Obvious Beta / Video Games

Arcade

• The arcade version of beatmania IIDX ran on a custom-made and very complicated PCB (it actually used a consumer DVD player controlled via a serial port to create video overlays, amongst other things), until the ninth version, where it was dragged kicking and screaming onto a Windows XP-based PC platform. The transition was anything but smooth; as well as the general bugginess of the code, the game's timing measurement and response speed were extremely bad, two things which are critical in a music-based video game. One song, the One More Extra Stage song "quasar", periodically crashed the entire game, forcing the player to get arcade staff's attention to reset the machine. It wasn't until the 11th or 12th version that things were almost back to normal, though the home releases continue to exhibit smoother and more responsive gameplay than the arcade ones.
• Gunforce II was released in-extremis months before its developer Irem went bankrupt, and it shows. The game has no ending sequence or even staff roll programmed and simply loops endlessly without any increase in difficulty or change in gameplay after completion, weapon power-ups are random (which is not a sign of a rushed game by itself, but the very unbalanced nature of the pick-ups makes it obvious the developers simply did not have the time to handcraft and balance power-up placement), the soundtrack is sparse and entirely made-up of rearranged tracks from the previous Irem game Air Duel (as the game's composer admitted he did not have the time to write new pieces) and the player character sprites are drawn in a different style and are of lower quality than the rest of the graphics as the game's graphic designer likewise didn't have the time to redraw them outside of the motorcycle segment.
• The initial release of the arcade version of Mortal Kombat 4 wasn't technically supposed to get out to the public because it appeared unfinished, lacking certain Fatalities, the Combo Limiter system, select characters and any endings. It also suffered from a Game-Breaking Bug that would make it impossible for fighters to attack each other if one of them used a special move that used a "lift" property because it would push the opponent to the top of the screen and too far out of reach, grinding the match to a standstill if no time limit was imposed.
• The release version of Rolling Thunder^note Known as the "old" version in MAME was a late beta build that Namco rushed into Japanese arcades so they could hit a December 1986 deadline. The game's difficulty had yet to be balanced, resulting in a metric-ton of Schizophrenic Difficulty. Additionally, the game's cutscenes haven't been implemented yet, extra lives are nonexistent, stages only use a single music track and certain levels have a bug that makes the player invincible. Namco would later release a finished revision of the game.
• The Japanese version of Pac-Mania is rather unpolished compared to the Western release. It notably lacks a high score screen (despite being an arcade game) and infamously has a broken credits sequence that shows glitched game graphics instead of actual text. Additionally, the "Courage Bonus" (in which using the level select grants the player extra points for starting on a later world) doesn't exist, giving the player no reason to use the level select.
• Metal Slug 5 was rushed as SNK rejected the original version by third-party developer Noise Factory but did not budge from its original release date. A large portion of the ROM is taken up by unused sprites and unfinished levels - unused files are normal and not a sign of an unfinished game by themselves, but the sheer quantity and fairly polished material in some instances makes it seem that a lot was cut in a hurry. A cutscene at the end of the first level introduces what presumably was meant to be the main villain, but the game has no further cutscenes after this and the character is not really developed or interacted with during the rest of the game. Levels have occasional pacing and balancing oddities: the second mission has you ditch the Metal Slug tank almost as soon as you get it and what was obviously meant to be an alternate path that you can't utilize, while the third mission has a part where doors in the background open but no enemies come out, plus an alternate route (seen here) that does nothing but pad the level's length and is unintuitive to access to begin with. The final boss is a giant demon that clashes with the otherwise fairly grounded selection of enemies and is not foreshadowed or introduced in any way, with the unused content making it obvious there was going to be a Pre-Final Boss and more narrative context to better set it up. Finally, the game has no ending scene and skips to the staff credits after the regular Mission Complete assesment screen.
• The western version of Undercover Cops was blatantly unfinished compared to the Japanese release, lacking more than half the movelist (no alternate grabs, alternate combos or super-desperation attacks), many graphical details and having much worse sound quality. In an interview with a French gamer in 2014, a designer on the game confirmed the western Undercover Cops was a beta version of the game and that he had no idea the game was released in that state outside Japan.

Atari systems

• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was made by a single developer who was given only five weeks to make it so that it would make it in time for Christmas. As such, it was an utter mess. It was a confusing, unintuitive, ugly-looking game that bore no resemblance to the movie it was based on (though to be fair there's very little if anything in E.T.'s plot that lends itself well to a video game adaptation.) The backlash from this was so bad that a completely different version of this game planned for the Atari 5200 was aborted. Atari, figuring they had a license to print money, made more copies of this game than there were consoles, expecting a system seller. Needless to say, Atari had a very, very large amount of unsold games on their hands that became the bulk of Atari's "buried treasure", namely a landfill in New Mexico where they dumped all their leftover inventory before exiting console and computer markets after the game turned out to be the harbinger of The Great Video Game Crash of 1983. The game gained a more positive reputation in the late 2010s. While it will never be a highlight of the 2600 library, it's pretty damn impressive for something done by one guy in five weeks, especially compared to some of the other entries on this page.
• The Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man is sometimes accused of being one, to the point where there's a myth that the game was released as soon as Atari got their hands on the programmer's alpha version (the reality is rather more nuanced). The game is infamously unable to draw all the ghosts on screen at once.^note This relates to the Atari 2600's limited capabilities for drawing moving objects; other games on the system with many moving objects ran into this problem, though none suffered as badly as Pac-Man. CRT screens also had phosphor decay that allowed the ghosts to stay on screen for longer and partially mitigated the flickering. It also looked ugly, at least partly because Atari didn't want games to have black backgrounds unless they were set in space. Like E.T. Atari produced more copies of Pac-Man than there were consoles to play them on, and like E.T. a large amount of them were buried in New Mexico.
• Fight For Life for the Atari Jaguar was actually shaping up to be a good fighting game. But Atari had gotten into the bad habit of shafting their employees, so the programmer decided to withhold the game until he got paid; leading the company to say "fuck it" and release the latest build they had instead. It was perhaps 60% ready, slug-paced, and unbalanced. Much later, he let a Jaguar fansite have the final build, so they produced the vastly improved "Limited Edition" from it. But talk about limited: only 28 cartridges were produced, making it one of the rarest games ever. More here.

