I recall there being a Survivor game (as in, the TV reality series) some time ago on the PC. The game was unplayable from the get go. It would either crash, freeze, or loop at startup. You have to install a patch and you'd only know about it if you went to the developer's site.
Why you would want to do that, I have no clue. It was a terrible game with horrendous AI.
Haha yeah that reminds me of that Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor uninstall bug that took out your Windows partition along with the game.
Nasty.
What in the fuck? O_o
It deleted some system files from Windows dir that prevented your PC from booting again.
Something similar to this happened with EVE Online's Trinity Update. Apparently the patch installed a bunch of new features, and then deleted your boot.ini file. That's a pretty huge oversight, considering that it will prevent most computers from starting up at all.
I have the power to crash any Left 4 Dead 2 server. Grab dual pistols, rapidly press E at a melee weapon. For every time you press E, it will create an additional pistol. After about 200 pistols are created, the server slows to a grinding halt and eventually crashes.
The other awesome bug I ran into was in Assasins Creed. During the final mission, I fell through the earth. It respawned me back at the beginning of the map and there was a doppleganger Altiaire. He responded to my every move and in fact, I could assassinate him and he could assassinate me. I had more fun trying to see how far into the level I could go with my new best friend than I did playing the rest of the boring game.
tribes 2 had a few good bugs in it, if i recall correctly it also had a hard drive wiping problem with a patch they released, glad i didn't download that one
Please explain the bugs like the KOTOR Stealth bug or FF6 Realm Sketch one.
The Relm Sketch one was, iirc, that if you used Relm's "Sketch" command it had a chance of completely wiping your save
That is so... random.
I remember this one, only when I used it, it copied multiple weapons from my characters and dumped them into my inventory. So I suddenly had a few hundred delicious weapons to be used as Throw fodder for Shadow, and most party members had double Atma Weapons. It only made enough to outfit 5 or 6 members of the team, so when I assaulted Kefka's Tower, the rest of the crew wore Illuminas. :P
El Fantastico on
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
edited June 2010
This doesn't qualify really (I'll explain it after revealing it) but here goes:
In Phantasy Star IV, if you level a character to 98 or 99, their stats revert to like level 1-ish. It doesn't qualify for the thread really because it doesn't stop you from beating the game, since you can beat the game at level 40, and easily at level 50 - 60.
The PC version of Beyond Good & Evil had a nice little bug (the Triangle Key Bug) that prevented you from advancing as a key that was supposed to spawn didn't leaving you stuck forever. There was eventually a community made patch to fix the issue but if it weren't for that and the internet the game would have been completely busted for a lot of people.
If I remember correctly, WWF No Mercy for the N64 had a bug where it wouldn't save data to the memory card. So every time you turned on the game, all your progress and custom characters were gone. I think the company updated them and sent new ones out.
Here we go, found it....
Nov. 2000
GameSpot has received complaints from consumers stating that THQ's WWF No Mercy contains some problematic bugs. Reportedly, some copies of the game erase saved data for the championship mode, created wrestlers, unlocked hidden wrestlers, and money earned.
THQ has opened a special portion of its Web site to address these concerns. The company recommends resetting the cartridge to factory defaults and playing through the game again before reporting problems.
I think that's the fix I used to continue playing the game, but I still kept backup saves after that.
HonkHonk is this poster.Registered User, __BANNED USERSregular
edited June 2010
Empire: Total War. Sometimes you will get to a point in your campaign from which all new save files will be corrupted. Whole days of playing spent without a chance to get further. Unfixable when encountered.
My worst bug memory is the Ultima VII key bug, where keys disappear from inventory when you sleep.
It was especially insidious because it was hard to detect right off the bat. So a key would go missing and you'd think, well... maybe I misplaced it in my inventory. Except the damn key is gone forever.
I would also like to note I used to work for activision as a tester, and have encountered several awesome bugs for games you and your family will probably never play.
one of the first big bugs I found that the game actually got released with was for the PS2 game Monster Bass.
