--- Game Bugs ---

I'm sure we've all run into bugs--times when your game crashes, freezes, gets you stuck so you have to reset, or just does something really weird that obviously wasn't intended by the programmers.

Some of them are no fun (especially crashes/freezes), but others are funny as hell.  And that's what this page is about: the funny or entertaining ones.   So, without further ado:

Gears of War

These few Gears of War bugs were what inspired an actual dedicated "Bugs" page, rather than just putting them in the game's own page (because we don't have a Gears page...maybe we should).  Actually, now we do: Gears of War page.

Anyway, we have 3 Gears bugs.  The first one is self-explanatory.  If you don't see the bug, get your eyes (or your monitor) checked.  Click for Video:

Number two is maybe not really a "bug", it's just a strange side effect of Gears' ragdoll physics system.  But it's hilarious.  Don't miss this one!

Number 3 is pretty simple: a Berzerker wants to kill us, but can't seem to move.  So it just runs in place.  I tried to jar it loose, but no such luck.

Metroid Prime 2: Echoes

This game was an obvious victim of "gotta get it out before Christmas" syndrome, because its predecessor didn't have any crazy morph ball bugs like these.  

In this first one, the morph ball's auto-camera insists on going behind this pillar, making it impossible to see the ball and therefore very difficult to navigate the tracks.  I made 3 videos of this bug, while Bruce talked me through this section of the game over the phone (pardon my frustrated voice on the video).  His game's camera was fine.  I've also included a video of what the section is supposed to look like, just in case any doubters show up.

Bug number two is during a boss fight--one of the bosses you have to fight in morph ball form.  To win the fight, you have to boost the morph ball across the chamber and knock off the 'head' of this robot, which only comes out occasionally.  In this bug, the robot's head is almost always out, but you can't hit it.  It turns out that when the head goes back in, it's really out.  So I was able to kill it when it wasn't visibly there, and the bug didn't stop my game progress.

Hulk: Ultimate Destruction

These next two are also on our Hulk page, but a bug's a bug.

This first one happens while I was beating up a mech.  I threw him at a cow, and then picked him back up--and got the cow, too!  The game treated it as if I were holding a cow on the ground (over my head--mechs get held out in front of the Hulk), but holding a mech in the air (it let me beat him up--cows just get thrown away no matter which button you press).

Bug #2 features Bruce after he's fallen into an invisible lake in the middle of the desert town.  He's stuck in there for a while, but manages to get out.  Weird...

Grand Theft Auto IV

GTA IV is great fun, but a game as large and ambitious as this will obviously have some bugs, or at least things that weren't encountered in development.  In short, anything might happen.  So here are a few things that have happened to us:

This first one is pretty simple.  You can grab and climb on most of the geometry in the incredibly detailed GTA IV world.  But we stumbled across this odd wall that isn't built quite right.  Click to see.

This next one shows how effective the Liberty City Fire Dept is...Roman's business is going up in flames, so hey, we dialed 9-1-1 to get the Fire Dept down there and help out!  They show up incredibly fast!  See what happens then.  Incidentally, this also shows what great taxi drivers you'll find in Liberty City.

While swimming around, you can have Niko grab onto boats  -- if you're fast enough.  Actually, maybe you don't have to be all that fast...

This particular 'bug' requires a little setup.  There's a swing set in the game that can launch a car clear across the city: just press up against it and sooner or later it will 'twitch', which flings cars away with a hell of a lot of force.  Go to Youtube and search for "GTA swing set", you'll see dozens of videos of it.

But ours is different.  Click the video to see.  Credit for this one goes to our friend Steve (or Tarsus, on our forum).  He found this one; we were just lucky enough to re-create it.

Steve also chanced on this next bug, which is a pretty bad one--it locked up the game entirely.  It doesn't really require any set up, just click and see.

Here's one more.  This is me trying to outsmart the game.  On this mission, Niko is supposed to kill all the guys in this SUV.  But when I tried it the first time, they got past me and holed up in an alley, and it was hard work killing them all.  So I thought I'd try again, and use a nice big truck to keep them out of there, and maybe just run them all over instead of shooting them.  Great plan!!

Here are a couple from the brand new Gears of War 2:

This first one is nothing special, just a misplaced collision detection.  There's a one-way invisible wall right at Marcus' feet.  Weird--unless you've ever built anything with the Unreal Engine.  :-)

This one is just a floating piece of ice left over after I blasted a stalagmite.  The other stalagmites all fell down completely when I shot them, but this one is special.

Here are a couple of bugs from Resistance 2.  The first one is an area on top of a building that inexplicably has a small section where you are under water:

The next one has an invisible enemy called a Chameleon who got stuck somehow.  Normally you can hear these guys coming for a second or so before they jump at you--and you'd better shoot them or it's an instant kill.  This guy we can hear stomping for quite a while before he finally leaps.

I will vouch that the new Prince of Persia game is far less buggy than last gen's Warrior Within or Two Thrones--both of which had game-stopping bugs in my playthroughs.  But we did come across a couple good bugs--good meaning funny but inconsequential:

We ran across a small glitch in Halo 3 this weekend; a frozen, semi-intangible corpse.  See for yourself.

Deadly Creatures is the latest game to bug out on us.  We have 3 videos of craziness for you:

This first one is pretty self-explanatory once you see it in action.  It's a scorpion, fighting a horny toad lizard--or at least, trying to fight it. 

The next one requires a little explanation.  During some fights, the game locks you in place by putting up walls made of little dots in key locations.  They're almost transparent.  In this case, a tarantula came into the area to fight our scorpion, but he got stuck on a bone outside the barrier, which presents a problem, since the game can't progress until he's dead--and our scorpion can't reach him.  Or can he?  Watch and see.

This last Deadly Creatures bug concerns a couple of rats who really want to eat our scorpion.  They're set on killing him, but can't reach him, and keep "falling" off the wall down below.  Trust us, the rats in the game don't normally act this way.

If you want to drop us a line, send it to "webmaster" AT "gameswelike.com".