PC

• One of the most notorious examples is Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, to the point that it's essentially an Obvious Pre-Alpha. So much is broken in this game:
  • It is impossible to actually lose in this game. There is no code describing what would happen if you did. The only way to lose is for the game to crash (which admittedly happens pretty frequently).
  • Although it's supposedly a racing game, there are no opponents. There are technically opponent cars, but they don't do anything other than sit at the starting line. There is a patch that will get them to move, but they will still stop right before crossing the finish line. Again, there is no code that describes what happens when you lose a race.
  • There is practically zero collision detection in this game; you can drive straight through buildings and trees. This means that if you drive over a bridge, you'll fall straight through it to the valley beneath. But that's okay, because you can drive straight up and down vertical cliffs without even slowing down. You can go off the side of the map at your leisure. Funnily enough, The Angry Video Game Nerd, in reviewing the game, happened upon a downed helicopter that is the only thing in the entire game you can sort of collide with.
  • You can accelerate almost infinitely fast in reverse. It took years for players to reach a "maximum" speed, which turned out to be 12.3 undecillion miles per hour — that's a 12.3 with 36 zeroes. And "maximum" is something of a misnomer — once you reach that speed, the game doesn't prevent you from going faster so much as translate your extreme speed as your rig existing simultaneously in every spot in the game — including the finish line, so you win automatically. Put another way, one way to win this game is by breaking space and time.^note For those interested, that's 1.84 x 10²⁹ times the speed of light, at which speed you'd, hypothetically speaking, cross the 46.5 billion lightyear expanse of the observable universe in just under 70 ns. You might as well be everywhere at once.
  • Sometimes the game's code has trouble distinguishing between starting and finishing a race, so you'd win the race immediately.
  • Only four of the game's five maps work; the fifth one always crashes the game when selected.
  • The only available race mode is the custom race mode. The promised main campaign as written on the box involves evading police on public highways; it does not exist.
  • In the earliest version sold, they couldn't even get the victory prompt right: "You're Winner !"
• When the Leviathan DLC for Europa Universalis IV was released, the game became littered with ridiculous bugs, such as the ability to cancel constructions in other countries or your monarch getting blatantly implausible stats.
• Infestation: Survivor Stories (originally called The War Z until a trademark dispute with a similarly-named work) managed the remarkable feat of being a shoddy knockoff of a game that was a real beta at the time. Infestation touted itself as an MMORPG pitting the players against each other (and the zombies) in a huge, detailed, Wide-Open Sandbox. The game at launch didn't contain most of the touted features and was riddled with bugs and questionable mechanics (including the ability to pay your way to a ridiculous advantage). Some parts even came with overlays stating "Not for Public Release" — that's as obvious a beta as you're going to get. The backlash was so great that not only was the game pulled from Steam, players also got refunds — which almost never happened back then. It's speculated that this game was a direct reason for the Steam Early Access program, Steam's "public beta" setup (and possibly also a factor in Valve changing its "all sales final" policy). The game's lead developer, Sergey Titov, insisted that he had created a masterpiece, blamed customers for misinterpreting the game's description, and banned critics from the game's forums — perhaps it's no surprise that he was also the lead developer on Big Rigs.
• Test Drive Unlimited 2 suffered from a swarm of bugs and server issues when it was released on the PC. Since it had online activation and needed a connection to the game's master servers to play, the game would flat out refuse to let players start up the game, and it would often kick them out of the game without warning due to massive server overload. The day-one DLC was broken and would eat players' in-game money, and the game had several Game-Breaker promotional cars like the Bugatti Veyron SS.
• The PC ports of Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee and Stranger's Wrath as part of the Oddboxx were more like obvious alphas. Despite being ports of games that had come out five to nine years prior on the original Xbox, released halfway through the next generation with no graphical upgrades, they performed terribly even on high-end computers. Graphical options were opaque and lacking (Stranger's Wrath infamously only had options for changing the resolution), you can't move with a gamepad in Munch's Oddysee, and there's an unchangeable Y-axis flip in Stranger's Wrath. On the upside, the developers promised - and actually delivered - patches to clean this all up, including one that fixed all performance issues, and for Stranger's Wrath a free update into what would have otherwise been a PlayStation 3-exclusive HD rerelease.
• The delayed demo of indie 2-D fighting game Beast's Fury turned out to be an Obvious Beta, which was pretty upsetting to eagerly-waiting fans. There were control problems, graphical issues, and bugs galore, including one humorous glitch that an official tester stumbled across. The developer, Evil Dog Productions, placed little importance on updating the demo, and they would later pay for that choice when, in 2016, they would find themselves cancelling Beast's Fury. The rest of the game's Troubled Production — which is a story of its own — didn't make things any better.
• Empire: Total War started out this way, but it was fixed (somewhat) with a lot of patching. If you want to see what it was like on release, fire up the Road to Independence scenario, which for some reason seems largely unaffected by the bug fixes. Marvel as your AI willfully ignores an order you've give dozens of times, and when it does listen, interprets your order to move 12 feet forward to mean go play grab-ass in a forest 5,000 miles away.
• Muelsfell: Rise of the Golems: Since coming out of "beta", there are just as many, if not more, bugs than there were in beta. The features and monsters added later are particularly bad.
• Anarchy Online version 1.0 was an Obvious Beta, to the point where the original version would effectively force you to reinstall Windows.
• Streets of SimCity is a 3D Wide-Open Sandbox Driving Game spinoff of SimCity in which you can drive around cities imported from SimCity 2000. Unfortunately, it's riddled with tons of bugs. Likewise with SimCopter, except with a helicopter. Both are good games with a good-sized fanbase, they just happen to have a lot of bugs. You can play it just fine; it'll just crash every half hour or so.
• SimCity (2013) was released in a miserable state, many of which stemmed from two really big issues, the traffic and the always-online requirements. The backlash was so bad, that when the community began touting its competitor Cities: Skylines as "the Simcity 5 that never was", EA had to sack everyone and ax the entire Maxis studio to prevent their shares from plummeting further.
  • Traffic was very poorly programmed. Drivers would always take the shortest route rather than the faster one, resulting in all the cars ignoring the highway to take a single-lane dirt road. Cars would sometimes go in endless loops. Public services tended to follow each other, meaning buses would make the traffic worse rather than better. Fire trucks couldn't handle more than one fire at a time. People can't cross a street to go shopping, leaving the stores empty (and residents mad because they can't find the stores). Any city would grind to a complete halt.
  • Compounding that was that the game would withhold or outright misstate key information you needed to fix the problem. It would even show you a much higher population than your city really had, meaning that you wouldn't suspect anything was wrong until it ground to a halt from lack of manpower. The maximum city size was diminutive, and artificial — it was easy to build outside the borders by using an exploit, with no negative effects.
  • It was also possible to log in to your account and edit and control some features in someone else's city in the region. It was trivially easy this way to force other players to go broke and lose.
  • The servers just couldn't handle all the players. Wait times could exceed an hour, money would disappear when gifted to another city, and the game would just crash at points. EA had to remove some features (most notably "Cheetah Speed") just to prevent the servers from imploding. Although they never fixed the traffic bugs, they did fix this (or at least enough people stopped playing that the servers could handle it again). Early players even got access to a "Launch Park" for their trouble.
• The PC version of Red Faction II had a multiplayer mode that didn't allow multiple players, and showed pickups as 2D sprites in spite of the working 3D models in the single-player campaign. The campaign itself was a veritable glitch-fest, and the best ending was essentially impossible to get legitimately due to a bug where some civilians whom you were supposed to save would chase the player's vehicle down so they could die on contact, which was completely unavoidable.
• Disciples III: Renaissance. Its glitchiness was universally reviled. Lowlights include long load times, bad triggers, and an overly aggressive AI that is content to ambush the player from offscreen and destroy his essential party. For an added bonus, due to the way the game's autosave works, such an ambush requires loading from a manually created save, as the autosave triggers at the end of the player's turn—meaning they have no resources to prevent it, even if they know it's coming.
• Sierra
  • Most of the later VGA adventure games suffer from a profound lack of testing and can crash randomly based upon any number of bugs. The worst example is probably Quest for Glory IV.
  • Police Quest 4: Open Season has countless bugs that randomly crash the game, corrupt saved games, or make the game unwinnable.
• Ultima IX. The ending chapter of the Trilogy of Trilogies. The greatest RPG ever. And it was released as a mash of crap, unplayable on most hardware that was available at the time, and was a war crime against canon.
  Erik Wolpaw: [Ultima IX is] a game in which programming errors battle each other gladiator-style for the privilege of crashing my computer[.]
  • The original, unpatched version of Ultima VIII: Pagan is completely broken. What was released is an unfinished alpha version. Remember: Ultima VIII is the one where Electronic Arts wanted to turn it into an action RPG. Imagine a Mario game where it's impossible to estimate how far you need to jump and every gap has an instant-death pit. Unpatched Ultima VIII is like playing I Wanna Be the Guy blindfolded. With a mouse.
• Though it had no real Game-Breaking Bugs, The Witcher was such a bad case that the developers took pains to make up for it by producing the Enhanced Edition (available separately or as a free update), which in addition to being "the game as it should have been released," also came with a host of bonus in-game content and eight complete language packages (audio and text). This all happened because the game was considered to be a niche product for a fantasy novel only really known in Poland at that time, so the international interest was a surprise and the localization rushed, resulting in sloppy English.
• Egosoft has a history of releasing buggy games, releasing several minor patches to get rid of the serious show-stoppers, preventing people from returning the game, and then exactly one year later releasing a "2.0" super-patch that fixes and improves the game to "how it should have been". The new version might even have substantially more features than the original promised. Game reviewers have been known to re-review these games, and smart (and patient) customers know that the "real" release date is exactly a year after the official one. Their later games are buggy at release, but significantly less so compared to the disastrous Reunion launch.
  • This is a recurring problem in the X-Universe series of space sims. In X3: Reunion, the main plot had multiple unpassable stages.
  • X: Rebirth which was critically panned at launch due to performance and stability issues, missing features (such as ship commands, radar, and piloting multiple ships, the latter of which was a staple of the series ever since the days of X-Tension), and a convoluted user interface which was even harder to use than the much-maligned ones in previous games. The huge 2.0, 2.5, and upcoming 3.0 updates have fixed most of the performance/stability issues and added features that were missing at release, but it's still not what you'd call stable, and you can still only control the one ship.
• The expansion packs to Final Fantasy XI are egregious in this regard. If you buy them on their release date, you're not so much buying an expansion so much as access to a couple new areas without a whole lot to do in them and the promise that over the next eighteen months, they'll gradually let you access all the stuff they promised on the box.
• Final Fantasy XIV was released lacking so many features, and with so many known serious game design problems (they infamously asked critics to not review the game for a month after release so they had time to try and fix things), that it was more of an obvious alpha; it was straight-up called "unfixable". Undaunted, Square Enix apologized and promised to fix it, replacing the lead developer, remaking it from scratch, providing story updates in the interim, and waiving subscription fees until then. The result was FFXIV: A Realm Reborn, essentially a new game set in the same world five years later that was received much better and lasted far longer than it could have in its original state.
• EverQuest was extremely buggy at release. Mobs randomly could or couldn't enter water and some areas they couldn't otherwise access, there was bad pathing, falling through the world, inaccessible zones, instant death drops from falling two inches, and the boats didn't work consistently for years.
• Hellgate: London was released in a woefully buggy and unbalanced state, after a too-short beta period. It rapidly improved, but by that time, most people had already written it off.
• The first two S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, Shadow of Chernobyl and Clear Sky, shipped with a great many glitches and bugs. It took almost a decade of modders fiddling with the games to fix them into being stable and playable.
  • Clear Sky was especially bad, where the state of the game could change between quick saves.^exampleThe Zero Punctuation review noted a case where Yahtzee quicksaved behind cover in a gunfight, promptly died to a couple grenades, quickloaded, and discovered the grenade-throwers had completely forgotten they were supposed to be hostile until a couple minutes after one of them agreed to lead him somewhere else. Then the game crashed. Its original unpatched version was also notorious for numerous Game Breaking Bugs that made the game Unintentionally Unwinnable, one of the most notorious occurring during the final story mission.
  • Shadow of Chernobyl was also rushed in many other ways: translation errors in the English version meant a lot of confusion^*"shotgun" was translated as "rifle" and "attic" as "basement", for example; NPCs (including vital quest givers) can die in random locations^*even in otherwise-safe encampments, because they tended to spawn inside the campfires; mods like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Complete 2009 had no choice but to make NPCs completely immune to fire damage to get around this; it's possible to sequence-break to the point that the game takes ten minutes to finish; and there was enormous amounts of obviously cut content - fishing around in the game files showed entire missing levels, fully programmed weapons that never actually appeared, and camera settings for drivable cars and helicopters. Notable was the infamous "Singularity Car" glitch.
  • Both Shadow of Chernobyl and Clear Sky are near-legendary for crashing to desktop constantly (even patched versions), to the point where the infamous "X-Ray Engine has stopped working" Windows CTD message has become Memetic Mutation among the series' fans.
• K.Hawk Survival Instinct is a 2002 stealth game where guards will sometimes just see you through walls, one of the levels mistakenly makes you invincible to normal enemy gunfire and the gameplay is incredibly unbalanced. (It's near impossible to escape from enemies as they blatantly always know where you are and only stop after a long period of time, you can kill an enemy with gunfire, hide several rooms away and an enemy will cross half the map to your exact hiding spot.)
• Epic, a space flight sim on the Amiga, Atari ST, and DOS, shipped in a hideously unfinished state. The waypoint system would only point you to a single target even if you'd already destroyed it, the manual was confusingly written and incomplete (including a statement that an ion "is a particle of FILL IN LATER"), a cheat was printed on the control summary card, and early versions of the game crashed so often that many retailers returned their copies and refused to buy fixed ones. To make matters worse for buyers, the game received rave reviews in several magazines based on alpha code upwards of seven months before it was actually released.
• The Fallout series has very persistent problems with this. The majority of pages on The Fallout Wiki end with a list of bugs.
  • Fallout 2 shipped with some Game Breaking Bugs; for example, your car could vanish, or certain quests would cause the game to crash if you tried to complete them. There was also quite a bit of missing content that left certain minor plotlines completely unresolved. Fan-made patches, such as the Fallout 2 Restoration Project, seek to restore the missing content to a playable state.
  • Fallout 3: The game has serious stability issues, with crashes still very common, even in patched versions. In addition, a new story branch was added after the original ending with DLC. The most blatant bugs were the glitches that occurred if you did certain missions in the wrong order that made the game Unintentionally Unwinnable, such as starting "The American Dream" before finishing "Scientific Pursuits". The fact that the game allowed you to attempt this without compensating the programming for it nor letting you know about any of this was a major oversight on the developers' part. It also has a bug that screws the Pip-Boy's ability to receive radio music if you're running the game on Windows Vista or newer. What happened was that DirectSound, which the game uses, doesn't work properly with Microsoft's new and shiny UAA driver architecture which is used by Windows Vista and newer. There is no explanation to this except laziness; Microsoft did announce it was killing DirectSound while Bethesda was still developing the game, so they had the chance to change to a different audio method.
  • Fallout: New Vegas had bugs that were out of control at release, even more so than Fallout 3, and often worse due to the complex storyline. Subsequent patches greatly increased stability and removed a plethora of bugs, though the process itself wasn't without its own bumps (a patch released a day after release rendered the game unplayable on some systems, requiring another patch the next day to correct it). Obsidian has been quite honest that the initial release was the beta build, because Bethesda told them to make the game in just 18 months. Not an easy task, especially when you consider that Fallout 3 was made in 24 months, and had almost another two full years of pre-production before that. Most likely, this was because Bethesda didn't want New Vegas competing with Skyrim, their big title for 2011, made by the same folks as Fallout 3. The DLCs, which recycle much less from Fallout 3 and had proper time to be beta tested, were of much higher quality and showed what the game could have looked like with a longer development cycle.
  • Fallout 4 suffers from tremendous stability issues on different computers and wildly varying performance, with some people on weaker computers getting better performance than more powerful ones. Several quests are prone to glitching out, dialogue can sometimes either overlap or simply cut out entirely, and subtitles are often out of sync.
    • The first expansion, Automatron, adds the ability to create and customize robots. The Robot Workbench is unlocked near the beginning of the quest, and more modifications and robot types become available as the player completes quest stages (and later, Nuka-World). However, if the player chose to construct a Robot Workbench as soon as it becomes available, rather than waiting until the game specifically tells you to, said existing Workbench prevents quest progression, and you actually have to completely scrap it and build an identical one to continue. The implication here is that Bethesda's playtesters played the entire quest straight through, rather than focusing on testing the newly added mechanics (something one would expect players to do in an open-world sandbox game).
    • Likewise, even existing in the current, 2018 version of the game, is a bug wherein attempting to start the Brotherhood of Steel quest is simply not possible, as it's impossible to board the vertibird to meet with Elder Maxon. Even after this point, the vertibirds aboard the airship still like to glitch and not take you to the correct destinations.
  • While Bethesda's open-world games have always been known for a large number of bugs at launch, Fallout 76 at launch was barely playable, despite a day one patch that was bigger than the game itself. Well known bugs from Fallout 4, including bugs fixed by players in mods, reappeared, plus a whole slew of new bugs, such as having their entire screen consumed by a black void or have their account irreversibly switch with the account of another player. Kotaku reviewer Ethan Gach had spent weeks being unable to quit the game properly because the game always crashed first. Exploits which weren't as much of a problem in the prior singleplayer Bethesda games, such as exploits to enter the Dev Room which contains all the best items, became massive issues as cheaters were able to easily get the best weapons and armor in the game - and Bethesda knew neither how those players were getting into the dev room or, once they started issuing bans over it, how to differentiate between players who'd cheated and players who had acquired the best gear legitimately. The game was considered so unplayable that the law firm of Migliaccio & Rathod LLP has filed a class-action lawsuit against Bethesda for quote, "...releasing a heavily-glitched game, Fallout 76, and refusing to issue refunds for PC purchasers of the game who found it to be unplayable because of its technical problems."
