do with normal party members. The possess command is only available to ghosts. Ghosts can temporarily join your party in the ghost train dungeon, about a quarter into the game. It requires a lot of effort and cool glitch exploitation to be able to transfer that ability to Gogo (an optional character you cannot get until much later than the ghost train) and carry it through to the final boss battle. Details here: lparchive.org/Breaking-Final-Fantasy-VI/ (you need to read parts 1 through 4 to get to the possession bit).

bAmp.

bOmp.

bImp.

bEmp.


I KEEP GLIT-GLIT-GLITCH-GLITCHING.


bUmp!

He's a russian bot. We've been infiltrated c.

I have no idea what this game is but there are some fun shark glitches. Best one is at the end.

More of an assumed bug/glitch but for years on NBA 2K I could steal the ball every time against the CPU's point guard if he was in a certain position. Had to know which dribble movement to look for after they stopped driving up the court. Worked even with players who's perimeter def/steal rating was garbage.

I also couldn't have been the only one stubbornly ascending mountains on Skyrim and somehow finding vulnerable spots to jump up and land on. Ironically I probably spent just as much time doing that as it would have taken to just walk around them.

All released within a couple of days. Absolutely glorious. Madden is nothing new but this Saints Row reboot? Chef's kiss.

I used to be hyped for games and order them on day one, now 2 years after release seems to be the sweet spot because of things like Blindy posted

Aug 24, 2022 15:39:02 GMT System said:

I used to be hyped for games and order them on day one, now 2 years after release seems to be the sweet spot because of things like Blindy posted

2 years ago Cyberpunk 2077 reigned supreme, last year the GTA Collection, I think Saints Row has gotten the open world sandbox award of 2022. Not sure what else is going to beat it. I am sure WWE2K had some good stuff, MAYBE AEW's game is the potential sleeper pick of glitchfest of 2022. 

Aug 24, 2022 15:44:22 GMT Blindy said:

Aug 24, 2022 15:39:02 GMT System said:

I used to be hyped for games and order them on day one, now 2 years after release seems to be the sweet spot because of things like Blindy posted

2 years ago Cyberpunk 2077 reigned supreme, last year the GTA Collection, I think Saints Row has gotten the open world sandbox award of 2022. Not sure what else is going to beat it. I am sure WWE2K had some good stuff, MAYBE AEW's game is the potential sleeper pick of glitchfest of 2022. 

Oh man the apologists for Cyberpunk 2077 dickrode that game hard.

Me
“Yeah it crashed every 6 minutes on me, especially when driving. It sucks”

“It’s still a great game though! The story, the graphics the..”

We have a new contender for 2023 in the form of The Last of Us Pt 1 for PC

Ladies and gentlemen I present to you the world premiere of Starfield....

Ubisoft has entered the fray with Star Wars Outlaws thus far,

x.com/NikeFerrari_/status/1828080613347516820

Not sure if there were any other major offenders off the top of my head in 2024 but this is the beginning of the fall season. 

I have kind of fond memories of falling through the Earth in Grand Theft Auto III (original PS2 version) and then trying to make my way back up the surface lol.

There is a glitch in Cyberpunk 2077, during a mission with Panam to abduct Hellman, where she can catapult V off of her motorcycle hundreds of feet into the air, and then plunge her to her death, if V gets too far ahead of Panam. The game can send Panam's motorcycle into V's at, like, the speed of light. It's f*cking hilarious.

Aug 28, 2024 1:28:25 GMT Blindy said:

Ubisoft has entered the fray with Star Wars Outlaws thus far,

x.com/NikeFerrari_/status/1828080613347516820

Not sure if there were any other major offenders off the top of my head in 2024 but this is the beginning of the fall season. 

Ubisoft coming out and saying people who paid for a Ubisoft+ membership a few days earlier on the PS5 version will have lost their save file due to a game bug and they are giving people who lost hours upon hours of gameplay some cheap reward of some in-game currency.  

This game owns the worst offender of 2024 of glitches until proven otherwise. Not sure who else touches this one. 

Reminds me of the time I lost 90 minutes of gameplay playing The Last of us Day 1 on the PS3 due to an autosaving glitch which IIRC didn't allow you to properly save and thus it forced you to exit out and go back to what you previously hard saved on. The time you lost was dependent on how fast you saw that alert online, for me it was an hour and half. Some others lost twice as much of that! I didn't even get any goodies for that one either.