The 5 Most Hilarious Abuses of Video Game Glitches

5 Assassin's Creed is a Nightmare Orgy Straight From the Bowels of Hell

I never got into Assassin's Creed, but after watching that video, I'm ashamed of myself for giving up on it so easily. If I had known about all of the wall-fucking, suicide-ridden glitches, I wouldn't be writing this article right now. I'd be camped out in front of my TV, laughing until I passed out from the lack of oxygen. The scene above, in case you aren't able to watch it, starts out with the main character, hiding in a small room on top of a roof while two guards casually walk past. It's obvious they have a purpose, and from their casual demeanor, you can tell they've done whatever it is they're about to do a thousand times before.

Calmly -- almost bored, even -- they step up to their posts, lean up against the wall, grip the top with both hands ... and just dick the living shit out of it.

At first, there's just the one guy. He's the go-getter of the morning crew. If the boss needs something done, that's the guy he goes to because there's never any whining from him. He knows what he's paid for, and he does the job without question. The second guy is no slouch, but you can expect him to be the first one in line to punch out his time card at the end of the day. But hump the wall, he must. And hump the wall, he does.

The guy on the right is the player, who is my new favorite person. Not only for uploading the video, but for joining in and making what would otherwise be a funny video, a work of pure goddamn genius. And for also making this, from the same game:

Depending on when you watch that one, it can take on several different tones. If it follows the wall-humping video, it's going to have a disturbing rooftop orgy feel. A group of tightly-packed men dry-humping our protagonist with jerky, thrusting, machine gun efficiency. But if viewed after this nightmarish trio of rapidly shouting guards, it puts out a much more sinister, Children of the Corn vibe.

Note the end of the video in that link, after the player knocks one of them off the roof, the other two follow him down of their own accord in what I like to imagine as a Romeo and Juliet display of soul-bound love, diving to their deaths in a fit of passion and grief. That's not a one-time thing. If you position yourself just right when the guards are in full pursuit, you can produce a line of stupid so powerful, it could fuck-start a battleship:

I could seriously watch that all day. Just that huge line of guards, running stupidly against the wall like mindless wind-up toys, each getting slowly nudged off of the ledge by their comrades. An assembly line of shouted commands for you to stop, followed by screaming and a soft thud -- each body that litters the pile representing an insurance claim that none of their wives and children wanted to ever see cashed in. It really is a thing of beauty.

4 GTA Gives Us Mass Suicide and Spontaneous Vehicle Launches

It turns out that Assassin's Creed isn't the only game you can see a line of cops diving to their deaths. Grand Theft Auto IV did it so well, I swear to this day that they programmed it in there on purpose. In the above video, the player climbed up onto the catwalk of a billboard while being chased by the police. Rather than try to shoot him down, they formed a nice, neat line, climbed up after him, and one by one stepped off to form an ever-growing pile of corpses on the sidewalk below.

As funny as it is to see that happen over and over again, the funniest part is the audio because as they climb up after him, they all talk shit. So you end up with a string of cop after cop saying, "One shot, that's all I need -- AAAHHHGG! *Thud.*" "The safety's off, buddy -- AAAAHHG! *Thud.*" "I got a clear sho- AHHHGG! *Thud.*"

Of course, it's not all Doomsday Cult police. One of the funniest glitches in GTA IV involves a couple of swing sets, scattered throughout the game. If you back a vehicle up to one, it will randomly launch it across the map like it was fired from a circus cannon:

Or if you want a more personal touch, just hang on it, and it'll launch your monkey ass the same way. Seriously, once you know that this is in the game, how could you ever justify doing anything else?

That's the problem with modern toys and technology, though. Sometimes, it just flips out and flings mofos at random (yes, it will do it to pedestrians, too). That's why to get a truly realistic feel from a game, you have to go back to a setting like the olden days depicted in Red Dead Redemption, which is just the Old West version of GTA. Back then, it wasn't the machines doing crazy shit. It was the people. Like this clearly possessed woman who can't ride her horse and buggy without jumping up and down like a goddamn lunatic:

Or my favorite glitch of all time -- the spastic horses:

Look at that and tell me that hell doesn't exist. Even if you don't believe it in our realm, it fucking well does in theirs. And it hates horses. Or wagons. For all we know, the horses could be innocent bystanders. Regardless, if they did that all the time, I'd own 10 copies of this game.