• The Elder Scrolls
  • An unfortunately common occurrence throughout the series, in large part due to the sheer scale of the games. Each game has its fair share of Game-Breaking Bugs and exploitative Good Bad Bugs when released, but Bethesda is generally quick to get them patched fairly quickly. For the PC versions of the games, modders will usually put out Game Mods as unofficial patches until Bethesda is able to release official ones.
  • The original release of Daggerfall had a vicious game-breaking bug which renders the main quest impossible to complete. Not sometimes unwinnable — it was impossible to ever complete the main quest in the original retail release, fullstop. And this in an era (1996) when fewer people had internet connections, so it couldn't be easily patched. Regardless, a patch was made available, which includes an official tool entitled FIXSAVE.EXE, which as its name implies, repairs errors in saved game files because they were too common to tell all affected players to restart the game. Bethesda also ended up publicizing some cheats, such as a dungeon teleportation spell, because the glitchy collision system in the engine tended to let people slip between the world geometry and into "The Void", where they'd fall forever otherwise, and because of the game's use of Randomly Generated Dungeons could often result in dungeons without exits.
  • Morrowind itself was released relatively stable for a Bethesda title. Bugs and glitches were certainly present, but, in a major step up from Daggerfall, you could at least complete all of the major questlines without significant issue. However, the two major Expansion Packs, Tribunal and Bloodmoon, badly conflicted with one another. Installing Bloodmoon after Tribunal (as most people did since Tribunal came out first) caused an "endless loop" dialogue bug with a major Tribunal character, cutting off the final 80% of the expansion's main quest line. A fan patch was released which largely took care of this until Bethesda released their own, which just created loads of new problems. The Game of The Year Edition finally, thankfully, resolved the majority of these issues.
  • Oblivion was plagued by many, many, many major bugs, glitches, and serious technical problems. Bethesda released a number of official patches for these issues, but they typically only covered the most severe issues. Fan-made unofficial patches in mod form on the PC covered a large portion of the rest, but in a few instances, Bethesda's official patches conflicted with these unofficial ones, forcing you to choose between the issues you wanted to have fixed. Perhaps the most infamous is the "nVidia black screen bug" which renders the game completely unplayable by those with certain video cards. Once gain, the Game of the Year Edition largely stabilizes the worst of the issues (but not all).
  • Skyrim: The PS3 version was especially prone to these issues, and its biggest issue has never been resolved. As your save file gets larger (which naturally occurs as you explore, find new locations, complete quests, etc.), the game would bog down more and more. Eventually, once the majority of the game world had been "discovered", the game would slow to the point of being completely unplayable. Bethesda stated that they were aware of the issue, but to date, no fix has been released.
• The English version of Princess Maker 2 was never finished before it was scrapped and subsequently leaked. Several endings lack text, and there's a hidden "Beta Shop" that lets the player fiddle with stats and trigger any ending they want (or an instant Game Over).
• World of Warcraft suffered from this for quite some time, though it has (mostly) stopped doing so. It helps that content patches are regularly available for testing on the "Public Test Realm" for anyone interested.
  • In the early days of Burning Crusade, the final bosses in the two main dungeons were not only horribly unbalanced to the point of being effectively undefeatable, but the first time that any guild managed to kill Lady Vashj, she instantly respawned and killed the entire raid.^note This was made more infamous by the controversy of two guilds competing for the "world first". Since both kills were bugged, they were dubbed the "world's first second" and the "world's second first". Blizzard also badly underestimated the number of people on the servers, all of whom crowded the same quests for the first few days, which is rather inexplicable as they were ready for this sort of thing before.
  • Before any of the expansions came out, most final raid bosses were rendered unkillable or unreachable by Game Breaking Bugs. Some of it was on purpose; they didn't want players getting too far, running out of content, and complaining about it on the Internet. But others were just not properly done. Ragnaros would never come out of submerge and just keep throwing Sons until you ran out of mana and died. C'thun would Eye Beam you while you were in the stomach. And nobody really knows about Naxxramas, because you can probably count how many guilds entered Naxxramas on just your hands. The most amusing one was Chromaggus, who was overscaled on purpose to prevent players from reaching Nefarian because the Nefarian encounter wasn't fully coded.
  • Silithus in general was an Obvious Beta zone. It was this little corner in Kalimdor that, for some reason, wasn't covered in the guide, but there were actually a few quest chains in there. When you entered, you found this wall that you couldn't get past; fully half the map of Silithus was unfinished. It also became an Obvious Beta (along with Eastern Plaguelands) for an attempt at creating world PvP. It was later finished in patch 1.8. It's still plagued with mob-density problems, but that has been improved in other patches. Even after the Cataclysm which brought about a complete revisit to all the original zones, Silithus remained somewhat of a dead end, where little of the vanilla quests were changed and mobs had a chance to drop items that no longer had any functionality, until they just did away with quests in the zone entirely for Battle for Azeroth.
  • The high-level neutral zone Azshara, while not quite as bad as very early Silithus, was generally something of a dead end zone until Cataclysm. There weren't many questlines in the zone, and most of those that did had No Ending and would just cut off at seemingly random points. This huge zone had many areas the player never needs to go to for any reason. There were no checkpoints or friendly/neutral settlements beyond the western edge of the zone. A big reason was likely a PVP battleground that this zone was supposed to host being Dummied Out, meaning the zone was practically empty until it was revamped into a low-level Horde zone in Cataclysm.
  • Expansions typically have growing pains and players expect it, but Cataclysm was notoriously buggy at launch, largely due to the sheer amount of content Blizzard crammed into it with a relatively short beta testing period. Numerous quests were glitchy or outright broken (Vashj'ir being the biggest culprit), mob spawning was out of control, phasing caused any number of headaches, achievements were busted, you name it and it was screwed up. Loads of hotfixes were a daily occurrence for weeks, and even after the first major patch (4.1), there were still lingering issues.
  • The introduction of certain trinkets in Siege of Orgrimmar with effects that Blizzard was planning to implement as regular stats in the next expansion, such as Multistrike (a new form of Critical Hit) and Readiness (lowering the cooldown of certain abilities), had numerous problems. The fact that these effects are now nowhere to be seen says a lot.
  • Warlords of Draenor shipped with so many bugs that the game was unplayable; insanely long server queues, broken starter quests, and glitched phasing rendered countless players stuck on flight paths or in the middle of thin air. Garrison missions were easily exploited, and several of the newer stats added to the game either were completely useless or utterly overpowered. While mostly fixed with a lot of hotfixes and patching, some of these issues are still there.
  • Battle for Azeroth became infamous for this trope, to the degree that it was given the Fan Nickname 'Beta for Azeroth'. The pre-patch 8.0 was bashed because of its many glitches that made almost every content that wasn't PvP or mythic dungeons either unplayable or far more difficult to complete than ever. Here is a full list of the pre-patch bugs. The released expansion was just as bad: unbalanced dungeons that were hard or just impossible to do in time on Mythic+ difficulty in some affixes (Teeming and Grievous had to be nerfed because of it, and in at least one case, a dungeon was rendered unwinnable because they forgot to cap the amount of orbs that spawn from the Explosive affix), PvP end of season titles rewarded the very second said season started, unfinished class specs and more. All made worse because many of the bugs were reported on beta but some were only fixed weeks after the content was out.
• Warcraft III: Reforged was supposed to be a remake of Warcraft III, but it went through a Troubled Production no thanks to a cripplingly low budget provided by Activision Blizzard, was released unfinished and ended up being a downgrade from the original in several ways.
  • The game completely lacks several of the new features that were promised, including features that were shown in the trailer, and is even missing features from the original game. Even more infuriatingly, the release of the game forced owners of the original to update to the new version.
  • The game also has serious Game-Breaking Bugs that make it nearly unplayable for some users due to constant crashes and other bugs, and in some places the game is visibly unfinished with things like placeholder objects and other bad graphics.
  • One of the worst letdowns is that custom campaigns are no longer playable despite being one of the consistent draws of the game over the years. Thankfully fans came up with a mod that lets you do so.
• Gothic 3 Forsaken Gods, the standalone expansion to the third game, is so bugged it took a 240 MB patch to make the most basic features (like shield parrying) work properly, and it's still a bug-riddled minefield anyway. It also has worse cell load skips than its predecessor when unpatched, is prone to crashing, and generally runs subpar at best given its massive requirements. The developers were unfamiliar with the engine and slapped the game together in a few months; it wasn't properly playtested before being shoved out the door, either.
• The initial demo release of Painkiller: Resurrection was an absolute disaster. The developers accidentally released a much older version of the demo than they had intended, and it shows. Loading up the level takes a good five minutes, particle textures appear as orange-brown cubes, the finicky draw distance causes distant church towers to hang in the air miles away, and players couldn't even finish half the level because a physics-enabled rope bridge kept tossing them over the edge or pushing them straight through itself. The Steam release of the game wasn't much better either, thanks to dodgy AI programming, painfully long load times and frequent crashes. And even in the retail version, the multiplayer mode is an absolute mess: Players can dart up along walls, the weapon pickup models are completely botched, and firing the electrodriver crashes the game on the spot.
• Daikatana, after a Troubled Production noted for excessive delays and slippages, shipped with broken AI, largely unfinished levels, and dozens of bugs and glitches. The game was a mess in co-op as well: Cutscenes (and their subsequent event flags) were removed entirely, causing the players to spawn stuck behind closed doors that were supposed to open in cutscenes, first rearing its ugly head in the second level of the game. The readme recommends playing the single-player mode first to get an idea of the story. The co-op has a host of bugs on its own, the best being a glitch that causes players to spawn stuck partly in the floor, telefragging each other in an infinite loop.
• Supreme Commander shipped in an Obvious Beta state, including severe game balance issues (most notably regarding the Aeon faction being a gigantic Game-Breaker) that had been identified during Beta testing but weren't fixed prior to launch, pathfinding problems, engine problems, and hardware compatibility issues. Despite being promoted heavily as a DX10 showcase, the DX10 support was never added; in addition, the promised SDK and editors never materialized due to proprietary code used in them. The majority of these issues were fixed by further patching and the Forged Alliance expansion, and even more have been fixed since by the modding community.
• Planetary Annihilation exited Early Access with insane amounts of bugs, pathfinding issues, lag spikes, promised content that wasn't included in the game such as the Unit Cannon, always-online DRM, an unfinished Planet Editor, and severe RAM issues that caused it to become nearly unplayable on certain systems. Most of these problems have been fixed with patches since release.
• It is rare to see an enemy in an unpatched copy of Hidden & Dangerous 2 not floating ten feet above the ground. Other show-stopping bugs include not being able to interact with any object in the level — including mission objectives, enemies moving behind locked doors they have the only key to, and the AI's disturbing tendency to blow itself up if left with anything explosive.
• Jurassic Park: Trespasser had a host of problems:
  • The game came with a severely broken physics engine. The player can lift several-hundred-pound steel girders with one arm, but can't pull themselves over a chest-high fence by that same arm. It also lacked friction; stacked objects would just fall off each other regardless of mass, breaking most of the physics puzzles in this game; one entire level had to be cut because of this, and most of the physics objects you come across in the levels that made the cut, especially those making up "breakable" objects like chairs and the weird statues in level 4, spawn in locked in place, often floating several inches above the ground (because the team also lacked proper tools to actually test where physics objects were placed in-game), until you touch them. It was still pretty advanced by 1998 standards, though, and the idea of a heavily physics-based game was much improved in later works such as Half-Life 2.
  • Melee weapons are stowed over the player character's shoulder. This, however, means that such weapons might damage you continually when stowed because of their hitbox clipping into yours while moving. The developers "fixed" this by removing all mass from such weapons, but now melee weapons don't damage enemies, either. The sole exception is Nedry's Mace, which you can't even properly use because you can't keep weapons between levels, and said mace is found a couple minutes and a single raptor away from the end of the level it appears in.
  • The game's 3D engine rendered distant objects as scaled sprites, which popped abruptly into polygons as the player approached them. It was released at the dawn of the era of hardware 3D acceleration, but it actually looked worse when run with a 3D card; software mode used system memory to store textures, whereas the accelerated version was limited to the small texture memory of contemporary 3D cards. The software mode also used a clever form of bumpmapping which was incompatible with 3D accelerators, and so as a consequence the game looked better and ran faster in software more than with a 3D card. And that's not even getting into the hilarious deforming dinosaurs who had to be "dumbed down" due to the mishandled coding of their AI — save for a couple of friendly raptors in level 3 that the developers forgot to tinker with.
• Valve in general has a habit of releasing games with Game Breaking Bugs, although they are generally prompt about patching them. However, they also have a habit of releasing patches that cause brand new bugs in addition to fixing old ones. Special mention goes to:
  • The 2010 Half-Life 2 update, which ported the entire game and Episode One over to the newer version of their engine used in Episode Two, but introduced a host of new problems, at least some of which are present on all or at least most users' systems. The patch was released in May 2010, and to date only one bug (which made the AI crash at a critical point) has been patched.
  • The OS X and Linux versions of Half-Life Source double as a Porting Disaster. The port was released barely playable, suffering crippling problems, such as spawning with no weapons, HEV suit, or even a HUD. To make matters worse, these errors were even present in the Windows version, which launched almost a decade earlier.
• Elemental — War of Magic was released in a buggy state. Given that it's Stardock, this by itself isn't too terribly surprising. What is surprising is that said "buggy state" is horribly, horribly buggy and received more patches (six) in four days than GalCiv2 and Sins of a Solar Empire did the entire month of their respective releases. And it's still missing content, like competent AI. If Brad Wardell is to believed, this was deliberate — as a substitute for Copy Protection. Reviewers did not wait for the six patches to hit before slamming the game for being unfinished.
• Elite 3, a.k.a. Frontier: First Encounters, is a great game, and the fact it's still played after more than ten years (after being reverse-engineered and spawning advanced graphics clones with the same gameplay) proves this. But Gametek took Executive Meddling up to eleven, went behind Frontier's back, and released the closest thing to a complete version they had (or so Frontier's official site says). Ugly bugs spoiled the release as a result. For example, when flying into the atmosphere of a gas giant to scoop up hydrogen fuel (a useful and oft-used feature in the previous two games in the series), as soon as the scoop activates, the game crashes spectacularly. Even after the game was patched, it still refused to run in anything that wasn't a pure DOS environment — which prompted the aforementioned hacking of the game by the fans over the years so that they could at the very least run it in Windows.
• In Frontier - Elite 2 (at least on the Amiga version), Game Breaking Bugs appeared over time (150 hours or so). It, therefore, most irritated players who had put the most into the (otherwise excellent) game. It became impossible to access the bulletin board to take missions and other features became disabled. The fact that Gametek released several improved versions cemented its position as an Obvious Beta for those who played it for the requisite length of time.
• Might and Magic:
  • Might & Magic IX is loaded with bugs, glitches, and strangely empty buildings. This is partially excusable due to 3DO going bankrupt during the development process.
  • Might and Magic VII was nowhere near as bad as IX, but it still has an assortment of problems — overpowered and underpowered classes, extreme laziness in the sprites (they didn't even bother with Palette Swaps and just tinted them single colors) and obvious unfinished content.
  • VIII had fewer problems with class balance (fewer classes and a simpler class promotion system) and sprite-tinting (more recycled sprites), but also more obvious unfinished content (a dungeon placed along the way to one of the main quest areas in which the only interesting item is a quest item that isn't connected to any quest).
• Might and Magic: Heroes VI has issues despite testing including open beta. A fan-created bug list contains over 120 issues, and quite a bit of them were Game Breakers.
• Dungeon Lords was released with many missing features, despite them being stated in the game manual and advertised as such. Buttons, sliders and icons were present in the game and didn't do anything. Game patches gradually implemented some of those elements. The developers later released a collector's edition with some (but not all) of the missing features labelled "new stuff". To add insult to injury, the very last patch doesn't upgrade the original release to the "collector's edition" version.
• Star Trek: Legacy. The Xbox 360 version wasn't too bad, although it suffered more bugs than a console game really should. The PC version, on the other hand, was a total mess, riddled with bugs and controls that obviously hadn't been tested properly, if at all. When players looked through the game directory, they found huge chunks of legacy code from the ancient Star Trek: Armada engine, just proving how little effort had truly gone into the game's development.
• Pool of Radiance: Return to Myth Drannor was so buggy that some gamers reported it destroying their OS. Even the install shield had a crippling bugs which prevented players from installing the game to a folder other than the default. It was so bad that the developer needed to release not just an update patch, but a completely new installer, meaning the user has to download this to install the game rather than going through the autorun setup from the disc. Most users would not be aware of this fact and will install it from the disc anyway, making it pointless.
• After the closure of Black Isle Studios, producers of Fallout, Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment, the studio was "resurrected" through Spiritual Successor studios made up of much of their old staff, Obsidian Entertainment and Troika Games. Both studios have become renowned (or reviled) for their tendency to release unfinished or incomplete games.
  • Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords: Due to LucasArts pushing for a Christmas release, much of the last third of the game is missing, including lots of voice files and code left in that details entirely new planets, a more satisfying ending, and a bit more character exploration and personal sidequests. A fan mod was eventually released to try to implement some of it. Compounding this was some massive Executive Meddling, as Obsidian was fully willing to release the rest of the game in a free patch; LucasArts said "no", presumably because the Xbox version wasn't Live-enabled, but still.
