10 game glitches - April Fools edition

To kick off April Fools day we're I have decided to go make an article listing 10 known video game glitches. There are a ton of glitches in gaming but I have decided to list some of the ones I remember hearing about. I'm a gamer and if your a gamer, you know that game glitches and bugs are a part of being a gamer. We all encounter them. Some just odd, some funny, and some just want to make us just want to throw the game system out the window and then go sit in a corner and cry.. Wait? What? That last one is just me? Okay.. So let's get this started shall we? Take note that these are not in any particular order and it isn't a countdown. Simply just listing them.

Back long ago, when arcades were the thing there was probably one of the most famous arcade machines, Pacman. The early arcade machines of pacman had a glitch that you probably never saw, but hardcore fans did. It was a glitch in which the machine would freak out on the 256th level. What happened is the screen would just completely go crazy and bombard you with all kinds of graphical glitches on the screen making it pretty much impossible to finish, thus becoming what I call the pacman kill screen. However, some versions had this error fixed in a way that once you finished level 255, it would reset to the first level and it left your score intact to continue on munching away on the pellets and ghosties.

This would mean though that no one EVER finished the arcade pacman.. Well I mean technically you could IF you somehow managed to actually make your way through the maze of glitched up screen and avoiding the ghosts and collecting all the pellets. Trust me, nearly impossible. It will end in tears and you pounding on the screen screaming "WHY!?" over and over. Man what I would of given to see the face of the first man that figured this glitch out. Devastation maybe? Since it has to take alot of dedication of learning how to really play hardcore pacman to get all the way to level 256 in the first place.

This is a known bug for the Castlevania game on nintendo and it's annoying and angered alot of fans. There is speculation on what causes this problem, but some think it is because of the certain way the game cartridges were made and not the actual game itself on the cart. What happened is that when you are on the level that has the grim reaper, the game would suddenly freeze and it would do it alot. I don't know why it does this and it sucks when it happens. Apparently this doesn't happen with the game itself (It's been tested via a rom before) which is why it's lead to believe the cart is the cause to this one. There really isn't much more to the story here folks. That is about it. This is where castlevania started and it was a great game overall if it wasn't for that freezing in that level. No other level did this. It was just the one level that did and it made me eventually quit playing the game unfortunately. I never did finish it.

Back in 2005, there was gaming piracy on the PC was running rampant pretty much the same as it does today. Someone tried to do something about it and failed miserably. Instead they angered lots of people. Starforce Technologies tried to get ahead of piracy and created something that I am sure they assumed would help fight the epic battle of piracy, but they soon found out that it's a lost battle because it was something bigger than them. They sure did make alot of people hate them before that though. They created a copyright protection system on many PC games and it ran at the highest level of the computer whether you were playing the game in question or not. It didn't really matter. What it does is simply look for something suspicious and just keep an eye out. The system ended up being way too sensitive and backfired. When it assumed that something wasn't right and was suspicious, it would reboot the computer right then and there.

Yes, it would force your PC to reboot entirely. No matter what.. Were you doing something important? Oops, not anymore.. Uninstalling whatever it was that was supposedly pirated or suspicious would not help a single bit.. Seriously. Also when you uninstalled the game, the starforce system would still be left intact on your computer and it would leave your PC open to malware and hacker attacks. Wow how ironic is that? It's supposed to protect from essentially hacking and it could end up having your PC hacked. Now some games that did have this, ended up having revisions that took out the starforce, but really that there was so many games that had it left in like the company just didn't care. About 9 games were re-visioned to not have the system in it, but 180+ game still have the system in place which is completely insane.

Even the popular Super Mario game had glitches. One included this glitch that was more cool than annoying. In world 1-2 of super mario brothers, all you had to was jump through the pipe at the end of the level. It would warp you to this underwater level that was infinite. You could swim to your super mario heart's content. Yep, it would never end. There was absolutely no escaping this level unless you turned off the game. At-least you weren't that far into the game right? It was fun the first time I experienced this and I didn't know it was infinite for awhile. I just kept going and wondering where the warp was to the next level. I don't know if this was intentional or not. Either way it was cool to find it out on my own. Something so small as jumping through a pipe lead to this awesome glitch. It's like a riding that little mechanical pony at walmart. You put in that penny and go to town, but it's only fun the first time.. Don't judge me for riding that pony.

Yes thats right folks, I said hump. I think the developers put this in intentionally just for laughs. It was definitely a laugh. When playing Donkey Kong country. You were able to ride a rhino which was cool and all but it got super awesome when that rhino would suddenly turn into another monkey and you were suddenly riding on top of another monkey, BUT that isn't all. Your monkey would be doing some pretty weird looking animation on top of the other monkey.. Yeah.. I don't think I need to explain much else. It was a great little find and it was hilarious and still is to this day when I go back and play that game. There is no way the developers couldn't of known that the glitch was in there. That had to be planted there for a little one on one monkey time (wink, wink).

In Assassins Creed, I like to call this glitch "The superman horse" but I decided to call it the awesome horse because that is just what it is.. Awesome. I don't know how often this glitch happens or what, but one time when my character died, my horse spawned with 110% more awesome than he had before. Which if you don't know, it's alot of awesome especially for a horse. This was no more just some ordinary horse in a video game. This horse, when it spawned was something of legends. Both his back legs were just flying behind him all out there as if he was flying, but his two front feet were fine and dandy on the ground. This was epic and funny for me and I don't know how. I can't explain it. It was just so great. This horse would run around on his two front feet with his back ones just flying behind him in the wind.