3 Skate 3 is a Sadist's Wet Dream

There are two things you should know before diving into these videos and laughing until you puke blood all over your keyboard: 1) These glitches are not a core part of the game. The guy who made these used some exploits to launch himself into normally unreachable areas, and those areas that were never meant to be visited are the reason behind the buggy play and 2) I don't give a shit.

Quite frankly, I wouldn't have cared if he had cracked open his console and physically changed the motherboard to make these things happen. It's all worth it to see a skater doing some twisted version of "the worm" until he slams into a steel beam, folding his head back like a fucking Pez dispenser:

Or falling 200 feet to the asphalt and jamming his board through his chest:

Or my personal favorite, doing a front flip that ends with a guy's face smashed into your crotch while still standing:

It's not all about contortion and mutilation. Half of what makes these funny are when he's not on a skateboard. In that universe, skating is second nature to that guy -- but the second he steps off of that board, he can't take two steps without falling flat on his face or getting launched into the mesosphere.

Though I do have to warn you, if you found that first one funny (if you didn't, your soul is broken), you might want to clear some of your schedule today because he has three more of these videos, and every damn one of them is awesome.

2 Fallout 3 -- Exploding the Elderly

I'm not sure I've ever gotten as much enjoyment out of a concept this simple before in my life. I've played the Fallout series, and I loved every second of them, but if you were somehow able to compile all the happiness that hundreds of hours of gameplay has brought me, it would not compare to this five-minute video of the player repeatedly blowing up an old man with a giant pile of frag mines.

It's so damn simple, but I can't stop watching it. Step one -- drop a few dozen frag mines on the ground:

Step two -- fire off a round at the old man to make him get up and come at you:

Step three:

Oh, suck it, you old bastard! Eat sky!

And then he just keeps doing it. Over and over again. Frag. Shot. BOOM! Old man flopping through the sky. And I laugh every goddamn time. Each time, glancing down at the time bar to make sure it wasn't the last one. "Is he going to do it again? Hell yes, he is. And I am going to enjoy every second of -- " BOOM!

OH, HOW DO THOSE CLOUDS TASTE, ASSHOLE?!

I should probably stop watching these. People will start to think I'm a little -- oh, hey! A sequel:

1 Minecraft -- The Cat Fountain

This is why video games were invented. Everything we have ever done with graphics, AI, storytelling, physics, sound design ... it has all been in preparation of this solitary act of game manipulation. The Cat Fountain. Make sure your speakers are on because once that thing gets going, you will never see or hear a more perfect form of video game comedy in your life. This is it. This is the apex of our evolution. This is comedy Rapture.

It's done by manipulating these simple rules of the Minecraft universe: if you make cats in creative mode, they follow you around. And if you get too far away from them, they will teleport to you. So if you build a virtual Tower of Babel to the game's ceiling, leaving only a single square's thickness at the top, when the cats port onto it, they immediately fall off and re-teleport back up there. If you get enough cats going at once ... Cat Fountain.

This page also represents everything that is wrong with the world. Not the video itself, mind you. It's what's under it:

The fact that those 20 people exist frightens me. That there are sincerely 20 people in the world who watched that video, pondered it for a second, and thought, "That's stupid." It's not that they exist as individuals -- they represent a larger blight found at the fringes of every community, staring in with gritted teeth and bloodshot eyes, ready to tear down anything that represents fun and originality. Those 20 people are the barbed wire that will always stop a utopian society from forming.

Cat Fountain exposes that darkness in ways philosophy and activism never could. With a smattering of meows and a flowing spill of tails and fur, Cat Fountain is a reflection of what we are ... and an encouraging vision of what we could be.

Thanks to the posters in this thread for helping find these, feel free to go in there and post your own. John has a Twitter and a Facebook Fan Page. Both of which are certain to win him a Pulitzer Prize in Internet thing-typing.