  • Neverwinter Nights 2 was fairly buggy upon release and suffered from memory leak issues and a lack of polish. Then both expansions introduced Game Breaking Bugs that made the previous campaign unplayable: Mask of the Betrayer made a Plot Lock in the original campaign fail to unlock, and Storm of Zehir deleted all of MOTB's voiceovers. Though these were later fixed, several minor bugs were left over as Hasbro would later sue Atari over Forgotten Realms license agreement violations, which meant that all official patches stopped.
  • Alpha Protocol also has several bugs, including some that include flags not being thrown correctly in response to some of your actions and leaving you with odd results. Trying to sneak into the US embassy in Moscow will make the game think you butchered your way in, and Shaheed will mysteriously come back from the dead in the epilogue if you arrest him (when he's supposed to die in a missile strike).
  • Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura had a lot of bugs and incomplete content. These included such things as as certain spells and items not working as they should have, sound glitches, incomplete animations and missing dialogue.
  • Temple of Elemental Evil was riddled with several bugs and was generally unstable as heck. There are also references to some minor cut content in the second town. The bugs come both in game-breaking (like chests glitching out when doing anything with their content) and positive flavors (like using an enlarging spell to equip two two-handed weapons which count as one-handed due to size, then shrinking back and realizing you didn't drop your weapons and are free to use them or being able to equip both a bow and a sword leading to your character slashing at the thin air with arrow "shooting" out of the sword).
  • Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines was playable from the outset but had many physics flaws and bugs. A number of Troika programmers stayed on after the company went bankrupt and was able to finish an official patch that fixed many of these errors. Fans latched on to this and went on to produce several years' worth of unofficial patches that have fixed most of the game's errors and restored cut content.
• Dragon Age:
  • Dragon Age: Origins is rough around the edges in hindsight. The endgame (everything post-Landsmeet) is extremely bugged, failing to recognize who was made ruler of Fereldan and even your character's gender. The Dwarf Noble-only sidequest, "The Prodigal Son", was so bugged that it is Unwinnable without mods (and still causes issues in the "Completed Quests" folder). Most of the DLC post-Warden's Keep were notoriously full of bugs and glitches upon initial release, most notably "Return to Ostagar" (which had to be delayed for over a month because it was practically unplayable), "Awakening" (which even those who liked it agreed was most likely rushed), and "Witch Hunt". Thankfully, the combination of patches (both Bioware and fanmade) and special mods have removed or mitigated these issues.
  • Dragon Age II had some problems on release, including a way that the game could be made Unwinnable early on by killing a major NPC who is important to one of the late-game mandatory quests. Save file corruption has also been known to happen. Patches have fixed most of these, though even with 1.04 Sebastian and Isabela's character quests for Act III have to be completed at the beginning of the act or the game will crash when you play them (and with Sebastian's you can't have Anders in the party unless you also have Fenris). The game also has an overuse of Cut and Paste Environments and has a small variety of enemies. The developers have confirmed that these problems were the result of a rushed development cycle.
  • Dragon Age: Inquisition was loaded with both major and minor bugs from the very beginning. Unparallelled among them, however, is the notorious Patch 4. Bad enough that the whole thing was nearly seven gigabytes, but an error in programming it for the Xbox One ports caused it to automatically uninstall and reinstall the entire game.
• Several of EVE Online's expansions are considered this. Although CCP got better over time, many earlier ones introduced Game Breaking Bugs, lag, and desync issues, which then required entire patches dedicated simply to resolving those.
• Dark Sun: Wake of the Ravager was plagued with such issues as disappearing doors that left the player permanently stuck, NPCs who continued to speak and act after death, inability to complete quests, and best of all, enemies, allies, terrain, and equipment vanishing permanently for no good reason. An official patch fixed only a small amount of game-breaking problems. Completing this game is only possible through extreme abuse of multiple save slots.
• The (presumably leaked prototype of the cancelled) PC release of Rampage: World Tour was a literal Obvious Beta. If you were able to get it to run at all, it had the words "Beta Release" in all four corners of the screen.
• Lords of Magic remained in beta for a very long time after release. The developers admitted they rushed it out to cash in on holiday sales.
• While League of Legends went live without many hitches, Yorick the Gravedigger was an Obvious Beta. When he was released, he was considered worthless because his abilities were, well, practically a beta. His ult was also supposedly changed from development to release and was full of bugs. While the bugs of his kit were eventually ironed out, he still suffered from extremely poor design, and out of all the champions, Yorick had the dubious honor of never being included in the weekly free champion rotation. When Yorick was relaunched in 2016 with a brand new kit and model, the entire fanbase rejoiced.
• On the GliderPRO CD, the final star in "Grand Prix" appears in a room whose title promises one more. A half-built, unplayable sequence of rooms lies beyond. The house was supposedly completed, but no patch was ever released.
• The Oregon Trail 5th Edition, especially version 1.0, is riddled with glitches and compatibility issues; it requires a patch to work at all on XP (otherwise it crashes on launch), and is not compatible with Vista. Stick with II or the 25th Anniversary Edition.
• Having been shipped hastily just before the company went under, Mac RPG The Tomb of the TaskMaker has some noticeable glitches and Dummied Out content. Read the section on underdevelopment at this site.
• The first Super Smash Flash game was made in four months by a then-inexperienced McLeodGaming. It shows, with playable characters only having five moves, wonky hit detection causing most of said moves to kill instantly, items barely working, and perhaps most infamously, right-clicking allowing you to skip stages in single player modes.
• The sequel to Sword of the Stars, Lords of Winter, was released as a beta in November 2011 due to an erroneous upload of a pre-release candidate to the Steam servers instead of the intended release candidate. It was successfully replaced by the release candidate 24 hours later, at which point the delighted audience discovered that the actual release candidate wasn't much of an improvement and was riddled with several bugs. Kerberos Productions declared anyway that they felt the game is at the release stage, and bug fixes kept coming out on a near-weekly basis.
• Postal III. While the Postal series isn't known for its high production values, the game's initial release suffers from frequent crashing on some systems, the AI failing, broken Steam achievements, and sound issues, among other things. Additionally, the style was quite a departure from what RWS had in mind before Akella took over production, making it much more cartoonish. Free-roam mode was cut and later put out in a patch, and there is no multiplayer, despite its development being credited, as it was canned at some point. The game was quite underpromoted and wasn't out on Steam until two months after its official release date, instead having to be purchased directly from RWS' website or other minor retailers, because Akella, in the last of their many weird decisions brought about by an economic downturn that caused them to lay off their primary dev team early in development, was too cheap to send it in to get an ESRB rating. Reception (fan and critical) is mixed to negative, with one of RWS' developers saying "the whole thing was rather tragic" and RWS since declaring it Canon Discontinuity.
• Magicka had numerous game-breaking or crashing bugs on release; multiplayer was especially buggy and laggy, the latter because it used ridiculous amounts of bandwidth (far more than an average FPS game). After many of these bugs were fixed, the developers added a free "Mea Culpa" DLC (Latin for "my mistake"), including a wizard model with a patchwork robe, a broken sword, a staff that lets you summon bugs, and a "Crash To Desktop" spell that kills anything with less than 100,000 health but is completely random with who it targets.
• Merit Software's Command Adventures: Starship can become unplayable about halfway through. When you attempt to send a team to a planet, the default action sound will "bleep" three times and you're kicked back into space. At times, you'll find crew members vanishing, and eventually it gets so bad you can't even get into the shop and other sections of the Starbases. Merit intended Starship to be the first in a series of Command Adventures games, but it ended up being a Stillborn Franchise instead.
• o3 Games gave too much control over The Outforce to their publisher, who committed Executive Meddling upon it, pushing it to be released with only the Terran campaign finished. Even worse, the units for the Terran, Crion, and Gobin races have identical capabilities, even some of the unit names are the same across all three. Nonetheless, the AI is killer, it may have been the first RTS to support unlimited group sizes and the graphics are beautiful. Multiplayer also works and there are no game breaking bugs. It just needed more time in the oven to bake in more content and de-clone the three races.
• The PC version of LEGO Rock Raiders, thanks to rushed development and multiple revisions of it (the game is 80 MB and around a good 30 of them aren't even used), featured rampant Artificial Stupidity for both your Rock Raiders and the enemies sides (your Rock Raiders, despite Chief claiming that they're "very clever", are not exactly all the brightest when it comes to tactics. Such an example is that they love to clean up rubble and debris, even if it comes from halfway across the map in a area having constant landslides, meaning they'll try to clean it up until you do something about it. As for the enemies, in some levels, the Slimy Slugs just appear out of their hole, and then reenter it) and impossible requirements for 100% Completion, as the developers at didn't even fully make sure that some of the 100% objectives were completable (like you had to obtain Energy Crystals for 100% completion in maps which didn't have any) before it was fully released, twice.
  • Here's an example to the polish of the game: in a few levels there's lava in ice caverns, and in levels where erosion is a hazard, the ground can slowly become lava if not taken care of, and there are a handful of levels combining both aspects. A problem in this arises in that while the two other types of caverns, rock and lava, have graphics for the terrain deteriorating and slowly becoming lava, ice caverns don't have such graphics and instead reuse the base graphic, meaning you have no indication of what state the ground is at before it just suddenly turns into lava, rendering it completely useless.
• LEGO Island 2 was beyond rushed in the middle of its development, even more so than Rock Raiders! Almost 50% of what was intended was cut entirely — for instance, there was going to be a cave area with many more sub-games. And the fifty percent that was done didn't even look half-complete; the physics were basic, the graphics were very texture-filled, the instructions would barely give you a hint on what to do (an example being in the jousting minigame; Pepper would likely fly off if you were randomly mashing buttons in vain hope you would win), replayability was non-existent, the load times were inexcusably long (sometimes going as long as two minutes, all for an Egregious reason^ExplanationNot only are the files it loads extremely unorganized, meaning the game will load things which aren't even intended to be used in certain areas, it also prioritizes the rendering of the loading screen over the actual files per frame, and it can be fixed by changing a single instruction in the game's EXE file!), and it was filled with various glitches, not uncommonly game-breaking. Because the PlayStation version was based on this one, it consequently makes it incomplete in the same way (if not worse due to console limitations), but the Game Boy Color and Advance versions weren't and are entirely separate games on their own, meaning they were thankfully free of this trope, although opinions still tend to vary on them.
• The PC version of LEGO Harry Potter Years 1-4 is surprisingly broken for the usually-solid LEGO series. Not only are crashes shockingly common, the game is plagued by numerous potentially progress-halting bugs. For example, quitting a certain level^note Year 2, Tom Riddle's Diary without finishing it will cause the story to move on without unlocking the level for Free Play, and some rooms in Hogwarts can become permanently inaccessible if the player performs certain actions^note Approaching the Gryffindor Common Room painting as a non-Gryffindor character will cause the painting to refuse to open up for anybody, for example. Worst is a hidden bonus room that can potentially trap the player forever because the dragon that's supposed to boot you out is prone to becoming unusable. If one happens to save in this room just before this happens...
• The PC version of Dead Island, at launch, turned out to be an earlier developer build instead of the final retail build, and the Xbox 360 developer build at that. It even came with a built-in noclip button (which can crash the game if used).
• Freeware Metroidvania Legend Garden suffers from this. It's Unintentionally Unwinnable, over half the bosses are hideously broken, things have a tendency to get stuck in walls, and some items are unobtainable.
• My Time at Sandrock is a beautiful mess. There are loads of quests, characters, items, locations... and bugs. While true game-breakers are rare, many things are half-finished and some bugs have a nasty habit of accumulating. After playing for a bit, just walking a few steps from your workshop to the town will have you walk pass your glitchy fence that clips through itself, glitched mission markers permanently stuck to your minimap, random crafted items floating ten feet up in the sky.
• The Sims 3 lacked a vsync or frame limiter option. A number of players have complained about the game running at over a thousand frames per second on loading screens and several hundred FPS ingame, resulting in overheating. Forcing a framerate cap through the GPU driver's control panel fixes this issue.
• The Sims 4 has had a few releases that were buggy enough to qualify.
  • The Dine Out DLC is frustrating to play, at best. A multitude of issues plague the pack, ranging from poorly-designed NPC AI to employees getting deleted by the game's culling. Many players avoid that pack's gameplay as a result.
  • The "My Wedding Stories" DLC released in a very broken state. A number of interactions, like cutting the cake and having flower girls and ring bearers walk down the aisle, flat-out didn't work. And then the weddings suffer from the aforementioned AI issues... Let's just say that when the couple is exchanging vows, the attendees do everything except sit and watch respectfully.
  • The "For Rent" DLC released with several bugs, some game breaking. Commonly reported was build mode lag, bizarre apartment rent calculations, deleted households, up to a complete inability to create rental lots (the DLC's main selling point).
• The Metroid fan game Metroid; Beginings [sic], made with Adobe Flash in 2005 and discovered by Retsupurae in 2013, qualifies on a spectacular level. The collision detection is so buggy that you can often fall through the floor for no apparent reason, and it's possible early on to get stuck in a door — the twist being that opening the door doesn't fix it. It also has No Ending, in that the author simply did not program one into the game. Lest you think we're kidding, the player who recorded Retsupurae's source footage confirmed this using a Flash decompiler.
• Furcadia is an inversion: It's a complete, working game, with no more Bugges than most finished games—but has been in "Alpha" stage for over 20 years.
• The Extreme Paintbrawl series of video games. Your team had no programmed AI routines, so they would either run straight into a wall at the beginning of a match or randomly flail around like they were having epileptic seizures. You could shoot paint at the sky, and it wouldn't disappear. The "practice mode" was just an empty arena.
• As memorably revealed here, Gettysburg: Armored Warfare lacks certain features, like reliably being able to run, not exploding your entire army, spawning the sky dome more than half the time, etc.
• Star Trek Online launched as an Obvious Beta. The team at Cryptic bought the rights after Perpetual had dicked around for about half a decade not making the game. With the license on a tight deadline for release, they got the game out in about a year. It had crappy content, crappy graphics, and was just buggy in general. Cryptic spent the next four years of the game's life burying this content (and in the last two seasons, straight up replacing the story missions from launch with remastered versions) and making actual quality content. The dev team has been on the record that they will eventually get around to replacing all of the old story missions with properly done versions (with a few unwanted missions torn out entirely).
• PlanetSide 2 launched out of beta with beautiful graphics paired with massive performance issues due to a near total lack of optimization, and what little optimization it had only applied to a very specific set of hardware (Intel i5 or i7 CPU, NVIDIA GPU) that caused players on cheap $500 Intel rigs to have twice the framerate of players on monstrous $2,000 AMD setups. It launched with only two continents and a territory control system that made large direct fights very rare; players instead simply captured bases around the defenders and ignored them entirely. After release, the Operation Make Faster Game (OMFG) update effectively doubled everyone's framerate and made the game playable on AMD hardware, along with loads of incremental content updates (such as a new map and a sweet new dune buggy).
• Second Life became a horribly buggy mess when Linden Labs forced Viewer 2, the successor to Viewer 1, onto its users. Viewer 2 had terrible UI design that couldn't be customized, overall performance took a nosedive, and new users couldn't choose a last name when signing up for a Second Life account. The redesigned viewer was clearly not ready to be launched and it took Linden Labs years to remedy most of the problems after the user base loudly complained about the changes that were pushed onto them without notice.
• In the PC version of Tomb Raider (2013), the button prompts for QTEs will randomly cease to appear, turning the game into a Luck-Based Mission. Not only that, but there's a late game bug when you return to the ruins of the Endurance that makes the game Unwinnable.
  • Likewise, a bad physics collision glitch in the only non-multiplayer, non-cosmetic expansion, Tomb of the Lost Adventurer will prevent the area's puzzle from being solved. Granted, all you get is extra crafting material, but for content you paid extra for, this is especially frustrating.
• The Doom II PWAD NewDoom Community Project II spent three years in development, only to be released in a terribly buggy state. Among other things, you can't finish the second level without cheating (with a code or an exploit) because you otherwise get locked in a required room with no way out. The NewDoom community died a few months later, leaving an official fixed version in limbo.
• While quest- or combat-related bugs were relatively few, Warhammer Online shipped without several major features. Each racial pairing set of zones were supposed to have their own capitol cities, but only the Order/Chaos (human) ones were ready to actually be entered; the other cities were never completed, with all characters eventually starting in the human zones. Two of the classes had been going through constant rewrites and changes and weren't released (finally put out as the Dwarf Slayer and the Ork Choppa) until several patches in. Instanced PvP matches were quite badly implemented and lead to interminable queuing. The standard "load lag" of large numbers of player characters coming on screen at once ended up being either individual floating body parts or invisible. The developers stated that "due to late-developmental issues, the team was simply unable to compensate for all issues before release," which many fans took to mean "The bigwigs at EA that bought Mythic are sticking their noses in everything and forcing us to release early," especially in retrospect for some of their decisions with other games. There was also a severe issue involving server stability above certain (incredibly low) population levels, despite being released with several dozen servers to log into that caused player population to always be distressingly small in any one area outside a major city.
• The PC release of Dark Souls was both this and a Porting Disaster. FromSoftware slapped the port together and put it on PC simply due to a fan petition (despite their admitted inexperience with PC games), and it shows. Tiny resolution, terrible controls, garbled sound, and bad graphics were only the beginning. It also had plenty of bugs before patches — it was possible to skip everything after getting the Lordvessel by glitching through doors to get to the final boss, severals spells were so massively overtuned and/or buggy that they made the game trivial, and just hitting Black Knights with certain weapons would instantly crash the game. While the major bugs were fixed very quickly, the resolution and controls were never patched, although the modding community has fixed them since release.
• While not nearly as bad as the original, the PC version of Dark Souls II also shipped with technical issues on release, including unresponsive controls and a scaled-back graphics engine completely different than the one used in promotional materials. It also had many Good Bad Bugs, such as the famous binocular speed glitch and the ability to glitch out of a roll and fly through the air. These were eventually fixed.
