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Do you find certain glitches to be disturbing? [roundtable]
Glitches can come in all different forms, but certain ones I think are pretty jarring to see; up to the point where they nearly freak me out. One time I was playing The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, and I was in the forest dungeon, trying to jump onto a boat in a river. Link managed to miss the boat, yet dive far enough under the boat so as to get stuck, and the camera actually moved beneath the surface of the water (a rarity in The Wind Waker). Once the camera had moved under water, I was able to see that the entire area surrounding Link underwater was pure blue, and he appeared to be floating in the middle of nowhere. After some wrangling with the controls I worked my way to the surface, but my time underwater in the game was definitely unforgettable, even if not for the best reasons. All things considered, it's just a game, but when you've been playing for awhile and are engaged in the gameplay, glitches like that have the potential to be pretty scary. It's as if the entire world around you were tearing apart at the seams.

I recall a somewhat similar glitch in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 for the Playstation 2, where sometimes if I pressed the start button a certain number of times while a stage was loading, rather than being able to play, the game would go into some weird free-camera mode where I could move the camera around the entirety of the stage, to see how and where each area of the level was designed, and where the polygons end. Seeing the road away from the cul-de-sac in the Suburbia level eventually dissolve into nothingness changed my perception of the game from that point on. I'm not shaken to the core when I see this sort of glitch, but it can be somewhat unnerving.

Has anyone else had a similar experience such as these while playing a game? How do you feel about seeing such odd glitches? If you are engaged enough in a game, does seeing a glitch like this affect you in any way?

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Posted: 02/21/11, 00:47:59
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Way back when when I played Lufia II on the SNES, I encountered a glitch that gave one of my party members a massive defense and attack boost. Of course this broke the game for me (I was only up to the dungeon with the yellow/red tile puzzles) by killing powerful mobs with zero effort and I stopped playing the game before returning it to Blockbuster.
Posted: 02/21/11, 00:55:35
I guess this could possibly fit the description of a disturbing glitch :-P

EDIT: Wow, posting videos on an iPod is a pain.
Posted: 02/21/11, 01:07:16  - Edited by 
 on: 02/21/11, 01:27:47

LOVE Dark City!!!!

I hate it in games when I jump and get embedded into an object. I imagine it like Star Trek and being beamed into solid rock or something. That does freak me out a little.
Posted: 02/21/11, 01:45:32
Can't say this has ever happened to me, nope... maybe as graphics continue to get more and more realistic?
Posted: 02/21/11, 01:54:01
I admit I was a little unnerved when, in Super Mario 64 I was able to fly Mario through the stain-glassed window at the top of the castle, and drop down into that empty, black room. It was strange.
Posted: 02/21/11, 02:01:07
I had a recent glitch in Trauma Team where the game just wouldn't let me use any of the implements. I kept trying and trying and the patient kept slowly losing health, it was kind of unnerving. Even though I knew it was just a game and knew it was a glitch, I felt like I was failing my patient. Maybe this is what doctors feel like when they're trying to save a patient and nothing is working.
Posted: 02/21/11, 02:08:38
Using "No clip" cheats in Doom or Half-Life absolutely freaked me out as a kid, yes, and probably still would. When you go outside the limits of the level and suddenly all you see is some weird recursive image...

Makes my skin crawl.
Posted: 02/21/11, 02:12:06

Came to post that one. I remember doing it every once in awhile and it was always kind of disturbing that it would happen.

