History GoodBadBugs / MiscellaneousGames

* On the UsefulNotes/{{Atari 2600}}, people would have fun with glitches induced by rapidly jiggling the power switch, which came to be known as "frying" the system. Stella, the Atari 2600 emulator, even offers a simulation of frying. Some of the more entertaining and useful frying glitches include:

** ''VideoGame/{{Combat}}'': Jet Fighters battle in Tank fields, or with solid clouds (i.e. the plane would bump the clouds instead of pass through them).

** Before it was patched, there was a bug in late 2022 when the game introduced a new system called Archmastery where you can generate pips for specific schools that would be worth more. The bug is the fact that the developers did not account for spells that have an effect of stealing pips, so if a spell tried to steal one, whoever it happened to was met with a game crash. This was especially a problem in the PvP scene where you could knock an unsuspecting victim offline so you could set up against them while they wait for the launcher to log them back in. PvE was also affected as some bosses also used spells that steal pips, so if a boss used one, then the player basically lost.

* In ''[[VideoGame/TheYukonTrail]]'', it's possible to have negative food stolen by a thief, such that your food supply goes up.

* In ''VideoGame/MadTV'', the value of your studio increases each time you sell it. If you keep buying and selling the studio, you'll eventually end up in such a colossal debt (represented by having negative money) that the minus sign will not fit into memory... thus getting you billions of dollars.

* ''VideoGame/{{Arknights}}'', for all its complicated mechanics, contains a rather funny bug that hasn't been patched, not even in the original Chinese instance of the game. The bug concerns the boss in an event, Jayston Williams. If he is defeated for the first time, he simply transitions into a second phase. However, if he is pushed during this transition, he will shift indefinately as he is pushed. When this happens, he will also ignore all obstacles in his way, including ''the very edge of the map itself''. If done 'right', he'll eventually moonwalk out of the map entirely. [[https://youtu.be/KE3D6moIf_A Observe]]!

* In ''VideoGame/DuckTales: The Quest for Gold'', one of Launchpad's possible lines of dialogue after crashing in a flying stage "The ground was harder than I thought!" can come up even if you crash into the sea. He can also say it at the end of the game, where it makes even less sense.

* In ''VideoGame/{{Uplink}}'', it is possible to get a "track down the IP of the hacker who brought down our mainframe" mission in which you are the hacker. If this happens, you have an incredibly easy mission as you don't even need to use any tools: all you need to do is report 127.0.0.1 . This [[RefugeInAudacity stunt]] is treated as perfectly normal by the game and you suffer no consequences from it.
** Fixed in a later patch, so now it says "We cannot allow you to accept this mission, on the specific instructions of the employer" when you try and take the mission from the Uplink Internal Services Machine.

* A bug in the "Art Ending" of ''VideoGame/TheStanleyParable'' (the one reached by pressing a button for four hours while an annoying sound plays) caused a black rectangle to appear on the screen, covering up part of the text, the result of an object not vanishing properly. Most people didn't even realize it was a bug, as the ending involves Stanley meeting the embodiment of Art itself. Many assumed the rectangle to be Art, along with a possible ''Film/2001ASpaceOdyssey'' reference.

* In the original arcade game of VideoGame/{{Joust}}, a player's or enemy's mount will bounce across a platform if it hits the platform too low to extend its legs. For one platform positioned just below and to the right of another, a bouncing mount will squeeze through the seemingly too-small gap between the platforms, potentially surprising another player or enemy below. The squeeze was considered a bug in the game's physics logic, but when the creators realized playtesters were using the squeeze as a strategy, it became an [[AscendedGlitch Ascended Glitch]].

* The community-driven interactive fiction game ''Webcomic/MSPaintAdventures'' contains a tribute to useful bugs. Early in the game, when the player tries to pick up a gun on the protagonist's desk, it immediately turns into a key and the text parser insists that there has never been a gun in your office. When the player picks up the key, it becomes a gun again. Subsequent attempts to use the key/gun are a crapshoot as to which item it will be at the moment. Later, the player receives a number of other objects that behave the same way, and their dual properties begin to become a benefit, like [[http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=4&p=001002 a tube of lipstick which is also a chainsaw]]