• While there aren't really any blatant gameplay bugs, the port of Dark Souls III is a technical mess filled with frequent slowdowns and crashing. One of the more crippling — and hilariously ironic — bugs causes the game to crash when using a bonfire.
• Battlecruiser 3000AD was launched far too early by its publisher after existing in an (apparent) state of nigh-Vapor Ware for years — being an "everything" simulator a la today's Star Citizen but with a tiny fraction of the budget and employees tends to do that. This led to the game being critically panned due to a plethora of bugs and lack of documentation. The creator sued, settled out of court, and released several patches and an Updated Re Release to address the bugs.
  • Its spiritual sequel, Universal Combat, suffers from many the same thing to the point that the final version was released as a freeware after failure to trust the game to another publisher.
• Rage (2011) is filled with so many graphical and engine glitches, seen on a wide variety of hardware, that it seems it wasn't even playtested for anything other than the consoles. The fact that it apparently wasn't designed to work at all with ATI video cards (which are a third of all cards in existence) doesn't exactly help matters, either.
• Air Control was a game released on Steam that has errors apparent right from the beginning of gameplay. The player character's head moves around while selecting menu options, several debug buttons appear at times, the gameplay chaotically switches from one style and storyline to another, and giant green blocks presumably indicating something is clickable randomly appear. It was eventually pulled from Steam, and there is still some debate as to if this was all an intentional attempt at making a bad game to show how gullible people can be if they don't read reviews before buying something, or if the developers really were that inept.
• Raven's Cry, a game about Wooden Ships and Iron Men, is a hearty tale of pirates and game engine errors. Multiple videos exist on the subject. To summarize: Collision errors, voiced dialogue that doesn't play, and texture faults are common. Add to that odd (right at the edge of scaffolding ripe to be pushed off) or incorrect NPC placement (that woman urinating into the bush probably isn't meant to be), poor NPC behavior (like the guy who keeps "waking up" when a gun is pointed at him only to lie back down right afterwards), and some plain weird dialogue (such as the guy who keeps saying "Be brave" followed by some random expletive; something that was actually patched out of the game shortly after the video that made reference to it) and you have one unfinished and buggy game (albeit quite a humorous end product).
• While Blood is a consistently functional game with some Good Bad Bugs, the same can't be said for the sequel, Blood II: The Chosen. The creators have explicitly admitted the game was not released in a finished state, with one account claiming that they explained to the publishers that they had a choice between finishing the game and releasing it in what amounted to an early beta, at which the publishers promptly shipped it.
  • Damage-Sponge Boss battles like the Naga and Gideon end earlier than their last sliver of health being expended. In the latter's second form, he's the diametric opposite of Immune to Flinching - every hit makes him flinch - and when he dies his body is almost guaranteed to clip through the floor and drop to the lower boundaries of the level.
  • The Sawed-Off Shotgun can be wielded Guns Akimbo, but the second one doesn't have its viewmodel mirrored, so Caleb ends up with two right hands.
  • Fire just doesn't work right, with only the Flare Gun's primary fire actually lighting enemies up — secondary wastes eight flares to do nothing except look pretty, the Insect-a-Cutioner bug spray's secondary fire likewise does nothing but waste ammo better put to use with the M16's Grenade Launcher, and the Napalm Launcher fails to set enemies on fire under any circumstances as well.
  • Killing a Death Shroud with a weapon that gibs on death will keep its "presence" sound running.
  • Characters that are friendly have in-game entities hostile to Caleb. If a cutscene ends too early, which is a bug of its own, they will attack you if you're within their line of sight, and given the power of their weapons, they will kill you. In turn, you can slaughter them to no ill effects. Gabriella at the end of Chapter One is a notable example, but it's rarely possible for the same to happen with Ishmael at the end of Chapter Two.
  • By dropping a weapon you're holding and staying on top of it, when you pick it up it'll come with a full serving of ammo as if you've picked it up for the very first time.
  • Some enemies, like the third Soul Drudge in Love Canal, will be permanently stuck attacking the air (often several times faster than normal despite not corresponding to the animation playing) until you shoot them. If you don't, they'll just stay there and can be safely ignored.
  • The Behemoth has its AI set so it starts Shockwave Stomping the ground when its health is below a certain level and it takes damage. However, it's not immune to its own shockwaves – each causes a tiny bit of damage to it. If you hide while it's pounding the ground after you hurt it enough for the behaviour to trigger, it'll eventually gib itself, though it takes a very long time.
  • There's one that elevates the Drudge Lord from Giant Mook to Demonic Spider: if you aggro it and hide, it'll sometimes move forward at walking speed while it launches its set of three fireballs, something it's not supposed to do. If you don't run away far enough to see the fireballs coming, you're bound to catch the third one with your face when it turns the corner.
  • Enemies tend to get frozen at the end of an attack/flinch animation if they can't see or get to the player by the end of it, instead of going idle or prowling the level.
  • Doors are particularly deadly if you don't show the proper respect for them. A cutscene in Chapter Two, in particular, can end up with you dying a few seconds into it, because it starts up while you're partway through a door, which will automatically close during the cutscene, and if you're in the wrong spot, it will promptly crush you between the door and its frame.
  • The difficulty in general is extremely poorly balanced, with the equivalent of Easy mode, Genocide, making you nearly Immune to Bullets while your own weapons deal so much damage that you can gib almost everything you kill on accident - including several bosses. Moving on to the Normal equivalent, Homicide, expecting a reasonable difficulty curve turns out to be more like a difficulty cliff, as enemies suddenly gain superhuman reflexes and deal upwards of 25 damage per shot, and then drop piddling amounts of life essences to recharge.
  • In general, damage values tend to be very wonky. It isn't abnormal for a shooter to have a degree of variation in its damage values, but usually this means something like "sometimes an enemy takes four pistol shots, sometimes they take five." In Blood 2, though, it's completely unpredictable—sometimes, an enemy that died in a single hit from a weapon in a previous encounter can take three shots and keep walking. It's especially noticeable with the heavy-duty weapons, with their slow firing rates and limited ammo, which means they have a habit of sometimes barely tickling Elite Mooks when you really don't want them to.
  • Certain enemies can pick up health and ammo if they happen to run over it trying to get to you. Particularly noticeable near the end of Ishmael's level from The Nightmare Levels, where several pickups along one wall - the way the game tries to make fighting a Behemoth in close-quarters anything approaching possible for Ishmael - will be taken by a Shikari before you can get down there and kill it.
• Realms of Arkania HD was rushed out in pre-alpha stage at best, with many obvious missing features and loads of bugs. It was vastly improved with more than 30 patches released within the year. The rush was a direct order from the publisher's order, despite the protest from the developers.
• The main reason for Lords of the Fallen's average reviews was its utterly staggering amount of bugs at launch, including several game-breaking script failures that could make the game Unwinnable. It also suffered from severe crashing and stuttering issues (most of which stemmed from the game's Denuvo DRM), enemies getting stuck in scenery, etc. The vast majority of these issues were eventually fixed with a lot of patching.
• Hatred was strongly criticized for its buggy state upon release. Its near-lack of optimization and anemic options menu caused massive slowdowns even on powerful machines (in a top-down twin stick shooter no less). The devs later released the free Survival DLC which fixed nearly all the optimization issues, along with adding many more options and expanding the single player campaign to boot.
• The PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight was handled by Iron Galaxy Studios and was wrought with lots of glitches and graphical issues on launch (known for months prior to release, apparently). This was so bad that the game was almost immediately rescinded after launching from stores like Steam in order to try to suss them out. This happened in June 2015 and the game was not returned to digital distribution storefronts until the very end of October, where it was still steeped with problems (such as requiring an absurd 12 GB of RAM to run on Windows 10 without issue). WB Games washed their hands of the matter by offering refunds (regardless of playtime) until the end of 2015 and admitting there are things they simply couldn't fix (a similar story was told of the PC version of Arkham Origins, which had several progression-halting issues that WB walked away from in order to put their resources into Downloadable Content for the game).
• The launch version of XCOM 2 is very unoptimized. At best, players on the Windows version of the game would experience some slowdowns from time to time despite system specs, especially on the Avenger. At worst, the game will run out of RAM/VRAM and crash after playing the game for some time, or the CPU and/or GPU will be extremely stressed to the point they'll overheat and take down the entire system, or in some cases the game just won't load at all (again, despite system specs). And all of this is after the game was delayed for three months.
• Goat Simulator is Rule of Funny in compiled code form. The game was made during a game jam that was designed to help the staffers at Coffee Stain Studios master working with the Unreal Engine 3 and was never meant for a full release. When Memetic Mutation took hold and the game was highly desired by those who got to see it in action, the team decided to take the game into a full release but only fix the bugs that would cause the game to completely break operation, leaving all the other bugs and unrefined development work intact so as to retain the feel that gave the game its popularity. The result is the game is highly unpolished (for instance, going up the elevator to the coaster can cause the goat to phase through the floor and fall out if you ragdoll on the way up). The Steam store page even proclaims "MILLIONS OF BUGS" as a selling point for the game. The game has been ported, faulty code and all, to other platforms and has also received new expansions (such as a zombie-themed or MMO-themed add-on packs). The short development time (roughly a month) and the cheap assets used for the game also allowed Coffee Stain Studios to make back what they spent to make the game in about ten minutes of putting it on sale.
• Paradox Interactive is known for releasing really big Grand Strategy games, and they tend to ship in very buggy and incomplete form. Their business model is to release things in this state, but keep close engagement with their userbase and patch the bugs out. New DLC are likewise expected to come with bugs in whatever new material they introduce.
  • Hearts of Iron III, a World War II strategy game, shipped with extremely broken AI. The AI countries would join factions seemingly at random; it wasn't uncommon for Japan to join the Allies or the US to join the Axis. Save games got corrupted all the time. The game ran incredibly slowly, even on computers that far exceeded the system requirements, and crashes were very common. The AI failed to research certain very valuable techs, giving the player a huge advantage. Improbable events, particularly involving naval landings, happened practically every game, such as Brazil invading Germany in 1941.
  • Stellaris' internal politics were a complete and utter mess from the start, with slaves unable to ever revolt and factions almost never forming. This took several patches and a complete revamp to fix and they're still (as of writing) working on getting it all right.
• Missing Stars' demo is this. After being in Development Hell for several years, the first demo came out in January 2018. Unfortunately it contained some spelling errors and run-on text issues. Two of the love interests are also inexplicably not present in the demo. Word of God is that the demo was rushed.
• In Ravensword: Shadowlands, it's apparent that the game was not tested well:
  • There's multiple ways to go out of the world's bounds, the easiest being the use of the pterodactyl acquired late in the game that lets you fly freely around the area.
  • Whoever was in charge of designing the items didn't make sure to check if the items have the right size when dropped, resulting in such bizarreness like a helmet that becomes as big as a car when dropped.
  • The game has a home decoration mechanic, but it's bortherline useless because you're supposed to decorate your house by buying furniture like any other item and then dropping them where you see fit. You are unable to move the items around when they're dropped, unless you have the Rune of Winds, which is acquired late into the game; and even that's not very helpful, because you have very little control over how the items are moved when you manipulate them with the Rune. And then there's the fact that you have no way of actually putting the paintings on the walls, and that the paintings are way bigger than they are supposed to be.
  • There's quite a few instances of objects floating in the air and blatant holes in the geometry.
  • Sometimes, corpses end up being rendered in T-pose if you leave them unlooted and then come back to them a little later.
  • The game has issues with pathfinding, which will likely drive you absolutely nuts during the quest where you have to lead a defenseless miner out of the Abandoned Mine he's stuck in, as the guy has real trouble going through tight spaces and across the planks that lead to the higher level.
• Groove Coaster for Steam has had a pretty difficult ride so far. Backgrounds fail to load correctly for many players, controller support is pretty unreliable, and sound is handled pretty poorly (if you hit a note late or miss, the music will mute until you hit or the note is counted as a miss).
• No Man's Sky promised an infinite space game consisting of over eighteen quintillion procedurally-generated worlds. When the game was released, it was criticized for featuring barely any gameplay mechanics, no clear purpose to anything you can do in the game, an enormous number of bugs and glitches and a poor attempt at introducing a multiplayer mode. Since it was greatly hyped as the biggest space exploration game ever prior to its release, the backlash was vicious, and the active player count ended up plummeting to as little as 14 players at once in the entire world with sometimes not a single person in the world logged in to the game. Hello Games's official social media accounts eventually went eerily silent, leading everyone to believe they were toast and on the brink of bankruptcy — until the Atlas Rises update rolled out in August 2017, which implemented an actual single-player campaign, and then the NEXT update rolled out in July 2018, which finally added the much-vaunted multiplayer mode everybody was expecting. As soon as the NEXT update hit the online stores, the good reviews began trickling in, many video game news outlets ended up reviewing the game again due to the sheer amount of changes, and No Man's Sky ended up being hailed as one of the most epic redemption stories to ever grace the video game industry.
• Vector Thrust, an attempt at a highly moddable Ace Combat-like flight action game, suffers from this. It was out from Early Access, but still very buggy, missing a lot of features and with unplayable campaign (without workarounds). Suddenly in August 2016, the developer, Timesymmetry, went completely silent to this day, dashing any hopes for updates or remakes. The community also dispersed soon after.
• Towns was an early Dwarf Fortress-inspired city-builder that garnered a lot of interest and then became a minor fiasco when it was seen as an Obvious Beta and (possibly) a blatant money-grab. Coincidentally, Steam rolled out its Early Access program — in which developers can intentionally release games in a beta state to generate additional funding and user feedback — not long after.
• Otaku Masshigura, the final Visual Novel fully written by CROSS†CHANNEL creator Romeo Tanaka, was released in an unfinished state with an engine so unstable that it's essentially unplayable. Even after the game was fully patched months after release, the heavily rushed nature of the game is obvious. Long stretches of story are skimmed over with little buildup, with one of the routes being almost completely missing, voice acting is limited to only the heroine of the selected route, with one route just having it dissapear entirely, most areas reuse backgrounds, entire scenes have been Dummied Out, and the game script is filled with grammatical and continuity errors which suggest virtually no editing had been done.
• After 6 years in Development Hell, Yandere Simulator's official demo was finally released in the tail end of August 2020... and was widely criticized for being clearly unfinished, with students frequently clipping into walls, suffering pathfinding issues, and numerous shortcuts galore. To make matters worse, it resulted in YandereDev releasing 15 bug-fixing builds within the span of half a month. History repeated itself with the release of 1980s Mode in early October 2021, with players often finding their saves being corrupted and rendering issues, and again YandereDev had to fix over 80 bugs within just five days.
• The initial release of Sense: A Cyberpunk Ghost Story on PC was immediately pulled from digital store shelves; aside from QA testers stating that its difficulty was unbalanced, it was impossible to save resolution settings, and having the demo still installed corrupted the main game's save files, as well as other minor bugs. The 1.1 version released a month later, fixing these issues as well as adding more checkpoints and clearer instructions.
• Car Tycoon was obviously rushed out for Christmas 2001, so there was no time to properly balance the game. It is playable, but not for too long. The major problem is that the streets on the maps don't have enough capacity for all the cars produced in the long run, and the overall number of cars increases too quickly because too few cars disappear over time. Eventually, due to too many cars on the map, the streets will be clogged with traffic jams that lead to gridlocks. However, the streets are also used to get new cars from the factories to the dealerships. You'll eventually inevitably go bankrupt because you can't get your new cars to the dealerships and turn them into money as they're stuck in traffic jams. This was never fixed because it would have required a new set of bigger maps.
• Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach has a whole heap of bugs and glitches that should have been discovered on a playtest. The AI often teleports out of bounds, gets stuck on objects, and loses track of the player completely if they climb on any elevated surface, turning the voice volume down to zero breaks most cutscenes, starting a new game and dying without saving will pull data from a different save file, and jumping while entering Freddy causes the entire map to unload. On top of this, the game rarely directs players to the place where they're actually supposed to go (see Markiplier getting stuck in a laundry room for 45 minutes because he couldn't find the exit), and the ending cutscenes take place in a comic book format, a notable downgrade from the rest of the game and its fully animated cutscenes. It's pretty telling that Backstreet Games once tasked himself to beat the game without encountering a glitch, and could only do it if he counted "not seeing a glitch" as not a glitch, and even later versions have areas can just casually walk, climb, or jump to that will just utterly break the game.
• The Lord of the Rings: Gollum launched in a highly buggy state, to the point where some reviewers couldn't even finish it. The game features clipping issues, frame drops, failed triggers, crashes, and falling out of the map. The optimization is also poor at best, with the game's requirements on PC being far higher than a game with its graphics should warrant.
• The Windows release of Disney's Animated Storybook: The Lion King in 1994 gained infamy for "killing Christmas" for thousands of children that year as a number of Compaq Presario computers that came bundled with the game crashed when trying to load it due to driver incompatibility issues with graphics cards used by the Presarios in question, causing Disney—through developer Media Station—to issue updated versions of the game in an effort to placate families who had been frustrated by the Storybook ordeal. This was cited as one of the key factors for the development of DirectX in 1995.
• Cities: Skylines II released in an utterly barebones and broken state, with awful frame rates and performance, loads of bugs, a superficial facade of complexity, with graphics and visuals that are practically independent of the statistics and gameplay, and barebones content compared to the original game (including lack of mod support at launch, widely considered one of the best features of the original game, which was not added until several months post-release), making it abundantly clear the game was Christmas Rushed and far from completion when it was released. This was made even worse when the first paid DLC released; despite being labelled as "Beach Properties", it doesn't actually add beaches and the handful of buildings it does add are almost identical to one another, making it apparent this update was Christmas Rushed by Paradox Interactive too, who refused to delay the DLC from its original date to allow more time for the base game to be patched (a common practice for the company regarding its game releases).

