Old game bugs that stopped you in your tracks

[Brad]

These days we hear about them soon enough but back in the day games could have bugs that you never even knew about. Anyone got any stories to tell? I have one of course, hence starting this thread.

Mario 64 course Dire, dire docks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y04DBLimGbs

I had a glitch that mean that when I reached this level the yellow and black poles were not moving around. Of course, I didn't know that they were supposed to be moving so I spent hours trying to get all the red coins. And I got them all apart from 1. I concluded that it was impossible to get the last coin so, for the first and only time, I phoned the Nintendo game hotline and found out I had discovered a bug. The only solution was to start again. The result is that to this day I have never finished Mario 64.

Anyway, anyone else got any old skool game breaking stories?

[dave heats]

As I'm currently playing through MSR on the Dreamcast again, I had sudden flashbacks of how bug ridden the first print release was. Aside from the occasional lap counter weirdness and other oddities, the main bugs seem to have been:

• The Alfa Romeo GTV cannot be gained legitimately as the 'time to beat' was set too low at 31 seconds (first and second PAL version);

• The Street Race in Chapter 17, Challenge 8 cannot be beaten legitimately as it was mistakenly set to infinite laps (first and second PAL version). I encountered this on my recent playthough however, and if you just quit the race after 6+ laps it recognises it as a completion.


I have to say though, as long as bugs aren't game ruining, I quite like having them in older games. Pre-patch days had a certain rough and ready charm.

[nakamura]

Post patch days have a much more rough and ready charm.
Fifa 11 for example didn't work properly for the entire year!

[thetrooper]

I seem to remember Theme Park on the Amiga 1200 had a nasty habit of freezing every time the player expanded the rides etc. beyond a certain point. It was very annoying but I don't think the hardware was up to running the game at that level, even with the 030 accelerator card I had running. It wouldn't have stung so badly if it was a pirated copy but it was a birthday present and the Virgin Megastore wouldn't accept it as a return.

[briareos_kerensky]

Daggerfall. Can't quite recall all details, but after completing a particular sidequest and reaching a mian-quest related village would make my character clip into the terrain and endlessly fall through the void.

Echelon (the sci-fi flight sim by Buka): it advertised that the player's jet could strafe around, only that in the release version, and a lot of the subsequent patches it never worked. And missions were built around this capability, making even an early mission like the third impossible to overcome. It should be fine now that's on Steam though.

[beecee]

pretty sure i got caught out with the water temple bug in OOT.

[eastyy]

sonic adventure for the dc on the beach the first set of bumpers i went through and died and it happened many many times.

Knights of the old republic there was a major bug towards the end would stop dialogue from happening (was something to do if one of the main characters was in stealth mode the other character before the cutscene they could not interact.

Valkrie profile 2 silmeria not sure where or when but there was a point where the game could not progress

[charlesr]

Some helicopter game on the GC (Fireblade??) - totally impossible to get past one level because even once I had cleared all the bad guys, it didn't register as end of level. Pretty sure I was the only person to bother trying to get that far....

[Cepp]

On the PSX version of Broken Sword 2 I got stuck in the art gallery because of a bug that stopped me from being able to click on an object. I ended up restarting the game and everything was fine.

[fuse]

Not a bug, but old adventure games that would let you make progression-limiting mistakes, and then let you carry on without telling you used to really boil my blood. Return to Zork and King's Quest VI stand out as games I generally look back on fondly, but there were real points when I wanted to fling the discs out of the window.

[S3M]

I seem to remember Theme Park on the Amiga 1200 had a nasty habit of freezing every time the player expanded the rides etc. beyond a certain point. It was very annoying but I don't think the hardware was up to running the game at that level, even with the 030 accelerator card I had running. It wouldn't have stung so badly if it was a pirated copy but it was a birthday present and the Virgin Megastore wouldn't accept it as a return.

Happens in every version of Theme Park I ever played, Amiga, SNES, Saturn, build your park up big enough and it gets to big for the game's memory, crash follows.

XIII on Gamecube the game had a crash if you played on hard mode and cleared the sub pen. Happens in every version of the Cube version I tried only way around it is to play it on Normal. Wasn't best pleased having to replay the whole game.

In another funny note Star Was Bounty Hunter on Gamecube crashes on the second level if you watch one of the intros from start to finish, had to skip the intro for it to work.

[thetrooper]

Happens in every version of Theme Park I ever played, Amiga, SNES, Saturn, build your park up big enough and it gets to big for the game's memory, crash follows.

I wasn't the only one then! I wonder if the PC version suffered from this?

The original Alien Breed had a glitch where you couldn't collect enough keys to get through a certain level (or something like that). A year later the special edition fixed this, but I think it dropped the rendered intro and a few other cutscenes.

Jumping even further back into the good old days, I half remember an Amiga magazine reporting that a cracking group had taken the Amiga version of Operation Wolf (or was it Thundertbolt?) to fix a few bugs and even compress it down to one disk rather than two before distributing copies. Who needs fancy day one patches when you have Warez?

[112]

I have memories of playing Hammerfist many times during my youth, on the Commodore 64, only to have it crash at certain points during the game - mainly during the underwater level, when fighting the Octopus guardian. I would constantly reload the game to try and get past that part but it would crash again and again... On the odd rare occasions did it let me go beyond the underwater level, but would later crash further down the line. To this day I am only able to see the rest of the game, watching longplays on youtube...

112

[S3M]

I wasn't the only one then! I wonder if the PC version suffered from this?

The original Alien Breed had a glitch where you couldn't collect enough keys to get through a certain level (or something like that). A year later the special edition fixed this, but I think it dropped the rendered intro and a few other cutscenes.

Wrong way around it was the budget release Alien Breed Special Edition that had the issue, Team 17 had to issue a patch which was given away on Amiga Power. I still have the game and the patch disc as well.

On those lines the originial version of Jet Set Willy had four different non-progression in it, players had to code their own patch via a magazine!

[thetrooper]

That's what it was! :-) It's funny but Alien Breed was the only big box Team 17 game I didn't own and I regret not holding on to my Amiga collection. How did you apply the patch, S3M? Was it just a boot disk?