Exploiting Glitches in Games

Sometimes while playing a game, you might discover an interesting glitch that may make certain levels, battles, or the game in general easier or more fun. What video game glitches have you taken advantage of, if any?

When I first played Super Mario 64, I accidentally discovered that passing through certain locked doors was possible depending on how the camera was positioned. At that time I had already found all the stars, but I still found it interesting.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I have this soccer game for my GameGear, where if you run at the goalie from a certain angle, he dives out of the way and you score, every time.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

The most recent one I know of taking major advantage of is in Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction.

When your Merc has selected an item to buy from the Merchant of Menace, throw the Drop Zone beacon, but before it touches the ground, select your PDA and select another item to buy. When you return to the game, the beacon will fall and the goods will arrive, but you will not be charged. Of course this glitch seems a moot point when you start using the $1,000,000 cheat code fifty some times, and crates of advanced guns, except the ultimate portable airstrike missile launcher only cost from $5,000 to $15,000 some.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I don't remember exactly how it was done, but in Final Fantasy Tactics, if a job had enough abilities to where you would have to scroll down to see them all you would have to get an ability on a lower (or upper part of the list) and go to another ability at the top (or bottom) of the list and act like you're buying it, but instead of pressing yes, you would hold square and press down (or up) and it would scroll to the ability you've already gotten and you would end up with like 9999 JP or just able to get all the abilities of that job. I didn't use it that often, honestly, but sometimes, I just hated being a job like chemist and wanted to get some of the stuff quick. But I assure you I didn't know about this till my like 5th play through.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

I abused the "multiply items" glitch from ES: Oblivion. It gave me some needed money to throy around, plus I loved seeing the shower of, say, water melons. An entire street filled with water melons is perhaps one of the funniest things I've seen. For no reason at all.

I was speaking idiomatically.

I remember a glitch in the original Deus Ex that I heard about and exploited. Basically if you completed a certain objective earlier on, a person would later give you an item and you would recieve skill points. If your inventory is full, he would tell you to clear some space and hold onto it until you do. Only thing is, you would still get the skill points EVERY time you talked to him until you opened an inventory space, so after a few minutes of talking to him over and over agian you could get enough skill points to max out every skill in the game. However, this happens at the end of the third-to-last mission, so it's only an end-game thing really. But it was quite fun going through the last two levels with everything at max.

How ya doing, buddy?

The only glitch I've actively exploited has been the infinite money trick from Saga Frontier. It's actually abusing two glitches in one. The first lets you keep grabbing items from the salvage store over and over without paying. This is way too slow to get any meaningful money, but it gets you the initial capital to start manipulating the gold market, taking advantage of the price caps to get back more money than you started with.

I should feel bad about it, but game balance is practically non-existent in that game, and spending the time to actually earn enough money to buy anything good is beyond tedious. The game really isn't much fun unless you cheat, sadly.

FELIPE NO

The only thing I remember is that I mass cloned all my items in Pokémon Red using that Missingno glitch or something. It was more fun to teach your Pokémon all sorts of TMs without worrying about the amount you had.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

I love that Mario 64 one. I'm not sure why - but then again, it's quite hard to define precisely why one likes anything at all without using an "it's fun" or "it's nice" or something along those vague lines.

I suppose my first glitch was the afforementioned Missingno one. Yes, yes. Rare candies, Master Balls, the lot.

Next was a rather odd Zelda 64 "glitch". I use inverted commas because it's more of an invoked thing - you pull out the right side of the cartridge which allows you to walk through certain walls.

I suppose the W-Item trick could be termed a glitch. I used that to no end...

In Star Ocean, Till the End of Time, I frequently use the 'Skip-cancelling' glitch, which basically allows you to 'skip' moves in a combo. In a Star Ocean combo, every other move in a combo can be countered under certain conditions, so it's often beneficial to skip these moves despite the sacrifice in damage, as to remove the possibility of being screwed over.