PlayStation 3/Xbox 360/Wii

• Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 featured poor controls, poor hit detection, graphical errors, framerate problems, placeholder graphics from the old Sega Dreamcast games, a notoriously buggy physics engine, game-breaking unlockable abilities for Sonic due to the Action Gauge not draining, missing content, and Loads and Loads of Loading to the point where you may end up spending more time loading the game than playing it. It ended up that way due to rushing for a Christmas release, the 15th Anniversary of Sonic, and the launch window of the PS3 and Sega firing its entire bug-testing crew prior to the game's release.
• Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode I was essentially an experiment, as its glitchy physics engine and extensive rehashing of content from the older games can attest to. The game wasn't even intended to be made for consoles, let alone a sequel to the Genesis games; as the game refers to itself as "Sonic the Portable" within the game files, and in one of the zone's background assets too.◊^note Stealth, a person who worked on the Updated Rereleases of the original Genesis games and Sonic Mania, confirmed these suspicions himself in an interview. Sega was depending on its reception to determine what should be improved in Episode II, or whether there should even be one. It being downloadable and not actually a physical release gave them less to lose.
• Far Cry: Vengeance for the Wii has been criticized for laggy framerates, cut content, and sloppy visuals.
• The in-game Loading Screen hints in TimeShift frequently refer to features that don't actually exist, and the rewind function spends much of the game disabled because the developers didn't feel like resolving the minor issues that it could present.^*]For example, if a character is scripted to open a door, then the player could have used the rewind function to be either inside the room before the door opened, or outside of the room after it closed.
• Haze at first was promoted as having a new task-based AI system which was licensed by Free Radical Design, then found not to work at all on the hardware they were designing for. The game slipped for over a year, with early trailers having nothing to do with the final plotline. The end result had obvious missing functions (e.g. two rifles were clearly designed with underbarrel mounts), poor visuals, stodgy AI, repeated samples, and a disjointed plotline. Since FRD had promoted all their other projects as using the distinctly unimpressive Haze engine, they duly lost all their customers and collapsed shortly afterwards.
• The Last Remnant for the Xbox 360 is plagued by massive slowdown during battles which, coupled with the amount of grinding that you have to do and Loads and Loads of Loading, makes the game drag to an infuriating extent. The PC version successfully fixed all of these problems and included a Turbo Mode to make battles go faster. You'd think that they would be working on a patch to fix the graphical problems in the Xbox 360 version, but seems to have been abandoned entirely. The PlayStation 3 version that was supposed to come out simultaneously with the 360 version has vanished entirely into the ether and Square refuses to speak of it.
• The King of Fighters XII: The playable character roster had been cut nearly in half between XI and XII (a few players browsed through the index files of the Xbox 360 version and discovered files for several unused characters in the game such as Yuri and Takuma Sakazaki, fan-favorite Mai Shiranui, and long-unused Fatal Fury Sub-Boss Hwa Jai), the main arcade mode is little more than a glorified time trial with only five stages and no proper end boss (though given SNK's reputation for making extremely punishing bosses, this change could be seen as a good thing), and until a version 1.02 patch fixed it, the netcode for online play was extremely unreliable, leaving some players stuck on the loading screen for minutes before even being able to select a character. The fact that all of the characters that were datamined from leftover files in XII showed up in XIII proves that XII was an obvious beta.
• Another Century's Episode R is, by direct admission, an Obvious Beta to allow the team behind the ACE trilogy to get adjusted to the PlayStation 3 architecture. This entails rebuilding the game engine from the ground up and focusing on gameplay and graphics rather than loads of characters, as the previous two games did.
• The 2010 reboot of Medal of Honor is a glitchfest riddled with Game Breaking Bugs. One level has a huge glitch that causes a section of the level to go missing, leaving only a bottomless void.
• If Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 was ever tested, it wasn't done very thoroughly. The game's makers and testers never picked up on the fact that the invisibility cloak (when it actually works) breaks most levels wide open, causing event triggers to fail, enemies to simply stand stock still and, hilariously, putting it on while fighting the final boss causes you to win the entire game almost instantly.
• The original Wii version of Tales of Graces was recalled in 2010 due to the number of game-breaking bugs and glitches. It went all right on its first playthrough, but on repeat playthroughs the game just imploded on itself. Sometimes the music would glitch during fights, too, characters could use their Mystic Arte back to back without the game meaning to, and the Superboss could be one-shot due to a specific character glitch. All of these lead to an Updated Re-release titled Tales of Graces ƒ for the PlayStation 3, which fixed all the known glitches and bugs. This version was also the one localized.
• The Silent Hill HD Collection was made with incomplete versions of the games' source code—because Konami had lost the complete code—with predictable results. However, Konami patched the PS3 version to correct the problems (sadly, not the X360 version, though), and the problems were mitigated somewhat.
• Soul Calibur V was released with only 1/4 of its story mode completed due to the development team running out of time.
• Blacksite: Area 51 was released in an obviously unfinished state, to the point that project lead Harvey Smith admitted it went straight from alpha to gold. Among other things, visual glitches and oddities run rampant (intel and ammo frequently floats in midair, there's no animation for NPCs entering vehicles, so your teammates entering a Humvee is represented by them standing next to the vehicle and reappearing inside of it), the squad control and morale mechanics barely work, the game is short on content (short campaign, only 6 guns and a bare-bones multiplayer mode) and the final boss had no AI before patch, he simply stood still after the end of his short scripted behavior.
• The PS3 port of The Orange Box was handled by EA Games, with disastrous results. Team Fortress 2 got hit with this the hardest, being nearly unplayable on the PS3; bugs continued running rampant more than a year after they had been fixed on the original PC and 360 versions.
• The Wii port of Sam & Max: Season 1 suffers from countless problems: The cursor getting permanently stuck in the lower-right corner of the screen, horrible texture compression (leaving several visual or text-based gags incomprehensible), random crashing, long loading times, the list goes on.
• Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD fell victim to Summer of Arcade. Summer of Arcade is a special event that Microsoft holds for Xbox Live Arcade every year. It's held because Microsoft wants to get some timed exclusives (or permanent exclusives) to the Xbox 360. Tony Hawk HD was one of them. As a result, one of the levels (Downhill Jam) is so glitchy it's borderline unplayable, the physics aren't polished, some of the tricks are glitched, and there's a huge glitch where you can't use tricks that you buy.
• Mercenaries 2: World in Flames was another EA victim, with glitches with terrain that would occasionally cause vehicles to act as if they'd run into solid walls while going across level surfaces, objects spawning on top of buildings that had previously been destroyed so that they were just suspended in midair, and most glaringly, in-game tips to use Vehicle Repair Crates and Vehicle Ammo Crates to repair and reload your vehicles despite neither of these items actually being present in the game. These issues were especially problematic in light of the game's release having already been delayed for over a year by the time it came out.
• Ride to Hell: Retribution, despite being in Development Hell for five years, still came out in an unfinished state. The game suffers from large amounts of texture pop-in, and it's possible to fall through the ground and end up in a void if you go too fast in some places. Enemies exhibit massive Artificial Stupidity to the point where it's quite common to see them running into the wall right next to an open door, many character models are recycled, and it's not uncommon for corpses to glitch out and twitch or get suspended in the air.
• Batman: Arkham Origins generally got good reviews but became rather famous for being a lot more buggy than the other Batman: Arkham Series titles. A couple of them were Game Breaking Bugs, preventing you from progressing through a story-relevant location and leaving you stuck. Others included enemies who were obviously incapacitated but still trying to hit you, getting stuck in a landing pose with your cape expanded, and sometimes just unrefined combat controls. The game was outsourced to WB Games Montreal with all the game programming Rocksteady made for the other games, leading to a lot of Only the Creator Does It Right. Fortunately, WB Games management apologized for how glitchy it turned out, and released patches for all of the major issues.
• The console and PC versions of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time have terrible issues with tracking NPCs' data. If you happen to trigger certain events (such as a door unlocking after defeating all mobs, or just mob spawning), there's a chance that Farah or a mook will be stuck behind a gate that just closed up, forcing you to either suicide or reload your save. And never save near a death trap. Farah's stupidity will ensure you won't be able to continue from there.
• Darksiders II. The controls randomly stop working completely (at least in the PC version) whenever you exit the Chronicle and the game randomly crashes after certain cutscenes, most infamously the ones before and after the Lilith boss fight. In fact, that one crash can make the game Unwinnable since there is no solution to it other than completely starting the game over. And due to THQ going under, none of this was ever fixed.
• Grand Theft Auto Online is still filled with Game Breaking Bugs and exploits that have yet to be patched, grossly overpowered vehicles and weapons that are still unbalanced, and the use of mods that can easily give one God Mode with no repercussions whatsoever still runs rampant. Most suspect this constant rebalancing and bug fixing is the main reason why heists, the most anticipated feature of Online, were MIA far longer than intended.
• The Xbox version of Supreme Commander would grind to a halt whenever battles got too large despite having drastically reduced the graphics quality. Throw in a completely unintuitive control scheme and you have a clearly unfinished product.
• Retro City Rampage intentionally invokes this with a minigame based on the NES hardware prototype of the game, Grandtheftendo (renamed ROM City Rampage).
• Downplayed with Burnout Paradise. The original release was a full, perfectly playable game with few bugs in its own right, but it wasn't the version the developers wanted to ship. Later patches added in features they couldn't complete the first time around, including a day/night cycle, driveable motorcycles, increased control over the soundtrack, and more.
• According to an episode of Matt McMuscles What Happened?, the North American version of Spyborgs is a beta build of the game. Developer Bionic Games had spent spent the final months of development overhauling the lackluster partner AI and better balancing the game's difficulty, but unbeknownst to them, their publisher Capcom (with whom the studio enjoyed a troubled relationship) took the last build they received and had another unnamed studio do the fixes strictly necessary to pass Nintendo's quality certification and have the game hit release date. The European release actually incorporates the changes. Otherwise, the game doesn't stand out as too visibly unfinished, although its short development time and troubled re-scoping shows in things like the rather shallow gameplay and low enemy and environment variety.
• Data Design Interactive put together a tech demo build for a potential sequel to Zool, but the deal fell through due to the rights owners being very unimpressed with their work. Undaunted, they tweaked the build to make it their own property and released it as Ninjabread Man. Its status as such shows: the game is overall poorly programmed, with wonky hitboxes, a host of glitches, and wildly variable performance. It also has very little content on display, with no story to speak of and only four short levels.
• Pipeworks ''Godzilla'' Trilogy: Godzilla Unleashed'' was criticized for motion control issues, and Godzilla 1954 in particular is unpolished in comparison to the other monsters — the camera goes above his head in his introductory cutscene, and he lacks a proper roar taunt. In addition, sometimes certain music won't play (King Ghidorah's theme won't play in Story Mode, while King Caesar's won't play in Brawl Mode).

PlayStation 4/Xbox One/Wii U/Switch

• Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric for the Wii U took four years to make, yet looks like a beta version rushed to release thanks to a Troubled Production. Before patching, it was possible to infinitely extend Knuckles' jump by pausing the game mid-jump, unpausing, and jumping again; you can respawn outside arenas with forcefields that turn off only when you kill the enemies in them (making the level Unintentionally Unwinnable); and it's far too easy to go out of bounds◊. This is the result of Sega forcing the devs to release the game as a Wii U exclusive at the last minute which the game’s engine wasn’t compatible with.
• ZombiU was clearly rushed to meet the Wii U's launch. It was absolutely chock full of game-breaking bugs, a startling number of which forced you to restart the entire game from scratch. They weren't patched until about half a year later.
• Assassin's Creed: Unity suffered horrendous bugs that, among other things, caused facial textures to disappear (only leaving eyeballs and teeth behind). It was so bad that Ubisoft nixed their Season Pass for the game and offered up paid Downloadable Content for free; anyone who did buy a Season Pass was given a free Ubisoft game.
• Halo: The Master Chief Collection was originally plagued with a string of matchmaking issues when it launched in 2014 (never connecting to other players, games being unevenly divided, etc.). 343 Industries has tried to patch the game but to no real avail (in some cases with players reporting a drop in matchmaking consistency). Add to that the already protracted installation times, and a significant number of players turned to demanding refunds. Most infuriating is that the matchmaking is merely a port of the four then-existing games' matchmaking system, and was one of only three things that were "changed" about the games for the release of MCC (the other two being the audio/visual overlay for Halo 2 and the addition of five completely remade maps for "Halo 2 Anniversary" multiplayer). Kotaku alone ran twelve separate articles on how The Master Chief Collection has tried to get itself working, yet remained buggy and broken as all hell six months after release. Thankfully, ever since a major patch in 2018 that essentially was a relaunch of the game, the overwhelming majority of these problems have been resolved.
• The PlayStation 4 version of Ultra Street Fighter IV launched in a bug-ridden state. Graphical errors like invisible Sonic Booms, background sound effects triggering in time with character movements, and worst of all, behavioral glitches that do not exist on any other version of the game (such as attacks teleporting through characters when they would connect on any other port). Furthermore the game's menus and character selection screen are very slow (running at a cut frame rate) and the input lag is even worse than the already too-high PlayStation 3 port. Capcom attempting to move the community to the PS4 version was stopped dead in its tracks due to these issues and major tournaments are reverting back to the already standard Xbox 360 version of the game. The bulk of the blame in this case falls to Other Ocean, a porting house Sony used to convert the game to the PS4 and not known for having a good track record.
• Street Fighter V: The game was launched for both PS4 and PC on February 2016, in time for the Capcom Pro Tour. Since day 1 it was mainly marketed to professional players and focused to Tournament Play and online modes, so it lacks an Arcade mode and offline Vs. modes (There were even reports of huge lag and disconnections in the online). Additional content, characters and stages have been gradually added since then.
• The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 quickly became notorious for its hilariously buggy physics engine and lack of polish. For starters, a day-one patch for the game that went live with the game's released was found to have a file size larger than the base game itself (vanilla game: 4.6GB; day-one patch: 7.7GB).^note This sparked a rumor that the patch included the majority of the game, and that people with the base game could only play the tutorial and Create-A-Skater mode, but this was later debunked. And when playing the game, it's not too difficult to see why. It is not uncommon for the player to see their character glitch into the walls, into the ground, or even into the air when grinding, using the game's "slam" mechanic (which immediately forces the player onto the ground or a rail when pressed) or even simply landing incorrectly when falling down from a ramp. A video from Eurogamer that showcases many glitches noted that they were found in merely one hour of gameplay time—and this was after the patch was applied. Some copies of the game also became prone to straight-up crashing when people tried to play them.
• Brawl was first released under the title Basement Crawl. This version of the game allowed eight players to battle at once, but had only four player character models and no color-coding, palette-swapping or tags to tell them apart. The online multiplayer experience was ridden with Game Breaking Bugs, and the promised tutorial-oriented single-player mode (realized in Brawl) was absent. Bloober Team apologized for Basement Crawl and rebuilt the game, adding many new features.
• LittleBigPlanet 3 on both the PS3 and PS4. The first release had online multiplayer that always failed to connect players, and bugs with the story mode levels that blocked progression for some players. Persisting from the actual beta was a placeholder "Fix Me Hook Hat" icon that became an infamous meme to the point of a DLC shirt being created when it was actually fixed months after launch. It also had Loads and Loads of Loading, even on the digital version, severe framerate drops even on levels from previous games, an annoying bug that prevented stickers from being placed anywhere in Create Mode, and a lousy bug that blocked creators from selecting locked adventure levels on My Moon. In addition, profile corruption was reportedly much more common than previous games. Even now, there are some slight engine differences which mean that some 2 and 1 levels will behave oddly, either distressingly or hilariously.
• While the PC version of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night works and runs the best, and the PlayStation and Xbox versions had some Game Breaking Bugs and glitches but weren't unplayable, the Switch version was horrendous at launch. Problems including the extremely shoddy graphics, terrible optimization and inconsistent framerates, Loads and Loads of Loading, frequent crashes and numerous glitches, and input lag made the game an extremely frustrating experience at best and practically unplayable at worst. What made this worse was that when fans suspected issues with the Switch version based on footage from a pre-release event, the developers tried to cover it up by blaming it on the case causing the Switch to overheat and pushed the release date of the Switch port back a few days (presumably to prevent it from affecting review scores). Needless to say, fans who paid for the Switch version were extremely unhappy. Luckily, the developers apologized and quickly pushed patches to fix the myriad of issues, and in its current state it now runs and plays fine (albeit still not as well as the other versions).
• Cyberpunk 2077 was pretty rough on a good PC and ninth-generation hardware, but its initial launch on eighth-generation consoles was almost completely broken—frequent crashes, framerates routinely dipping below 20, graphical quality dropping to PS1 levels on a bad day, a habit of not rendering things when the player isn't looking at them, meaning that looking away from objects tends to reset them or make them disappear, clothes routinely vanishing or clipping through the character's body parts, large portions of the AI failing to function (particularly cars), and glitches that defy categorization, all combining to practically turn Night City into a World of Chaos. The launch was so notoriously bad that Sony and Microsoft allowed for refunds on digital sales, and Sony pulled the game from their digital store outright. CD Projekt went on to apologise to their player base, pledging more updates and bug fixes down the line.
• The 2020 remake of the Cult Classic XIII was an absolute dumpster fire on release. Bugs and crashes galore, absolutely braindead enemies, and framerate issues plagued this once beloved game.
• Balan Wonderworld was revealed to be this when Yuji Naka was released from a gagging order, only to blast the development studio and Square Enix for effectively firing him when, among other things, he said the game was nowhere near ready. Even when players were severely unimpressed by the build released as a playable demo, Square Enix still went through with release and the game was a critical and commercial flop, with considerable criticism for its clumsily-designed, experimental gameplay mechanics that didn't mesh together, a nonsensical storyline, and a multitude of glitches and oversights.
• At release, Chess Minimal didn't even have the chess rules programmed in correctly — pawns could only promote to queens, stalemate wasn't recognized correctly, and castling was bugged. Additionally, private matches didn't work, and the built-in AI was slow and fully deterministic. The developers have apologised for the game's state and patched it.
• Saints Row (2022) launched in a woeful state with several bugs and glitches, despite being delayed for quality assurance purposes. These can range from character animations not playing properly to the game becoming softlocked, most notably when navigating the menus, and it gets worse when playing in co-op mode. The game has gotten numerous patches since November of 2022, although some players are reporting new bugs and preexisting issues remaining unchanged or becoming worse.
• Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are the buggiest games in the series since Pokémon Red and Blue, featuring an eye-watering framerate caused by memory leak issues, clipping errors galore, animation bugs, atrocious texture quality and filtering and semi-frequent game crashes. The title shows clear signs of being Christmas Rushed for Holiday 2022.