The scoring system for that game had never been correct and no one could figure out why. On the final build we received I figured it out, every 3rd fish you hooked, every 3rd combo you did for it did not award you any points. Its a pretty lame bug but I felt amazing after I figured it out
TheKoolEagle on
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ApogeeLancks In Every Game EverRegistered Userregular
Haha yeah that reminds me of that Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor uninstall bug that took out your Windows partition along with the game.
Nasty.
What in the fuck? O_o
It deleted some system files from Windows dir that prevented your PC from booting again.
Something similar to this happened with EVE Online's Trinity Update. Apparently the patch installed a bunch of new features, and then deleted your boot.ini file. That's a pretty huge oversight, considering that it will prevent most computers from starting up at all.
Bahaha, I remember this. I dodged that bullet by sheer luck - missed a few days of EvE-ing, thus avoided the patch. How the hell do you 'accidentally' delete boot.ini, anyway?
For me, the worst bug evar was probably in Descent 2, back in my dial-ul multiplayer days on Heat.net. Good times.
My Dad was an early adopter of all things techy, and so we had a pretty rad computer for the family. I got Descent 2 and loved playing Descent 2 online, with the graphics at max (800x600 WOO). I *think* it was a Pentium 2 something or other, with an early Geforce. The specifics escape me.
For those of you unfamiliar, Descent is a FPS played in entire indoor levels, in flying/floating ships. Shoot and fire missiles around, blow people up, good times.
The bug was that one of the key weapons, the plain 'ol homing missile, had it's homing code written such that it updated it's angle every frame that refreshed, and it was done client side. To young me, this meant that I could not dodge a missile, ever. No matter how sharp a turn I threw, a missile would always follow me. I figured I just sucked; the Descent community was pretty hardcore, and I was a nooby at best.
I only discovered this bug a few years ago; my ego is restored :P. Too bad I can't go prove myself online anymore .
Save bugs seem to be common. One of the worst, which I think hasn't even been fixed yet is Gears of War for PC.
The game saves your games in some really obscure way, in a really hidden folder. However, backing these files up doesn't help at all. The game would just randomly delete all your savegames. Sometimes you'd make it all the way to level 3, and the next day your save was there. Then you shut the game down, and 20 minutes later you come back, and there is no save.
I beat the game in one sitting just to avoid this.
Oops, I forgot to mention that trying to restore your saved games in the exact way you found them did nothing. They'd still not show up.
Satsumomo on
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Warlock82Never pet a burning dogRegistered Userregular
edited June 2010
Yeah the Relm bug could happen under a fairly decent number of circumstances. If I remember right - sketching while muddled, sketching vanished enemies, and sketching Gau when he appears on the Veldt could all cause it. I'm sure there were other circumstances too. It didn't always erase your game - sometimes it just did weird crap like equip pheonix downs in your weapon slot or morph one of your characters into General Leo, etc.
There were a ton of other bugs in that game too. Don't remember most of them now, but I do remember if you try to use that skull switch in Narshe to access the secret cave after the event where you are *supposed* to use it, the game would hard lock.
Also, of course, the infamous vanish+x-zone insta-kill any enemy bug
I think there is actually an FAQ on GameFAQs that covers most of them.
Please explain the bugs like the KOTOR Stealth bug or FF6 Realm Sketch one.
The Relm Sketch one was, iirc, that if you used Relm's "Sketch" command it had a chance of completely wiping your save
That is so... random.
I remember this one, only when I used it, it copied multiple weapons from my characters and dumped them into my inventory. So I suddenly had a few hundred delicious weapons to be used as Throw fodder for Shadow, and most party members had double Atma Weapons. It only made enough to outfit 5 or 6 members of the team, so when I assaulted Kefka's Tower, the rest of the crew wore Illuminas. :P
Yeah I didn't mention it but the Sketch bug could also insta-kill anything, including bosses, dupe items, (I think?) give you free levels, crash the game, and I think...that's it
Empire: Total War. Sometimes you will get to a point in your campaign from which all new save files will be corrupted. Whole days of playing spent without a chance to get further. Unfixable when encountered.
Nice.
Oh god the bugs in Empire Total War. Like if you were on the 2nd floor of a fort your solders wouldn't fire on anyone below them and let entire armies just walk into Forts without a shot fired.