In Soul Calibur II, I used (sometimes by accident) the infamous '2G' glitch which allows you to block when you shouldn't be able to. It's not generally banned because the input window seems to be in the region of four frames under 60 FPS. I also used the SCc technique to lessen the recovery on Raphae's 6BB - although that's more for the flash factor.
In Soul Calibur III, I tended to use the G22 glitch, which basically lets you cancel all or part of the animation of particular moves so that you might be able to sneak some extra hits in. It's particularly noticeable on throws - in all fighting games, throws are overly elaborate and the animation puts both characters on rails for perhaps ten seconds. If you can break out of these rails in the last, say, four seconds, it's enough to unleash a damaging combo.
I don't tend to use this against other people (unless we've agreed that we'll permit it) though.

In general, I have no moral objection to using glitches. I may opt out of using a glitch that improves efficiency on the basis that it renders the game completely dull, but if others want to use it, then I feel no need to be prescriptive in my behaviour. I suppose if it's in the game, it's in the game (alas, a display of the pinnacle of deductive logic).

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I too liked the Missingno glitch to get 99 rare candies and beef up my pokemon since the gym leaders were too hard for me back then. Venusaur vs. Arcanine certainly doesn't cut it, so I had to level up some other pokemon.

I don't know if it's a glitch moreso than an AI flaw, but in Marvel Vs. Capcom 2, I would just spam BBHood's Smiling Bullets/Morrigan's Soul Fists when I felt that the AI was in psychic rampage mode. Throw in assists every possible moment and the computer would just block and die of chip damage. Same goes for any projectile user.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

I've seen videos of people taking advantage of glitches in the Metroid Prime games that allowed them to get items and access areas before they are suppose to. There are also glitches that allow players to access areas that they are not suppose to go to, players call them "secret worlds".

xman25

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I was slightly surprised when i found one in Ys III only 30 minutes into the game. i was leveling up in the first cave for the sake of having it easy for the first stretch of gameplay and managed to find a bat that spawned off-screen. It was FANTASTIC, by positioning myself at the edge of the floor i was on i was right outside the bat's turnaround point, while the bat was still in range of my mad swinging as the attack button was held down. i left it on with the controller rubberbanded and max leveled in a matter of 3 days (the bat didn't give much exp).

I totally abuse the item dupe trick in PSO to makes the game a little bit more friendly, cause if someone gets a rare drop, we can clone it for everyone to share :3... though i mainly use it for money for weapon appraisals.

I didn't have much time to abuse it because of how late in the game you get erdrick's armor, but in dragon warrior1 once you have erdrick's armor, you recover hp for every step you take. i found that if you step out of a town/castle (the dragonlord's castle for instance) you can step out and back in with a relatively low encounter rate (it very well could be zero) allowing you to get back in the castle with max hp without consuming precious MPs. I tried using this tactic on the bottom staircase of the dragonlord's castle, but it seemed to be better in the overworld.

In the next tetris for PS2, i would spin the blocks (the square doesn't work) in place rapidly to keep them from locking into place in order to buy time to make my next move.

currently i used the missingno trick to run into a lv 176 wild nidorino and caught it with some master balls that i happened to have :3. i made a party of these brutes, and made them evolve into nidoking with some moonstones i had on hand. then i decided to give them all horn drill because it has a high rate of accuracy when used against lower level pokemon... and seriously... who in the game is gonna have pokemon higher than 176?

in the old bomberman games they had the suit of 30 second invincibility, which you had until 30 seconds of a stage passed. i used the invincibility to start a chain reaction of bombs under me, allowing me to be dropping bombs to feed the flame as i walked. and as long as i finished the round in less than 30 seconds, i would be able to use it in the next stage, allowing me to speed through the game rather quickly.

In kirby's adventure for NES, at the orange ocean stage, there was a cannon fuse under water that you needed to light with a laser. not realizing i could use the laser to shoot the fuse, i used the fire ability.
"....but Gakineko, you can't use fire underwater!"
aha, but you are mistaken. you can't breathe fire underwater, but the demonstration of the power gives you the ability to light things on fire regardless of where you are. so in the previous room i snagged the guy that had the fire power and swallowed him. i took him to the next room and ejected the fire power. i sucked it up and sank to the bottom where the fuse was. i pressed down, which made kirby spew fire to demonstrate the ability i had, resulting with a lit fuse. i then quickly swam and jumped into the cannon. it was an obscure method to solving the puzzle, but it worked anyway (^_^)

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

I abused the hell out of the missingno glitch in the original Pokemon Red and Blue. I never used any rare candies, though. They don't give any stat EXP!