PlayStation 5/Xbox Series X/Xbox Series S

• The GTA Definitive Edition trilogy proved to be anything but, as the collection launched with a multitude of bugs that weren't present in the originals, low FPS, messed-up textures, a broken launcher, and rain that looked like a bunch of white lines and made it difficult to see anything. Not helping matters is that Rockstar Games removed the original versions of the games from Steam without offering refunds when the Definitive Editions came out.

Handheld Systems

• Sonic the Hedgehog Genesis for the Game Boy Advance, the port of the first game, was a failure of epic nature despite the GBA having over twice the processing power of the Sega Genesis. It was rushed to come out on Sonic's 15th Anniversary. The developers did a quick and dirty port job, basing the port off the already shoddy (if forgivable due to the hardware) Java mobile port. Unfortunately, little to no optimization was done to make the game work for the GBA, and Screen Crunch was in full-force due to the game originally being made for a 320x224 resolution in comparison to the GBA's 240x160. The mobile port tries to alleviate this by shrinking the sprites for a zoomed-out presentation, which does result in inferior graphics, but makes the game a bit more playable. The GBA version, however, displays these sprites with the full Genesis resolution, zooming the game in too much.
• Virtual Lab, a puzzle game that was the last game released on the Virtual Boy in Japan, misspells "Nintendo" two different ways on its box and title screen, gives passwords after completing each level but lacks a menu to input them, and has speed settings that are wrong ("MID" is the fastest setting).
• Mortal Kombat Advance was (in theory) meant to give a bone to MK fans wanting to play UMK 3 on the go with their Game Boy Advance back in 2002. Midway, however, handed the license to an outside third party away from Ed Boon and his team and gave them two months to turn it out for a quick profit. Unsurprisingly, the game came rife with glitches, incomplete AI (either motionless or cheating), and unresponsive controls. The game proved to be a bit profitable for Midway, but this kind of practice foretold the future bankruptcy of the company.
• Pokémon Red and Blue, especially the original Red and Green (released only in Japan...after five years of development!), were notorious for this. The updated Blue engine (which was used for the international releases of Red and Green, with Green's name being changed to that of Blue), despite fixing some of the more painful bugs, was still a mess, with the infamous Mew glitch, Glitch City, the old man exploit, and Missingno. (which is generally accessed via the aforementioned old man exploit), due to being a beta and because of some of the shortcuts taken to fit the game on the cartridge. In addition, several moves did not work as intended (e.g., Focus Energy and Dire Hit, which lowered your crit chance instead of increasing it, and Psychic-types were immune to Ghost-type attacks rather than weak to them as intended). Even the Updated Re-release Yellow didn't fix everything, although it is widely considered to be the most polished rendition of Gen I. By Generation II, which uses an upgraded engine, most of the bugs were fixed, but exploits involving the PC boxes that had a similar effect to the Mew glitch (e.g., manipulating cloning and PC boxes to get any Pokémon) remained. The games were indeed playable (and many glitches you had to actually go out of your way to exploit), but it was one of those rare instances where they released a late beta and it actually worked.
  • Pokémon Gold and Silver were somewhat less of an obvious beta, but it was fairly clear that there was a decent amount of copy-and-paste between the two generations — not entirely unheard of in those old days, especially when getting a giant game to run on a potato like the original Game Boy/Game Boy Color took all the hacks and prayers one could shove into the cartridge. Crystal, like Yellow before it, fixed quite a few, but the way that some of the earlier-fixed bugs actually translated from RGB directly to GS made it clear that the transfer and development had begun before Yellow's release. Even then, some playtesting errors crept in, like a Pokémon's gender being tied specifically to its attack IV — which means that if you want a female Totodile, for example, enjoy its 1 ATK value.
• Soulcalibur: Broken Destiny for the PSP was obviously rushed out for a Summer Holiday release. It is supposed to be a port of Soul Calibur IV with extra characters and modes... but to get it out in time, there is no story mode or proper arcade mode. The options mode doesn't let you adjust the difficulty or number of rounds, the create-a-character mode is very lacking, and there is no money system or internet play. The game's makers excused this by saying that it's a "simpler SoulCalibur game for novice players". Tekken: Dark Resurrection, which came out three years before, is not lacking in any of the modes its home version offers, which shows that Broken Destiny could have been much better.
• Shin Megami Tensei's Devil Survivor:
  • The original has a few lines left in Japanese. You could argue that the beta testers couldn't find them all (considering how much dialogue there is), except that one of the lines has to be seen in order to get five of the six Multiple Endings. One of the skill descriptions states the exact opposite of what the skill really does.
  • The Updated Re-release Devil Survivor Overclocked could actually be considered worse than the original. Lag is everywhere, and grinding is bad when the game's form of Inexplicable Treasure Chests can randomly freeze your game.
• Mega Man Battle Network 1 is laden with stiff and clunky mechanics, and the characters are flat and all suffer one form or another of Early-Installment Weirdness regarding their characterization. It's also extremely short and easily beatable in under ten hours, less than half that of any other game in the series. While it was still good enough to serve as a foundation for the rest of the series, the sequel released nine months later makes the first game's beta status painfully obvious by comparison.
• While fun to play, the two Prince of Persia sidescrollers for the Nintendo DS (The Fallen King and The Forgotten Sands) are so glitchy and unpolished that it's obvious they were rush jobs. The Boss Battles are particularly embarrassing.
• Tales of the Tempest is clearly a tech demo for the Nintendo DS, suffering from poor performance and character models, slow gameplay, incomplete maps, and a very rushed endgame. It doesn't even have a full anime opening, something every other game in the series contains. Sadly, it is also the only DS Tales game to not get an Updated Re-release to fix these issues, despite a remake being hinted at in Tales Of Hearts R.
• The DLC for the North American version of Disgaea 2: Dark Hero Days had so many bugs and glitches that the developers actually had to pull them from PSN so they could work on fixing them. When first released, they had no voice, but random noises played whenever the characters would say something during battle, such as menu scrolling and selecting sounds, and their attacks were completely messed up in area and damage (to the point that Sapphire's Ultimate move did reverse damage, thus healing enemies). The DLC was later put on back on sale with the attack glitches fixed, but the random noises still play up when they are fighting.
• It's painfully clear that Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified was rushed to market to accompany Call of Duty: Black Ops II and to give the Play Station Vita a Call of Duty installment. The graphics look like a PS2 game from 2006, the enemy AI is abysmal (they will take cover behind explosive objects and try to shoot through them, blowing themselves up), the single-player campaign can be finished in less than an hour, there are loads of bugs that range from simply annoying to outright game-breaking, multiplayer is very hard to get working properly, and the maps are positively tiny - even the famously small Nuketown had to be cut in half to fit. Oh, and Zombies is conspicuously absent.

NES

• Action 52 is not just one, but a collection of 52 examples. Nearly every one of the 52 games featured on the cartridge has some kind of Game-Breaking Bug that makes it impossible to beat, or some other programming oddity that makes them barely playable.
  • Many of the games featured on the compilation are prone to crashing, with some being guaranteed to crash after completing certain levels. Two of the games, Alfredo and Jigsaw, are guaranteed to crash on startup on most of the cartridge.
  • Certain games are Unintentionally Unwinnable. Fuzz Power has an obstacle in level 3 that is completely impossible to jump over.
  • The majority of the platform games in the compilation have a control glitch that makes them much harder; the game cannot accept more than one controller input at once, so if the player holds the jump button, they cannot move at all in mid-jump, and the character will jump straight upward. In order to jump forward, the player must release the jump button, and then press forward.
  • The majority of the games provide no indicator of where their levels begin or end, meaning most levels simply end while the player is moving forward normally. This also creates the problem that certain levels begin by placing the player directly in harm's way, killing them immediately unless they know what to do in advance.
  • While most NES games would switch levels by swapping out the bank that holds the level data, Cheetahmen (and other Action 52 games with more than one level) accomplished it by swapping out the entire PRG ROM. The net result is that every level is, in fact, a different game, which is why bugs can occur in some levels but not in others, why each Cheetahman's level set has different sound effects and animations, and why the end result cost $200. Some of the different levels in games have the same level number, such as level 4 of Cheetahmen being labelled Level 3.
• Final Fantasy is at least possible to complete, but even the slightest look under the hood reveals that almost every system in the game has some kind of major bug in it. Among other things, the Intelligence stat does nothing (making the magic classes far weaker than intended), weapons use the wrong assignment for their crit tables, the Run command uses entirely the wrong values, no less than four of the game's spells either do not function or actually do the opposite of what they state, and the various Weapon of X-Slaying weapons lack their supposed properties.
• Hoshi wo Miru Hito. You move less than 2 tiles per second, there's zero attempt to fit map tiles together in any coherent manner, you start at level 0, the first town is invisible, there's no cancel option in battles, your HP values in battle are truncated so that the last digit of your HP is invisible, there's no way to check equipment stats in a store before you buy them, and old equipment is automatically discarded, the only way to escape a battle is by casting a teleport spell and failing it on purpose, key items disappear after one use which can lead to the game becoming Unintentionally Unwinnable if you use them at the wrong place, some key items found within dungeons are invisible, the game uses a Password Save that saves little to no information about your current status and using one always returns you to the same point you start the game from and the final boss doesn't exist. The game also can't tell the difference between controllers 1 and 3, leading to hilarity if you use both at the same time.
• Though Mega Man 3 is still well-regarded, it's not hard to tell it was rushed out. Several bosses and weapons are very buggy (most famously the Top Spin), the Doc Robot stages are fairly blatantly Fake Longevity, and the Wily stages are some of the easiest in the franchise. The most conspicuous thing, though, is that the game has features meant for bugtesting (i.e. immunity to spikes, greater jump height, invincibility) that were never taken out, accessed by hitting buttons on the second controller.
• The NES version of Strider looks like a late beta, due to things like uneven collisions, odd borders for platforms and walls, enemies and NPCs that appear and disappear at weird times or don't disappear when they should, and a poor translation. The third-to-last boss does not disappear or change in any way after his defeat, and the final boss simply does not appear in his room for several seconds. When he does, he just pops into the middle of the room as if by a glitch. The first Data Disk you analyze unlocks Australia as a stage, even though the actual clue in the disk refers to the location of the Attack Boots you get at China. Not only that, there's no reason to go to Australia until very late in the game (it's the final area you need to explore before visiting the Red Dragon). Further credence to this theory is the fact that the Japanese version was canceled before the release of the arcade version, even though a tie-in manga adaptation was already published for it.

Sega Master System

• The port of Battletoads in Battlemaniacs for the Sega Master System, which only saw release in Brazil but was intended to be released in Europe as well. The most obvious signs of the unfinished port are the missing, misplaced, and incomplete cutscenes and music.

Super NES

• Maka Maka was an obscure Japanese-exclusive RPG had several obviously unfinished parts and many bugs, some of which are game breaking. In fact, word has it that the game was released in its prototype form due to time constraints. Of particular note, there is Loads and Loads of Loading despite being on a cartridge, you can glitch the game horribly by repeatedly using a healing item on a character with full HP, a character stat at 128 can overflow to 0 on leveling up, the final boss' One-Winged Angel form dies in one hit, and another overflow renders the credits unreadable.
• Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals: The Dual Blade Shrine is garbled in the North American version, making navigation through the dungeon difficult. There are also places where dungeon names are untranslated, with the removal of the Japanese font resulting in these being rendered as gibberish, and enemies bear Engrish names such as "Hidora" and "Gorem".
• Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade's Revenge is an unfortunate example, as Software Creations were given a very tight deadline to complete the game by. This resulted in some very stiff controls and odd game mechanics (for example, once a character crouches they stay crouched until the player presses a button to "uncrouch" them) that make the game a bit of a slog to get through outside of emulators (where cheats can compensate for things like the incredibly tiny jumps the characters take).
• Star Ocean on SFC came with several crashing bugs, an item creation system whose success rate in some circumstances was so low it almost wasn't worth trying, items that were obviously meant to exist (and referenced in places) but couldn't be found, and a final dungeon that (story-wise) came out of nowhere on a planet you couldn't explore. The enhanced remake for the PSP corrected most of these issues.
• Super Double Dragon, which was Christmas Rushed in North America by its publisher Tradewest. It's impossible to catch your own boomerangs, knives do far too much damage, and you can't switch weapons once you pick one up. The Japanese version, Return of Double Dragon, which came out a few months later, is more complete than the American version (it even has an additional level, albeit a rather glitchy unfinished one), but is obviously far from finished (the game still lacks any sort of plot or even a proper ending).