Also ragdoll physics usually unnerve me, depending on how realistic the models are trying to be. Halo has had some moments where your body would contort in all sorts of directions and if a hand or foot was caught on something, the limb would stretch out to reach where the body was. Always found that a little disturbing to watch.
Posted: 02/21/11, 02:12:31
@VofEscaflowne That's pretty cool

@missypissy That's one thing I don't like about ragdoll physics. While I sometimes find them amusing nowadays (I like smashing apart bodies in Dead Space), I still don't really care for them in general. They usually either break the immersion (why would brushing against someone cause their body to fly around like a bag filled with beach balls?), or end up causing some pretty disturbing images, like that.
Posted: 02/21/11, 04:30:44
I had a bug in Okami where the dog's head seemed to be stuck on one certain point, and no matter where I went, the head morphed and stretched to stay in that one spot. It was weird, to say the least, and it didn't go away until I powered the system off.
Posted: 02/21/11, 04:37:42
Actually speaking of Dead Space and ragdoll, I remember a creature body getting stuck in a way where it kept twitching, even though I thought I killed it. So I kept stomping it, and it just wouldn't stop twitching. I thought maybe it was some new freaky enemy that couldn't die or something, but it was the only time this happened.
Posted: 02/21/11, 04:38:18
@Pandareus Yeah, no clipping was a little hairraising. I kept trying to get it in my head where and how I was geometrically on the game maps.

Can I bring up the Metroid secret worlds or are they too obvious? They freak me out even after knowing how they are derived from the code.

Posted: 02/21/11, 04:38:53
Depends on the glitches I suppose. Glitches were you have to a very specific series of action to even hit don't bug me but glitches that are easy to stumble upon are terrible.
Posted: 02/21/11, 07:55:21
I've never told anyone this story before, but here goes.

I'd never actually played Toejam and Earl back when it came out. I downloaded it off the Virtual Console one night back when there was that SEGA sale. Now, while it was downloading there was a raging thunderstorm and the power went out. Everything was pitch black- except the Wii's blue light. It was still on. Weird, but I didn't think much of it.

After downloading the game for realz that time, I started playing it. If I remember right, I picked the "random" mode or whatever it's called. So I was started off playing as Toejam (or Earl? I dunno). After walking around and going through a few of the layers, things started to get weird. Instead of the hula girls, there were... soldiers. They almost looked like Nazis, the way they saluted. I could tell they were replacing the hula girls because Toejam would dance next to them- but they just stood there.

At that moment I realized just how bad the storm was getting outside. I felt like my entire head was filling with water. I hit the HOME button on the Wiimote, but nothing happened. Toejam and the soldier just stood there. The funky title screen theme started to play in reverse. I could feel my head spinning. The game zoomed in on Toejam's face, pixelating it and distorting it. But as his face got closer, it also got clearer. His disgusting red flesh came into view as a photorealistic bloody octopus face filled the screen. The Nazi could still be seen in the background.

A bolt of lightning struck just outside, and for a moment I thought I could see the shadow of Hitler cast against the light. The power went out again- this time, no blue light. After a few seconds the power came back on. I deleted Toejam and Earl from my Wii and went to bed, making sure to face forward and not look out the corner of my eyes.
Posted: 02/21/11, 08:35:17
@Zero That reminds me of something else in Dead Space. This isn't a glitch, but after you kill the boss in Chapter 6 or something, if you go to the edge of the fleshy tunnel where it was and look at the texture, you'll see that it's at an immensely low resolution. It seriously looks like something from a Playstation game. You don't notice it during the fight, but afterward, walking up to it reveals how low-quality the texture is.
Posted: 02/21/11, 10:08:59
Absolutely. Character sprites or polygons twitching and contorting can be quite vile, and more disturbing with the frequency at which they tend to vibrate.


That video makes me want to hurl. Wow.
Posted: 02/21/11, 11:16:36  - Edited by 
 on: 02/21/11, 11:17:47
Red Dead edemption has some of the craziest glitches ever in videogames.

Posted: 02/21/11, 11:29:54  - Edited by 
 on: 02/21/11, 11:31:51
So did Rockstar do any testing when they made that game?
Posted: 02/21/11, 13:19:22
It doesn't look that way does it. I think its all been patched now though.
Posted: 02/21/11, 13:28:40
Glitches aren't disturbing; they make the game better. Because you're embarking upon uncharted territory not even the designers know about.
Posted: 02/21/11, 13:42:07
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