Or when you set up a cannon and they wouldn't account for land geometry and shoot straight into the ground 2 feet in front of them.
God damn that game was infuriating.
DrunkMc on
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HonkHonk is this poster.Registered User, __BANNED USERSregular
Empire: Total War. Sometimes you will get to a point in your campaign from which all new save files will be corrupted. Whole days of playing spent without a chance to get further. Unfixable when encountered.
Nice.
Oh god the bugs in Empire Total War. Like if you were on the 2nd floor of a fort your solders wouldn't fire on anyone below them and let entire armies just walk into Forts without a shot fired.
Or when you set up a cannon and they wouldn't account for land geometry and shoot straight into the ground 2 feet in front of them.
God damn that game was infuriating.
Correct. Non functioning resource points for my Indiamans was something that was ever present for me regardless of reinstalling and restarting campaigns. That can possibly be game breaking on some difficulties because you'll lose out on a very substantial source of income.
There's a bug in Fable 2 that causes you to get stuck in forced dialog mode, which locks you down from being able to do anything but emote and use food/potions from the d-pad. You can't interact with people, you can't fight, you can't do shit. You don't even know it's happened until the dialog is over. Alone, this wouldn't be such a bad thing. However, Fable 2 also has a retarded save system where it is ONE save file per character AND the game autosaves pretty frequently. Guess what happens when you get a bug that doesn't correct itself and the game autosaves before you are aware it has happened?
You get to start all over again because there is no chance to fix your save!
DarkDragoon on
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CorehealerThe ApothecaryThe softer edge of the universe.Registered Userregular
edited June 2010
Vanilla S.T.A.L.K.E.R bugs. And even with mods you can still get stupid amounts of bugs in the modded gameplay mechanics.
WoW has also had a few bugs from time to time, like the infamous Baron Geddon firebomb on your pet which you can then save for later when you bring him out in the AH and he nukes everyone.
My favourite one was a little while ago now. I ran BT on my alt Rogue in the early days of Wrath for the achievement, and we had just killed Supremus when suddenly, shit starts to get super laggy and the server crashes. When we log back in, some of us are dead, me included, and Supremus is alive and halfway through the floor. I used this chance to try going outside the instance door to see whats outside, since our bodies were stuck under the ground and we couldn't rez. I saw all the big outside placeholder textures and then randomly fell through the world. After the server crashed again and I logged in the next day, I had 100 gold extra in my bag and I was at the BT graveyard with lots of red gear.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. SoC was crazy bad for me. I installed it last week wanting to get right back into it after getting the new graphics card. It booted up fine and I got the opening quest easily enough. Problem started when I had to speak to the the ally waiting near the hideout where Nimble (guy I'm supposed to rescue) is being kept. I couldn't interact with him at all. Tried it a few times, restarting from the beginning andd no luck. So I figured I'd throw in an overhaul mod. Stlll it wouldn't let me interact with anyone. Eventually I thought fuck it and moved onto something else.
A couple other Fable 2 bugs. Randomly your allowance for your family(ies) will set itself to 0 except you won't know this until your wife/husband is very unhappy with you.
In addition sometimes your wife/husband can get 'stuck', usually when you have kids. They won't actually BE anywhere and you won't be able to appease them.
Had a kid in Fable II, returned to the gypsy camp to find him wedged up to his ankles in the ground, couldn't interact with him other than push him around a little, nothing I could do other than leave the wife to divorce me.
Oh, and I'm pretty sure original boxed Outcast could also possibly delete your entire hard drive. I can't remember the details, though, and Google is failing me. Something like it wiped the game directory and then the directory above that without checking what it was, so if you installed it to C:\Outcast or what have you, well, weeping and gnashing of teeth, etc.
Eight Rooks on
<AtlusParker> Sorry I'm playing Pokemon and vomiting at the same time so I'm not following the conversation in a linear fashion.