I was speaking idiomatically.

I remember finding one quite by accident a long time ago. It was on the original Zelda: Link's Awakening (any subsequent versions of this have the "glitch" removed unfortunately, like the color GB one).

The glitch was, anytime you were about to move to another area, if you timed it right, and pressed Select, then it would take you to the map screen, and upon coming back, you'd be in the same exact spot, except you're on the next map you were going too.

For example, let's say you were going to one map from the upper right corner. After using this glitch, you'd be in the same upper right corner of the next area, which was useful for getting past certain areas sooner than you're supposed to be there (I remember getting the fire wand right away from the last dungeon using this, even before recovering the sword from the beach lol).

There was a downside to this though. You could get stuck in an area, and then be unable to get out of there (most notably if you're on the beach, and use it to glitch onto the top area of the map, in which case you'd end up in the "sky" at the top portion of the overworld map. And if you got stuck there, you'd fall down as if you were falling down a hole endlessly, but dungeons were sometimes a pain too).

And sometimes it might save you where you were, so if you were in a really bad spot, and dying and what not wouldn't get you out of there, then you had to restart the game. With experience you could avoid some of these areas though.

The other downside was that I wore out my select button using this so much on my old gameboy lol.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

I remember a bug in Max Payne 1. Bullet time worked in a way so it makes you invincible while it lasts. It came in handy at a part where you meet your first enemy with a m79 grenade launcher

FELIPE NO

In Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage! I was able to go almost anywhere in Aquaria Towers but ramming my way out of the level's bounds.
I did this in the top area, where I put myself right against the edge of the area (at the corner where ground and barrier meet); then I pointed straight down facing towards the boundary of the level and used the underwater ramming move until I pushed myself out of the level.
I could then go anywhere in the level I wanted with reletive ease.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

I used the Zelda: Link's Awakening glitch a few times. I also sequence breaked in several Metroid games.

I really like the glitches in the NES Mega Man games. I've skipped over a good chunk of Bubble Man's level doing that, and I like grabbing ladders on the bottom of the screen from the top.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Quote:

Next was a rather odd Zelda 64 "glitch". I use inverted commas because it's more of an invoked thing - you pull out the right side of the cartridge which allows you to walk through certain walls.

Hahaha, I remember that. There was also a trick where you could see when the cartridge was created, and in which country, by pulling the left side of the cartridge out when starting a new game (or something like that.)

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Ah yes, I've used the dupe glitch in Wild Arms to get me infinite apples. Then i was unstoppable!!

Most amazing jew boots

I remember in FFVIII, I tried the Selphie trick where you use her Limit Break, then open your PS1, "pausing" the game. Then I kept flipping through until "The End" popped up. I think I tried using that on that one weapon.

Also, in KOTORII, there's one part where you talk about Visas' homeworld with Kreia. I ended up getting all the influence I wanted with her and managed to get the dialogue options I hadn't been able to get my first playthrough.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Originally Posted by terrakazama

Also, in KOTORII, there's one part where you talk about Visas' homeworld with Kreia. I ended up getting all the influence I wanted with her and managed to get the dialogue options I hadn't been able to get my first playthrough.

KOTOR II was pretty notorious for its many bugs and glitches (and it's incredibly lame 2nd half of the game. First half kicks butt though, when you're going around planets solving problems), some of which could cause your game to freeze up (I remember talking to that merchant outside of Dantooine, and asked him something and the game froze on me, forcing a reboot).

I don't remember all of them, but one of my favorite ones was talking to Hanharr (the chewbacca lookalike, cept he seems a lot more pissed off, but if you talk to him in the game, he explains why he's so angry) and certain dialogue would cause him to respond in a certain way, which would then give him an extra 2 str at the cost of 1 intel (I think that's what it was).

Strangely enough, you could repeatedly talk to him and have that +2/-1 thing continue (whereas other characters don't really give you any more gains or faction after you speak with them at least once on that subject).

The funny thing is, after it goes past 0 intel, for some reason instead of staying there, his intel resets to 255 (I think, I'm not 100% positive, as I haven't played in a while). So not only could he be incredibly strong, but still had a lot of intellect as well (I don't think you can do this with the other characters).

I was speaking idiomatically.