7 Video Game Glitches That Accidentally Create Comedy Gold
Game glitches can be annoying. Nothing breaks immersion like walking into a new area and suddenly falling through the floor, or all of your enemies becoming inexplicably invincible. That's what most glitches are: broken bits of the game that do nothing but ruin your fun. But every now and then a glitch makes the game so much better than anybody ever could have known ...
Heavy Rain's Protagonist Has A Mental Breakdown
Heavy Rain is an ambitious, complicated and tense murder mystery, which is exactly the sort of game that's begging for glitches to interrupt the drama like a drunken clown stumbling into a funeral. In the heady emotional climax, protagonist Ethan has found his missing son, Shaun, just in time to stop a serial killer from serial killing him. You're prompted to hit a button to howl Shaun's name to the heavens in sheer joy, but what's supposed to be a touching moment of fatherly love instead turns into a bizarre fit of familial Tourette's.
Sometimes the prompt to shout "Shaun" shows up and refuses to leave. You can scream it anytime: Ethan yells it at his girlfriend for no reason; he interrupts the villain's evil monologue with "SHAUN"; he hollers his son's name in response to getting shot. Later, as Ethan's lady friend is running from the killer, he keeps screaming "Shaun!" with the voice of a demigod that carries for miles. Eventually, Ethan he recovers from his wound, confronts the killer, and blows him away on top of a construction crane. In the pouring rain, he delivers his badass one-liner. It is, of course, "SHAUN!!!"
Resident Evil 4's Ashley Is A Suplex Monster
Resident Evil 4's Ashley Graham is the president's daughter, the target of hero Leon's rescue mission, and the poster child for how a bad escort level can ruin an otherwise great game. Ashley is slow, whiny, and utterly defenseless. Every gamer has intentionally left her to the zombie hoards out of frustration at least once.
Even worse, at one point you have to play as her when she's separated from her badass bodyguard. All of Leon's sweet guns are replaced with the ability to hide, jog, and throw a lantern. Unless, that is, you're able to knock a zombie to his knees with a well-placed door to the face, at which point this stereotypical damsel in distress can bear hug that undead motherfucker and suplex him into the ground so hard his head pops open like a Gallagher outtake.
Hell yeah! That's the kind of secret service training we want to see! Sadly the move, which is only supposed to be accessible to Leon, was taken away from Ashley in later releases, as the developers figured that the president's sheltered, teenage daughter taking zombies to Suplex City was kind of an immersion breaker.
Skyrim's Giant's Club Turns Your Sidekicks Into Weapons Of Mass Destruction
Did you find the beastliest weapon in all of Skyrim? No, it's not a dragon-bone sword or some sort of Daedric mace. We're referring to that humble stick of wood: the giant's club. Throughout your adventures you might stumble across an abandoned club, one that's presumably been left by a giant who realized the futility of violence. You may have also thought it was the unbelievable strength of the giants that made their blows so deadly, but nope: It's all club, baby.
The motion of the ocean don't do shit.
You can't pick it up, but your traveling companions aren't governed by the same rules, so you can order them to equip the primitive super-weapon (that is literally twice their size) and join you in beating a mammoth into jelly.
Congratulations. You're the sidekick now.
Lord Of The Rings Online's Chair Train
Lord of the Rings Online is basically World of Warcraft for lit nerds. You kill orcs, strum lutes, smoke Hobbit pipe-weed, and wander far and wide through Middle-Earth on foot, horse, or motherfucking rocket chair.
"You have my sword."
"And my bow."
"And my unupholstered, classical-style Italian side chair."
Thanks to a glitch, players could blast through the shire like handicapped hot-rodders. Eventually the throne riders figured it would be funny if they targeted a random player and all followed him at once, thus creating Middle-Earth's first railroad -- the train's unwilling locomotive fueled by confusion and fear.
One does not simply walk into Mordor, but one does blast in there on a screeching chair-train, defying physics and Sauron's will alike.
Crysis' Land Sharks
Crysis is a quasi-futuristic shooter in which you fight mysterious aliens across an island. To keep you within the bounds of play, deadly sharks attack your character if they swim out too far. The sharks are also lousy with glitches, so any attempt to engage them from the safety of the shore causes them to approach the water's edge and then, through the beauty of incomplete coding, lunge onto land and chase you into the jungle like the little bitch that you are.
"Just when you thought it was safe to stay out of the water ..."
They retain their swimming prowess even when exposed to the air, and they're surprisingly agile when they're not getting stuck on rocks or jamming their heads directly into the sand. They also inexplicably roar at you like deranged bears. Oh, and sometimes they'll attack in swarms, like when this player is accosted by an entire SNL season's worth of land sharks.
"CandygramCandygramCandygramCandygramCandygramCandygramCandygramCandygramCandygramCandygramCandygramCandygram"
Civilization's Furious, Nuke-Happy Gandhi
With all due respect to India's long struggle for independence, Gandhi's greatest claim to fame among millennials is probably his nuke-happy avatar in the long-running Civilization series. Each country in the strategy game is led by a prominent historical leader that you may or may not remember from third-period history. Each persona shares characteristics his their real-life counterpart, so George Washington is willing to cooperate while Genghis Khan will declare eternal war if you fart in his general direction.
In the original Civilization, Gandhi was naturally assigned the lowest aggression rating of any leader. However, in-game actions would inevitably lower his minuscule rating even further, producing a negative value that reset the scale to the highest possible value and making Gandhi prone to annihilating entire civilizations in a nuclear firestorm if they so much as looked at his loincloth funny.
As an homage to the hilarious glitch, the developers kept Gandhi's out-of-character aggression in future installments of the game. He's generally an easy going guy now, but he's by far the most likely to transmit the launch codes when things don't go his way.
FIFA Players Flopping And Boning
Thanks to the scarcity of fucks given by EA's coders, FIFA games have been riddled with glitches since time immemorial. In FIFA 14, games between the world's top teams devolve into rec league soccer played by clumsy epileptics and their teleporting monster friends.
That's all pretty typical, but sometimes the glitches that make players flop all over the field like, well, soccer players, produce results that aren't so family friendly.
The goalkeeper violently dry-humped his opponent before nonchalantly walking off with the ball like a dominant wolfpack leader. Through some subtle flaw in the game's physics engine, players can become entangled in a very different kind of sport. But to the developer's credit, this particular glitch only occurs in the rare situation where anything happens ever.
Weird. We thought "just do it" was Nike's slogan.
But it's not all violent hate sex between bitter rivals. Sometimes, even for professional athletes, the greatest goal of all ...
... is finding love.
*Play For Full Effect*
A big thank you to Karl Smallwood, who made this article possible. Sam Jackson would like you to buy his friend's book, then follow him on Facebook and Twitter.
Sometimes though, glitches aren't funny. No they're the complete opposite. Like the Sims glitch that gives birth to the Thing or the Manimals of Red Dead Redemption. See more unrelenting horrors in The 22 Most Horrifying Video Game Glitches and The 8 Creepiest Glitches Hidden in Popular Video Games.
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