Last night in Red Dead Redemtion I had two bugs that almost stopped me from playing. They seemed like load bugs to me from disc, ie game stalling and then graphic tearing, but I had the game installed on the HD. I am not sure if anyone else had these happen to them:
End game Red Dead Spoilers
When I shot Williamson the game stayed there as if going though all the chatter that was recorded for each guy as they pleaded for thier life. After about 5 min the game resumed on like it hadnt stopped at all. Later when the game was loading the final mission with Marston as I was coming out of the cutscene I got treated to a nice falling through the world/sky stage. It was kind of psychadelic. I had to relead the game for that one.
Save bugs seem to be common. One of the worst, which I think hasn't even been fixed yet is Gears of War for PC.
The game saves your games in some really obscure way, in a really hidden folder. However, backing these files up doesn't help at all. The game would just randomly delete all your savegames. Sometimes you'd make it all the way to level 3, and the next day your save was there. Then you shut the game down, and 20 minutes later you come back, and there is no save.
I beat the game in one sitting just to avoid this.
Oops, I forgot to mention that trying to restore your saved games in the exact way you found them did nothing. They'd still not show up.
IIRC it happens because it saves different data when you are signed in or not signed in to GFWL. Just another case of this service being shitty. And I *know* I encountered it and solved it because I could move my saves to backup locations and then restore them etc.
There was a chance the game would delete your windows folder during uninstallation.
Ferrus on
I would like to pause for a moment, to talk about my penis.
My penis is like a toddler. A toddler—who is a perfectly normal size for his age—on a long road trip to what he thinks is Disney World. My penis is excited because he hasn’t been to Disney World in a long, long time, but remembers a time when he used to go every day. So now the penis toddler is constantly fidgeting, whining “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? How about now? Now? How about... now?”
And Disney World is nowhere in sight.
In Rome: Total War if you were reinforced by an allied army the general of that army would suicide rush into the enemy (usually alone). So the player essentially had to make sure armies were spaced far enough apart that they couldn't reinforce each other...lest the heir to the emperor's throne was overcome with wanton bloodlust and threw himself upon the spears of the enemy.
This was eventually patched after Creative Assembly got out of Activision's "only 2 patches for a game" ridiculousness.
Enemy armies would also reevaluate their position (and be forced to stop seiges) whenever you saved or loaded a game. Individual units would occasionally devolve into a hoard of stragglers spread across the map. Occasionally the landscape would be overwhelmed with barbarians/bandits who would drive your province earnings down to 0 and (subsequently) bankrupt you.
And 1 of those 3 initial patches allowed? It was fixing a text error in one of the elephant content files that anyone with Wordpad could have resolved.
The hardest I've laughed at a bug was playing Fallout 3 - I was coming up out of the fire ant nest in one of the metro tunnels, and the 'ramp' up from the underground area was, as usual, uneven and covered in debris. I'm walking up like normal, and I turn around to make sure Fawkes is still with me, and as I turn, I see him get stuck and then fall directly through the ground and disappear.
It was so random and unexpected that I couldn't stop laughing. Anyway loading my last save fixed it, but I was always careful around uneven terrain from then on.
Buggiest game I have ever experienced was Descent to Undermountain. The game was so buggy it only installed on my PC after 6 tries. The bugs in game included the following.
-Cursor erased everything it passed over
-The NPC voices ran at chipmunk super speed.
-swords looked like Bows so I was swinging a bow at kobolds.
-cast spider climb, leap to the wall and drop to your death.
Nox had a weird bug. Not the worst, but when you installed the game, sometimes you'd be able to spawn the Staff of Oblivion in a multiplayer game, and sometimes when you installed it, the weapon wasn't available.
FyreWulff on
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anoffdayTo be changed whenever Anoffday gets around to it.Registered Userregular
EVE Online introduced a bug a year or two ago that would randomly wipe out people's Windows files. I forget the exact details though.
EVE used a file called boot.ini to store some of its startup stuff, unfortunately there is also a windows system file by that name. A patch came out that made changes to boot.ini, except that it overwrote the windows file, due to a quirk in a new patcher they used.
-The worst memory leaks I've ever seen
-Quicksaving would sometimes break the game's scripting
-A crash bug that meant that no one could actually, like, finish the game
There's more, but those spring to mind.