It was purely great and there are no words to comprehend how I felt when I found this glitch. Maybe it was only something that I felt. I don't know what happened that made him that way, but I mean it was great. I think his back legs were broken or something similar, but I don't think it was meant to be in the game. It is the only time that a horse breaking both of it's back legs is truly an awesome thing. I mean in real life it would be sad, but not in Assassins creed. Nope.. One day that horse will sit down, fly, stand, or whatever a horse does when it breaks it's legs like that and it will tell it's story to it's little horsey grandchildren. The story of it's epic journey across the land with it's two back legs just out there flying in the wind. I can't explain it any better than that.

I believe to any pokemon fan, this doesn't need an introduction but to everyone else I will humor you. In any Pokemon game, you come in contact and you battle tons of pokemon. You encounter so many and they are all unique, but the one that takes the cake has to be this glitch that goes by the name MissinGo.. You would encounter a MissinGo when the game would glitch up and tried to access non-existing data. It was actually something placed in the game only for the developer and their eyes, but apparently they missed something and there was some left in the game. This pokemon (if you could call it that) looked like nothing but a big pile of jumbled up bit graphical errors and I am sure that is exactly what it was supposed to be. Also encountering this thing will cause graphical errors and also copy a TON of whatever item is sixth in your item list at the time. This was an exploitation that I bet was used alot.

Overall the glitch had it's advantages and it was odd and cool at the same time when you found one. I remember my first MissinGo.. It replicated a ton of rare candies for me, but then it bit me (sad face) and I ran away crying hoping I didn't get MissinGo rabies.. Not really, but again it was a fun glitch and it just goes to show that some things the developers didn't want you to see may be cool and not all bad.

Portal is one of my all time favorite games. Just because of little thing in it, but then I found out I knew nothing when I ran into companion cube in the game. I fell in love with that thing until the game ripped it from my loving hands and killed it. I was so sad that it made me kill it. This is more of an easter egg than a glitch because the developers intentionally put it in the game for the purpose of hoping someone would find it (which pretty much describes what an easter egg is) so to continue on before I bore you to death. By the end of the game, if you go through some trial and error at the last showdown with the computer, you can not only get your companion cube back (which I was super happy about, just if you asked.. Probably not..) but if you keep a hold of that cube at the end of the game you will find that it leads you to a different scenario than the end you'd originally get.

Instead of going outside, the companion cube keeps you inside. You end up having to fall all the way down into some tunneling and you have to figure out how to get through everything and it will probably take some trial and error, but you can actually get to a room with the freaking cake in it. Which means the cake wasn't a lie all along. What a twist huh? When I found this out and tried it, I was so happy to just have my cube back that the cake could have been a lie and I wouldn't have cared in the slightest, but the cake was just the icing.. Well.. on the cake. Great game and great ending for the game.

NOTE: Upon closer research into this bug, I have found that it was a mod I added onto my game which did this so the developers didn't do it. Still.. I was so happy.

This was in Megaman 1. This was a great trick if you were stuck in the game and couldn't beat a boss in the game. The thing is that it made the game a ton more easier and it was both fun, but also it made it less challenging. Everyone uses a trick every once in a blue moon to help them out. What this trick is, is an exploit in which you could shoot a projectile and then pause the game as it hit the boss you were trying to take out and what it would basically do is hit them which is what it should do. If you pause the game just as it hits the boss though and then un-pause it, it will hit the boss again and cause him to take more damage. So you could pretty much hit a boss multiple times with a single projectile if you practiced it alot.

I don't think this was something intentional by the developers. It's just something that kind of happened and was found out by one person and then used by everyone since it's discovery (which is pretty much like any other glitch or trick). This was great because it helped me when necessary, but I wouldn't use it unless I really needed it. I like my games challenging for the most part. Sometimes though I like to just sit back and play some gaming without wanting to eat the controller. This trick saved my controller from it's demise in my belly that day.

I call the glitch this because it pretty much did epicly (isn't a word I know, but needs to be.. Someone call the people that make the dictionary) destroy all the saves on your PS2 memory card. The 120 hours of that final fantasy game? Yep, gone.. That save of getting 100% on Vice City? Gone with the wind.. All those awesome created wrestlers you made in that one wrestling game? All gone.. Remember, back in the PS2 era, we didn't have nearly all the ways we have now to back up our saves. We did have ways, but we never really had much reason to worry about it. Before news came out about this glitch. Hundreds of memory cards were already corrupted and saves completely broken.  What this glitch did was if you put in the holiday 2004 edition of the viewtiful joe 2 demo and tried to play it, it would completely erase your memory card and every little thing on it that you will soon cry and wish that you had back.

This sucked big time for gamers who didn't have a clue at all including myself. Sony then released a statement soon after saying that the game was actually playable but you had to take out your memory card before hand. No really!? We all wish we had the information before we played the demo the first time. Now give me back my hundreds of hours worth of saves back! How in the world this devastating bug was missed is absolutely beyond me. Doesn't anyone test demos before they go out? Luckily alot of people were saved before putting in the demo thanks to the internet and forums. Still, alot of people will never forget the day they wanted to destroy whoever issued the demo out.. Me included..

Overall there are thousands (probably millions) of game glitches, tricks, and bugs out there. These are the ones that I remember the most. I am sure there are other entertaining ones and maybe in the future, I will return with more. For now though this is what I got. Thought it would be a nice edition since it's April fools. If you encounter a glitch, you can't really do anything about it except take it. Take it for it's hilarity, it's oddness, or try to get through the frustrations. Either way there are bugs and there always will be. Even in the world of gaming we now have with patches able to be downloaded on the instant to fix games, not all developers care enough to fix something that small and sometimes the glitch adds something extra to the game. Live with them and learn to love them... or hate them.