What is the biggest flaw you have ever seen in a video game?

[dataDave]

One that really annoyed me was in Pikmin when I'd just got the Gamecube. I'd played it through but screwed up and didn't have enough time left so restarted and tried a full run through. About 2/3rd the way through the game I noticed some hefty slowdown due to some hectic pikmin activity. Instead of pulling away I drove straight for the the slow down and part of the screen folded in on itself and a massive black triangular hole appeared in the screen. After that I couldn't get rid of it so tried reloading but it had corrupted the save. That was awful.

That's great!! I've never seen anything like that before! Save corruption as well! Class.

I played Sonic Adventure last night for the first time in around 4 years - that game is pretty much glitched up to the hilt. Still good though, but the flaws stick out like a sore thumb now.

[Valken]

I put on DC Sonic Adventure last week and it gave me motion sickness!

[mt50]

I put on DC Sonic Adventure last week and it gave me motion sickness!

thats not a flaw though is it , which level was you playing?

[Kieran76]

Striker on the snes, when running in diagonally from the edge of the box you can't fail to score. I always hate it when you discover something like that, makes the game totally redundant.

[Valken]

I put on DC Sonic Adventure last week and it gave me motion sickness!

thats not a flaw though is it , which level was you playing?

Oops, I was supposed to be quoting someone but hit the wrong button!

It makes no sense by itself really :P

[karlidog]

there's always the missingNO / squigglesquigglesomething glitch from the original pokemon games... if you surfed up and down on the line where the land met the sea on cinnabar island (i think it was cinnabar, anyway... it was sea to the right and land to the left), you'd occasionally meet a lv100 glitch-pokemon of DEATH (i seem to remember it looking like an angry mutant rectangle), which was catchable, and would progressively **** up your save more and more the longer you kept it.

oh, and still on pokemon red/blue/green, turning your GB off at the right moment when it was scrolling the 'saving... do not turn off your gameboy' text used to duplicate an item (and pokemon, possibly... it was a while ago) - it wasn't the sorta thing you'd randomly come across, but it was stupid nonetheless.

...oh yeah, and the eggs-and-rails thing on billy hatcher? yep, that's broken right there. as is the camera on the same bits (first... circus... mission... argh!), where you have to go through an opening that's too small for your egg, then catch it as it comes off the rails. except that there's a sodding great wall in the way, and the camera gets stuck in it sometimes, and billy ends up plummeting to his death... for anyone getting pissed off with the rails, the only way to get the egg on there every time and keep it moving slowly enough that you can catch it is to jump and throw it. it's still annoying lining it up, but it seems to work.

[Tig]

Quality thread!

My fave so far is Syphon Filter failing to load the room in time
And that evil Pikmin thing sounds... evil. Have you considered that your GC is possessed by the devil?

I dont have any to rival that. Although, once I was zapped about a mile above the level in Glover. That was pretty alarming, as I was so high the entire level disappeared until I fell within the draw distance.

[evilmatt]

The way the creature AI in Black & White worked could be funny - I tried to teach my creature to be evil, so I only wanted him to eat villagers. So I slapped him about when he ate anything else.... so he stopped eating anything at all. I couldn't get him to eat people for some reason, so he would just wander about till he starved to death, respawn with virtually no health at my temple, then wander about a bit and starve again..... over and over. Idiot

[DjSatansfury]

Road Rash 2 on the MD

Far as im aware, all UK copies were ****ed, and it had no ending

[dataDave]

SNES Mortal Kombat 2.

Fighting Smoke after 50 vs. matches.

The first batch of carts simply crashed before he made it on-screen.

A prime excuse for taking it back and trading it for SoR3 on the Megadrive. Or did I trade it for SSF2?

Can't remember.

[E. Randy Dupre]

The N64 Shadowman thing - it wasn't that you couldn't collect all of the souls, it was that you could collect all of the souls and then some. N64 Mag contacted Acclaim about it and were told that they'd put a few extra ones in there so that even if you thought you'd completed the game, there was still something else to do.

Which, as far as I know, was absolute bull****. What was actually happening - or, at least, what was happening on my cart - was that certain souls that I'd already collected would reappear when I reloaded my save, letting me collect them again and fubar the game's design. Not got enough souls to access this section of the world yet? Can't find those two that you need to up your tally? No problem! Just go back to a couple that you've already got and pick them up again!