Oh, and the same day that the game was released, Activision shut down Troika, the developers.
If you disturbed any of the birds on your way by, it doesn't generate the lock on the door and you're stuck. Either revert to a earlier save or restart the area.
Posts
Why you would want to do that, I have no clue. It was a terrible game with horrendous AI.
Something similar to this happened with EVE Online's Trinity Update. Apparently the patch installed a bunch of new features, and then deleted your boot.ini file. That's a pretty huge oversight, considering that it will prevent most computers from starting up at all.
The other awesome bug I ran into was in Assasins Creed. During the final mission, I fell through the earth. It respawned me back at the beginning of the map and there was a doppleganger Altiaire. He responded to my every move and in fact, I could assassinate him and he could assassinate me. I had more fun trying to see how far into the level I could go with my new best friend than I did playing the rest of the boring game.
I remember this one, only when I used it, it copied multiple weapons from my characters and dumped them into my inventory. So I suddenly had a few hundred delicious weapons to be used as Throw fodder for Shadow, and most party members had double Atma Weapons. It only made enough to outfit 5 or 6 members of the team, so when I assaulted Kefka's Tower, the rest of the crew wore Illuminas. :P
Steam: TheArcadeBear
In Phantasy Star IV, if you level a character to 98 or 99, their stats revert to like level 1-ish. It doesn't qualify for the thread really because it doesn't stop you from beating the game, since you can beat the game at level 40, and easily at level 50 - 60.
AGGHHHH you beat me
I was going to post this exact thing
Here we go, found it....
I think that's the fix I used to continue playing the game, but I still kept backup saves after that.
@ShiftyPumpkin on the Twitterings. Book the Faces at [facebook.com/PerceptivePumpkinProductions]
Nice.
I considered suggesting Kakuna, since all he can do is harden.
It was especially insidious because it was hard to detect right off the bat. So a key would go missing and you'd think, well... maybe I misplaced it in my inventory. Except the damn key is gone forever.
one of the first big bugs I found that the game actually got released with was for the PS2 game Monster Bass.
The scoring system for that game had never been correct and no one could figure out why. On the final build we received I figured it out, every 3rd fish you hooked, every 3rd combo you did for it did not award you any points. Its a pretty lame bug but I felt amazing after I figured it out
Bahaha, I remember this. I dodged that bullet by sheer luck - missed a few days of EvE-ing, thus avoided the patch. How the hell do you 'accidentally' delete boot.ini, anyway?
For me, the worst bug evar was probably in Descent 2, back in my dial-ul multiplayer days on Heat.net. Good times.
My Dad was an early adopter of all things techy, and so we had a pretty rad computer for the family. I got Descent 2 and loved playing Descent 2 online, with the graphics at max (800x600 WOO). I *think* it was a Pentium 2 something or other, with an early Geforce. The specifics escape me.
For those of you unfamiliar, Descent is a FPS played in entire indoor levels, in flying/floating ships. Shoot and fire missiles around, blow people up, good times.
The bug was that one of the key weapons, the plain 'ol homing missile, had it's homing code written such that it updated it's angle every frame that refreshed, and it was done client side. To young me, this meant that I could not dodge a missile, ever. No matter how sharp a turn I threw, a missile would always follow me. I figured I just sucked; the Descent community was pretty hardcore, and I was a nooby at best.
I only discovered this bug a few years ago; my ego is restored :P. Too bad I can't go prove myself online anymore
The game saves your games in some really obscure way, in a really hidden folder. However, backing these files up doesn't help at all. The game would just randomly delete all your savegames. Sometimes you'd make it all the way to level 3, and the next day your save was there. Then you shut the game down, and 20 minutes later you come back, and there is no save.
I beat the game in one sitting just to avoid this.
Oops, I forgot to mention that trying to restore your saved games in the exact way you found them did nothing. They'd still not show up.
There were a ton of other bugs in that game too. Don't remember most of them now, but I do remember if you try to use that skull switch in Narshe to access the secret cave after the event where you are *supposed* to use it, the game would hard lock.