Genesis/Sega CD/32X

• Annet Futatabi (Annet Again, a somewhat obscure Japanese Sega Mega CD sequel to the Genesis semi-classic El Viento that was released in a very unfinished state. The protagonist's flashy spells are all unfinished, usually resulting in just a single animation frame blinking in and out. Basic combat controls work correctly, but enemies swarm you any time you get knocked down, effectively making getting up an impossibility. Enemies and bosses will occasionally wander off screen and not return for anywhere between a few minutes and never, making the game randomly unwinnable. It is little surprise that the game was never released outside Japan.
• Jurassic Park (Sega Genesis), while not buggy, was released in a very unfinished state. Velociraptors, for instance, were the scariest and deadliest dinosaurs in the film, but here became slow, lumbering idiots who farted about the levels waiting to get shot, and the mighty T. rex can be thwarted as easily as chucking a single grenade at her and strolling by as she's stunned. Two things support the theory that it was a rushed project: the first is that the actual beta ROM is almost identical to the finished product, and the second is that developer Blue Sky software later released a loose sequel Jurassic Park: Rampage Edition which ratcheted up the action and made all the dinosaurs significantly more dangerous enemies (for instance, Velociraptor encounters are now downright terrifying because of their aggressiveness, and the T. rex still only appears from the shoulders up, but now she chases you). While the original was still an okay game, it's pretty obvious that Rampage Edition was the version Blue Sky meant to make the first time.
• Nightmare Circus, developed by Funcom (later of Anarchy Online fame), was canceled for physical release by Sega of America at the last minute, but released in Brazil by Sega's Brazilian publisher Tectoy and later published digitally on the Sega Channel. While the result can be beaten, it features cryptic progression, and a final boss fight that does not trigger until over a minute after the previous level is finished. It also has no proper opening or ending.
• Sonic the Hedgehog 3, did have a load of glitches (such as getting stuck in the walls in Carnival Night Zone). It was very clearly rushed, as most evident because it was split into two parts to meet the deadline. Most of these were fixed when locked onto Sonic & Knuckles, but others are only possible in the locked-on game (such as being able to take Hyper Sonic off-screen and get him to access areas only Knuckles should be able to reach). Playing Sonic with Tails in 3 & Knuckles in particular is an excellent way to trigger a plethora of problems (by either shifting the camera up or down then grabbing Tails in flight, players can cause crazy screen-wrapping and object clipping glitches that would fill a novel). The manual even handwaves the ludicrous amount of glitches, calling them Robotnik's "diabolical traps".
• Knuckles Chaotix, the sole Sonic series entry on the 32X (itself an Obvious Beta of an add-on along with most of its meager library) was rushed for release so the 32X could have a Sonic game at launch, and it shows. The teamwork mechanic is wonky and unrefined, with the A.I. being extremely stupid, failing to make jumps and running into enemies constantly. The level design is very repetitive, drawn out and sometimes sparse when it comes to setpieces and enemies. There are also numerous collision bugs that can be unwittingly triggered by the aforementioned team mechanic. The earliest known evidence of what would eventually become Knuckles' Chaotix can be found in Sonic Crackers — a buggy, unpolished pitch ROM that wasn't even made for the 32X and didn't feature Knuckles at all. That ROM is dated April 1, 1994 and the first global release of Chaotix was in March of 1995. Mighty's sprites from Chaotix are edited from Sonic's Crackers sprites (whose only reason for being in the game was to avoid putting Sonic in a game on an internally-perceived doomed platform).

PlayStation/Nintendo 64/Sega Saturn

• Bubsy 3D for the PS1 was given such a rushed development cycle, it only got a barely finished alpha done that was shoved out the door in order to play catch-up to Super Mario 64. The result was a clunky to play, sloppy, and all around embarrassing rush job that was critically panned, tanked at retail, and killed the franchise dead.
• Mega Man X6 isn't unplayable, but it's painfully obvious during a playthrough that the game was rushed out in ten months. Many enemy sprites and music tracks are recycled from previous entries (curiously, the latter tracks are missing from the sound test), and the newer sprites are much choppier in motion than previous games. The level design ranges from barren and bland to very sloppy and uneven, and the game's main source of challenge is cheap difficulty tricks. Plus, it's extremely hard to play through the game as unarmored X, because the game is practically designed to be played with the Falcon Armor and the upgrades. Parts of the game that are even harder or straight-up Unwinnable without finding a specific part or armor, the former of which can be permanently lost if you don't rescue its specific reploid, and the game never instructs you to find them beforehand. It's also very buggy; certain tricks can result in the player having, for instance, unlimited I-frames. The English localization was rushed out so fast that the translation is extremely sloppy, and the original Japanese voice tracks were left intact.
• The North American release of Suikoden II has several places where dialogue simply wasn't translated at all. And because Konami also removed the Japanese font, the result is characters who speak indecipherable gibberish◊. The German version also has untranslated dialogue, like Lorelei, Gordon, and almost the entire Rokkaku Village speaking French.
• The N64 port of Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine was so full of Game Breaking Bugs that it was only released as a Blockbuster rental (or a direct purchase from LucasArts). One of the most memorable glitches had to be the fact that in one level, when you tried to drop into a cave since access seemed impossible, when Indy fell in the water and you tried to resurface, he just swam through the air. Effective for getting in the cave, but he just drowned.
• Star Ocean: The Second Story has a game crasher that would "randomly" occur after completing a battle, the overworld/dungeon screen would fail to load, leaving just a black screen and no music, forcing a reset. The game crashes if you push any button while the screen is black. It's not black for long, but if you happen to do it by accident, especially in the Cave of Trials, it'll be a hard moment. Furthermore, when leveling up, Claude sometimes says "Crawd has advanced forward!", with Crawd being his Japanese name, an indicator the voicework was done before the script was translated, and Lena's voice clip for the Tractor Beam spell remains in Japanese.
• Superman 64 has insane glitches, horrible controls, awkward animations, a very short draw distance, largely nondescript textures, a telling lack of content (well, unless overuse of Pass Through the Rings counts as content), two years in development and not much to show for it; it's unrefined in nearly every aspect. Where it gets really interesting is the actual beta release is better than the finished product; apparently due to Executive Meddling, the company was forced to change a lot, and they just ran out of time.
• WWF Smackdown! for the PS1 is clearly an Obvious Beta of WWF Smackdown! 2: Know Your Role. They were both made in the same year and built on the same engine, with many things being left over from the first game in the second. The oddness about the first game is as follows:
  • The menu descriptions are written in sloppy English, including a Create a PPV mode called "Match Making".
  • The season mode is limited: Hardly any backstage story, no feuds, the ability to skip matches, and the ability to be eligible for any title at the same time with little reason.
  • The create a character mode is limited with the only parts you can select being head, upper body and lower body. In the sequel, the same parts return as "standard" parts, individual parts now are under "advanced".
  • Instead of unlocking characters, you unlock their parts.
• The PlayStation version of Tactics Ogre has a major bug: Sometimes your save file will fail to load.
• The second disc of Xenogears, given the altered method of storytelling and lack of access to the overworld until late in the disc. It was scrambled together by the developers after the producer told Square Enix he'd release the entire game in one part rather than splitting it up, since it was near its deadline.
• In a subversion, the Dual Analog Controller has quite the feature set over the later released DualShock (which may even make it better than the DualShock). However, it was probably a rushed release to compete with the Nintendo 64 and its Rumble Pak, since most games released with Dual Analog support apparently couldn't find a use for the second analog stick.
• Formula 1 '98 on the PlayStation was developed in six months by a new developer, Visual Science, after Bizarre Creations (and the intended replacement, Reflections) opted not to work on the sequel to the very popular Formula 1 '97. Whilst the Arcade mode is somewhat polished and playable, Grand Prix mode (which most people would have been buying the game to play) was an unfinished, buggy mess. Amongst the many problems were cars turning into what resembled Atari 2600-style Pole Position cars when too many of them were on screen, a motion captured pit crew which did nothing but crouch beside the car for a few seconds, very poor handling, almost non-existant crash physics (you would simply stop on the spot with the other car getting a bump-boost), distorted commentary, and a game-breaking bug in which you would be disqualified after making a pit-stop if you chose to run with the flags on. Amazingly, the same developer was recruited by EA to make the console versions of their F1 series and were able to prove that with a little more time ('98 had been rushed out to coincide with the final race that season) they could make a decent racing game.
• While the Nintendo 64 adaptations of Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! are generally playable, they were also GameTek's swan songs before their bankruptcy and you can very much tell they were financially struggling at the time of their developments. Their presentations are very amateurish, with extremely simplistic menus that look hastily thrown together in PowerPoint. They also continued to use the digitized sprites of real life humans that they had used in past games, a practice that had been seen as increasingly dated and tacky by 1997. Wheel of Fortune also has a lot of errors with respect to the layout of the wheel from round to round and is missing a lot of very basic features like wheel prizes, the W-H-E-E-L envelopes in the bonus round, and informing the player when all vowels have been revealed (as in, the game permits you to still buy them when there aren't any left, which has never been the case on the actual show). Jeopardy!, meanwhile, suffers from an extremely strict text parser that frequently doesn't account for multiple possible responses to the same clue (for instance, one clue requires "Republic of Congo" as the correct response, without enough room to include "Democratic" in there like most people would call it). Most tellingly, neither version has any save feature to avoid repeat puzzles or clues, not even to the Controller Pak, a basic feature that the 1994 PC and Sega CD adaptations already put in place three years prior. While they did sport impressive FMV for the system, they otherwise failed to impress from the presentation standpoint and GameTek would ultimately meet their end mere months after their release, and their status as an Obvious Beta is even more blatant when Artech's offerings from the same year on the PC and PS1 completely blow away these versions.

Dreamcast/PS2/GameCube/Xbox

• Tomb Raider:
  • Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness was released in an infamously unfinished state and garnered many comments from reviewers along the lines of "it might be good when it's finished". Problems included the inability to dual-wield weapons despite Lara's twin holsters, the sea monster with an untextured belly, Lara's ability to beat a timed door puzzle without the allegedly necessary jumping upgrade, and Lara's clothes miraculously changing themselves.
  • While far more solid than Angel (outside the PS2 version), Tomb Raider: Underworld is also quite buggy, with various rough edges and some Game-Breaking Bugs.
• Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly. You can swim in the air if you get through a certain gap in the net in a pond, allowing you to swim to later levels and do the boss battle early. If you're directly above or below something but actually far away from it, it sounds close. Spyro sometimes freezes and slides around like he's ice-skating. Visual effects go wrong a lot. Sometimes you arrive in a level and have to wait for it to appear. NPCs twitch and bounce like Jell-O molds for no good reason. Sometimes the dang thing just freezes. When you press "Look", occasionally Spyro would headbutt instead of looking. There are copious spelling errors. The gateway to the second world sometimes doesn't work.
• Nippon Ichi also ran into this problem with the North American version of Ar tonelico II: Melody of Metafalica, which has a Game-Breaking Bug around the endgame, a plethora of other minor bugs due to aggressively breaking several routines, an overall terrible translation, and spots where there's still kanji floating around.
• Grandia III is a case of this. The whole bit about airplanes and flying that the game makes a big deal about early on in the story is almost completely abandoned once you actually get a plane, the second disc is very rushed, and one of the main villains is Put on a Bus, never to be seen again.
• Vexx is complete from a gameplay perspective, and everything works. But the story is rather skeletal (with tons of hints that it was supposed to be much grander), a number of power-ups/game aspects pop up all of once and are never referenced again, and certain things in the main game hint at a multiplayer mode that simply never happened.
• The Dreamcast port of Slave Zero, which was one of the few games released in the first year of the system. All of the ingame music is removed with only the intro and ending themes remaining, the menus in languages other than English are glitched and not fully translated, the framerate is far lower than the PC version and dips inexplicably during the cutscenes and the game is filled with all manner of bizarre bugs, such as falling infinitely off Bottomless Pits or getting killed by the checkpoint transition and becoming invincible as a result. Superior PC-to-Dreamcast ports showed Infogrames plainly didn't care and rushed the game to get a quick buck.
• The original Japanese release of Sonic Adventure, while not as horrendously glitchy as other examples on this page, had some very bad bugs and camera issues. As a result, Sega delayed the game's Western release to address the glitches and other issues, pushing the release of the game - and the Dreamcast along with it - back by almost a year. The end result is an inversion of Bad Export for You: the Western version of the game was better than the original Japanese release. Sega would later re-release the Western version back in Japan as Sonic Adventure International. Even with this revision though, the game is often considered rushed, with many bugs and exploits still remaining, key frame-esque cutscenes and incredibly imbalanced levels and campaigns which sometimes just abruptly end.
• The Japanese release for Tales of the Abyss. There were several items that were Dummied Out (Mystic Artes and cut-ins that weren't accessible in-game, a potential part in which Van was playable) as well as several bad bugs (Tear and Jade freezing while casting in overlimit) and plenty of Good Bad Bugs (being able to go anywhere on the world map, perfect because there are parts that can become inaccessible). What appears to be a Regional Bonus for North America was actually more of a completion, despite several bugs that weren't removed (Luke has an extension to his Mystic Arte if Ion is in the party; Guy and Natalia have two Mystic Artes; Fortunes Arc has an extension; the final boss has a second Mystic Arte; Nebilim had around seven Mystic Artes added; the cameo bosses not only have their cut-ins, but Philia and Reid actually had two). The original version of the game also had major framerate issues on the overworld map.
• Crash Twinsanity:
  • The game is fairly short, has its fair share of gameplay bugs, and is lacking appropriate animations and sound effects (and in a couple cases, music) in certain cinematics, which makes it seem like parts of the game were rushed before release... and they very well were, considering the sheer amount of cut content that one of the developers of the game decided to share on a Crash forum...
  • The cutscenes and world layout. After you complete certain cutscenes and stages, you go back to the world map, giving you some kind of free roaming until the next cutscene continues the game. Although this free roaming zone tends to be really linear, you can go back to a previous part of the world map, even though you're not meant to do so. If you do this, all the cutscenes and stages are reset, meaning that you'll have to play all of them again until you reach the point where you screwed up. The game just treats you as it was your first time reaching each zone. This can be seen after you complete Cavern Catastrophe, where you can find a tunnel that will get you back to N. Sanity Island.
• The developers of Drake of the 99 Dragons were given 18 months to launch the beginning of what was supposed to be a multimedia franchise while already being stretched thin with many other games, two of which were released around the same time. The end product was a game with awkward controls, abilities that hinder the player instead of helping ^note To give one example, the Bullet Time power slows you down along with the enemies, making it completely pointless., and tons of visual and gameplay bugs.
• Red Ninja: End of Honor, or Kurenai Ninja: Kekka no Mai (Dance of Blood) in Japan by Vivendi Universal Games. On paper, it is very much a potential Tenchu-killer, with its wire-based action, greater emphasis on platforming and maneuvers, Seduction mechanic, and artwork done by D.K who later did the art for NieR. On implementation, the game, while not exactly buggy, is completely unrefined. The wire combat, despite having a versatile potential, is often too situational (for a main weapon, being situational is not good). Camera controls were atrocious, and poor camera with platforming is a recipe for disaster. Level designs can only be described as malicious, relying too much on Bottomless Pits and other frustrating design choices. Platforming elements were consequently also harsh, with one level segment entirely relying on it. Items were often of no importance or too much importance, with no happy medium in-between. While the controls work for most times, the "wall run" mechanic relies on dashing, which is accomplished by pressing forward long enough. In a stealth game that rewards precision, that is a very vague input design, causing tremendous frustration. Despite controlling a lethal Ms. Fanservice, the vaunted Seduction mechanic is too randomly determined to be of any practical use. The use of CG animation in the ending is downright atrocious, and the soundtrack is very much below-par. The most griping point is that, with a few more playtesting and refinement, the game could have been much better, especially with a camera fix.
• The rushed European release of Metropolis Street Racer for the Dreamcast was riddled with game-breaking, save-corrupting bugs. Sega quickly recalled it, but the second version was still somewhat buggy. The third European release, as well as the North American release, were more solid.
• Dual Hearts feels this way at times, given the constant fuzziness of one world's graphics and the choppiness of the storybook stage.
• DRIV3R is loaded to the gills withs bugs due to Reflections rushing its development. You can get into vehicles after they've exploded and burned out, NPCs will sometimes get stuck in animation loops, and you can send your car somersaulting into the wild blue yonder just by hitting the right obstacle.
• Sensible Soccer 2006 was rushed through development so that its release could coincide with the World Cup. The many glitches included teleporting goalkeepers and frequent crashes.

Android/iPhone

• Tales of Crestoria: The game launched with very poor performance on Android phones, constant game crashes and softlocks during battles, unusable features such as the chat function, daily missions that would inexplicably lock for 12 hours a day, and reward glitches causing clear and arena rewards to not appear in people's inventories. Unfortunately, the game, despite getting most of the glaring issues fixed by its first anniversary, and getting a more positive reception, announced it would close down by February 2022.

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