Anyone else remember the PS Tekken 2 winning strategy? Low kick, low kick, low kick, low kick...

Carts from the first UK batch of Mario Kart 64 will freeze up during multiplayer. Actually, that's a glitch that works in the game's favour - you'll be having a GP against a couple of mates, one of you'll get a clear points lead, the final track starts, you get half way through it and... freeze. Laffs aplenty.

Xbox Splinter Cell: every now and again you'll load up your checkpoint save and, after about two seconds of play, be greeted by intruder alarms. I'm not sure what's going on there - at first I thought that it was because I'd not hidden a body well enough in a previous section of the level and the guards were only finding it now, but then I discovered that you can prevent it from happeneing by loading your checkpoint save and making sure that the first thing you do is walk back into the room before the checkpoint, then carry on as normal. The alarm won't go off. Daft.

[Hencole]

On Shenmue 2 in the arcade in the Golden Quarter - I'd just left the arcade cabinet and suddenly I was able to walk through walls! I was able to cross the street (with all the cars) and have a look around the buildings there. They were all incomplete, but it was still quite weird. Trouble is it mucked up my save and I wasn't able to leave that quarter. Similar thing happened when getting out of the arcade machine later on in the game. This time I got out and the whole screen had gone all trippy with blocks of colours flashing about and strange effects going on like some kind of music visualisation. I could still move about and do things as the patterns changed as I moved between lit and unlit areas, but had no idea what I what I was doing. Surfice to say I had to start that one again too.

[optimusomega]

GTA series on ps2 ft: Two examples of many : going to a lot of trouble to get the tank, get out turn around, turn back the things gone!

Shooting through bloody walls, whole world felt like it was made outta cardboard

[Yakumo]

I heard people talk about that Shenmue 2 bug were you can walk through walls. I'd love that to happen to me so I can see what's in the areas that you can't visit.

I can't believe that nobody has mentioned Evil Twin !! That game is so messed up that it's annoying. The first major **** up is the saves. When you switch on the game it should load the options and game saves automatically from the VMU BUT, if your VMU has no space on it to record a new save then Evil Twin won't load the options or your previously saved game file. This leaves you with no option but to go to the DreamcasT's bios and manually delete something from the VMU to leave space for a save that you don't need in the first place. Really dumb !!
Next up is the crappy control system. Sometimes the buttons just don't do anything !! You can press the jump button but will your character jump? My arse he will.
Then there are the loading crashes. many times the game will freeze when it should be loading a new screen.
Another bug is with the speech. now this maybe because I'm running a PAL game on a Japanese DC but I don't think so. Almost every part of speech is missing the first second and also has some very dodgy volume problems. Finally are the graphic glitches. Near the beginning of the game there isn't any that you'll notice apart from the messed up splash effects from the taps during the intro. But once you get near the end of the game there are loads of graphical errors. Some even fill the screen with so much crap that you can't see the original background.

I know a guy who worked on Evil Twin or so he says. He said the reason why the game is so full of bugs is because it was rushed out because of pressure from UBI SOFT but the game engine was a newly developed one that wasn't ready for release.

Yakumo

[E. Randy Dupre]

if your VMU has no space on it to record a new save then Evil Twin won't load the options or your previously saved game file. This leaves you with no option but to go to the DreamcasT's bios and manually delete something from the VMU to leave space for a save that you don't need in the first place.

Super Monkey Ball suffers from a similar problem. Even if you've got previous save data on your memory card, the game checks the card when loading and if it doesn't have three empty 'blocks' you'll get a message saying that it can't save. Means you always have to leave empty space on one of your memory cards.

I remember the PC version of Evil Twin PC being screwy, but can't remember exactly why.

<edit> Okay. So I just reinstalled Evil Twin to try and remember what the problems were. First obvious one: you can't get past the 'Press Start' screen. Hammer the joypad, press every key on the keyboard... nothing. This, then, is from memory.

When you're navigating the menu, the 'back' and 'forwards' keys swap places with every screen you go into. Play the game without a joypad and, despite what it says in teh manual, you can't change the camera view - a major problem when this game's got the single worst automatic camera I've ever seen. Play with a joypad and you have to have the keyboard sitting right next to you in order to move the camera. There were other problems, but these were the major ones.