Also, of course, the infamous vanish+x-zone insta-kill any enemy bug
I think there is actually an FAQ on GameFAQs that covers most of them.
Yeah I didn't mention it but the Sketch bug could also insta-kill anything, including bosses, dupe items, (I think?) give you free levels, crash the game, and I think...that's it
Oh god the bugs in Empire Total War. Like if you were on the 2nd floor of a fort your solders wouldn't fire on anyone below them and let entire armies just walk into Forts without a shot fired.
Or when you set up a cannon and they wouldn't account for land geometry and shoot straight into the ground 2 feet in front of them.
God damn that game was infuriating.
Correct. Non functioning resource points for my Indiamans was something that was ever present for me regardless of reinstalling and restarting campaigns. That can possibly be game breaking on some difficulties because you'll lose out on a very substantial source of income.
Thank fucking god that was fixed for PDXBLA
You get to start all over again because there is no chance to fix your save!
WoW has also had a few bugs from time to time, like the infamous Baron Geddon firebomb on your pet which you can then save for later when you bring him out in the AH and he nukes everyone.
My favourite one was a little while ago now. I ran BT on my alt Rogue in the early days of Wrath for the achievement, and we had just killed Supremus when suddenly, shit starts to get super laggy and the server crashes. When we log back in, some of us are dead, me included, and Supremus is alive and halfway through the floor. I used this chance to try going outside the instance door to see whats outside, since our bodies were stuck under the ground and we couldn't rez. I saw all the big outside placeholder textures and then randomly fell through the world. After the server crashed again and I logged in the next day, I had 100 gold extra in my bag and I was at the BT graveyard with lots of red gear.
In addition sometimes your wife/husband can get 'stuck', usually when you have kids. They won't actually BE anywhere and you won't be able to appease them.
Eventually they leave you.
Oh, and I'm pretty sure original boxed Outcast could also possibly delete your entire hard drive. I can't remember the details, though, and Google is failing me. Something like it wiped the game directory and then the directory above that without checking what it was, so if you installed it to C:\Outcast or what have you, well, weeping and gnashing of teeth, etc.
Read my book. (It has a robot in it.)
End game Red Dead Spoilers
IIRC it happens because it saves different data when you are signed in or not signed in to GFWL. Just another case of this service being shitty. And I *know* I encountered it and solved it because I could move my saves to backup locations and then restore them etc.
There was a chance the game would delete your windows folder during uninstallation.
And Disney World is nowhere in sight.
This was eventually patched after Creative Assembly got out of Activision's "only 2 patches for a game" ridiculousness.
Enemy armies would also reevaluate their position (and be forced to stop seiges) whenever you saved or loaded a game. Individual units would occasionally devolve into a hoard of stragglers spread across the map. Occasionally the landscape would be overwhelmed with barbarians/bandits who would drive your province earnings down to 0 and (subsequently) bankrupt you.
And 1 of those 3 initial patches allowed? It was fixing a text error in one of the elephant content files that anyone with Wordpad could have resolved.
It was so random and unexpected that I couldn't stop laughing. Anyway loading my last save fixed it, but I was always careful around uneven terrain from then on.
-Cursor erased everything it passed over
-The NPC voices ran at chipmunk super speed.
-swords looked like Bows so I was swinging a bow at kobolds.
-cast spider climb, leap to the wall and drop to your death.
Bungie made Myth?
EVE used a file called boot.ini to store some of its startup stuff, unfortunately there is also a windows system file by that name. A patch came out that made changes to boot.ini, except that it overwrote the windows file, due to a quirk in a new patcher they used.
http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=526
Where to start:
-The worst memory leaks I've ever seen
-Quicksaving would sometimes break the game's scripting
-A crash bug that meant that no one could actually, like, finish the game
There's more, but those spring to mind.
Oh, and the same day that the game was released, Activision shut down Troika, the developers.
Meaning no official patches.
Wheeeeeee
XBL: GamingFreak5514
PSN: GamingFreak1234
If you disturbed any of the birds on your way by, it doesn't generate the lock on the door and you're stuck. Either revert to a earlier save or restart the area.