*** This gave rise to an interesting tactic in the older ''X-Tension''. Xenon destroyer ships in that game were unusual in that, despite being large capital ships, they were also extremely fast - but their agility still sucked. So a player wanting to rid the universe of some Xenon ships would park himself behind a Xenon station, putting it between himself and a destroyer. Said destroyer would come barreling at the player, notice the obstacle too late, fail to pull out of the maneuver and piledrive into the station. This would usually result in a dead destroyer and a station with downed shields. One could then wait for the shields to recharge and repeat the procedure, or cause a second destroyer collision, which would kill both the ship and the station. It's worth noting that the destroyer would bump the station a fair distance due to its sheer mass, so it was a bad idea to park one's ship directly behind it; ''X-Tension'' has to be the only game in history that allows the player to die from being rammed by a space station.

* On the UsefulNotes/{{Atari 2600}}, people used to have fun with "on-and-off"'s - glitches induced by rapidly jiggling the power switch, some of which were quite entertaining. Examples of such include:
** ''VideoGame/{{Asteroids}}'': the Satellite and UFO (the two enemy ships that appear occasionally going from one side of the screen to the other at various heights, either moving straight or diagonally while bouncing off the top and bottom edges of the screen, all while firing in random directions), will only move along the top edge of the screen. The Satellite (the bigger of the two) is funny that it only fires upwards, resulting in its shots seemingly coming from beyond the bottom of the screen.
** ''VideoGame/{{Combat}}'': Jet fighter battles in Tank Fields, or with solid clouds (i.e. the plane would bump the clouds instead of pass through them).

** ''VideoGame/{{Adventure}}'': All objects randomly facing backwards, until the abovementioned "many objects" glitch makes them flip back and forth rapidly. Dragons would appear to be spinning around drunkenly, even when dead.
** ''VideoGame/MissileCommand'': The cities turned into objects that continuously change shape, all just random gibberish, save the one at the leftmost being the most distintive that it looks like recognizable objects such as numbers.
** ''Maze Craze'': The maze turned into the type that has more than one solution, such as a complete grid (so solving the maze simply meant moving straight to the right side of the screen). This has another effect of revealing the "lurking" mechanism the robbers used to navigate the maze (eg Red robbers lean on one direction - and in the grid glitch will simply go around in circles, while Blue and Green robbers go in completely random directions). At the same time the "victory" sound for solving the maze sounded different (a simpler cute oscillating tune instead of the usual random gibberish).
** ''VideoGame/SpaceInvaders'': Player 1's cannon can fire two bullets at a time, instead of just [[OneBulletAtATime one]].

* The building game ''Besiege'' had players discover a bug in early-access where, if you place a flaming ball on a grabber and mount the grabber on several sawblades, the resulting concoction will spin uncontrollably at speeds much higher than any spinning block or wheel in the game. Dubbed the Chaos Engine by players, it is a major component in some of the most [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZw1bn9M338 insane builds]], from helicopters to podracers to planes to giant flails. The developers, for their part, were pleasantly astonished by the players' creativity, and more than a few fans claim that patching the Chaos Engine would be a sign to quit the game altogether. Of course, it helps that the Chaos Engine just plain looks badass.

* In ''{{Uplink}}'', it is possible to get a "track down the IP of the hacker who brought down our mainframe" mission in which you are the hacker. If this happens, you have an incredibly easy mission as you don't even need to use any tools: all you need to do is report 127.0.0.1 . This [[RefugeInAudacity stunt]] is treated as perfectly normal by the game and you suffer no consequences from it.

** ''VideoGame/CastlevaniaSymphonyOfTheNight'' [[http://worldbeyondwalls.free.fr/ actually has a community]] devoted to finding nifty glitches and bugs in the game. Among the ones found are ways to prevent Death from taking your Alucard Equipment, the Swords Brothers trick to go beyond 200.6% map coverage, and the Librarian glitch that gives you infinite money. Even now, after a decade, people are still finding new glitches, such as a method to get an infinite amount of Life and Heart Maxes in the Underground Caverns.

* The Japanese-only NES game based on ''SamuraiPizzaCats'' has pretty tough bosses; that is, unless you use the main character's Level 3 Ninpo attack immediately as you enter the boss chamber. For some reason this causes the boss to immediately die before even entering the chamber, possibly because the boss' HP counts up from nothing at the start of the fight instead of starting off full, allowing the Ninpo to hit them instantly when they're at 0 or 1 HP.