Funny accidents in video/computer games?

Cafe Society
1

Ever unintentionally find something funny in a video game? Maybe not necessarily an easter egg, just a funny coincedence/moment?

Example: I was playing Mechwarrior 3 for the PC. I was piloting a SuperNova in a skirmish map. The SuperNova has six extended range large lasers (big honkin’ lasers). The first thought that crossed my mind was, “I wonder how much heat will be generated if I fire all 6 at once?” So I linked them together and fired.

The screen flashed blinding white, then it did the ‘destroyed’ camera angle (when your mech is destroyed it shows it blowing up in 3rd person) but where my mech was there was a mushroom cloud rising up…even funnier I happened to do this right in the middle of a city which of course got leveled by the explosion. In Multiplayer I had great fun using this tactic to simply kamikaze myself in the middle of my opponents…of course my lancemates weren’t too amused by this.

2

Good old Mechwarrior! Sadly in 4 and onwards you can’t blow yourself up that way; it just shuts you down from overheating. Of course, they did introduce the “High Explosives” weapon that increases the destruction from your self-destructing. :smiley:

In Jedi Academy I sometimes get a glitch; if I swing my lightsaber, the lightsaber “stays” in all the places in that arc. So a few random swings make you end up looking like some kind of lightsaber hedgehog, with plates of lightsaber sticking out of you. And then, of course, you run through the level, straight through the enemies…

3

No specific video game, but I do like it when you can make the characters interact in sexually implicit ways they aren’t really supposed to. :smiley:

Also:

  1. I’d never done that in Mech Warrior 3 and now feel the need to play it again.

2)‘Hedgehog glitch’ in Jedi Academy? How do I ask for a cite in a nice way? I don’t doubt you but I would love to see this. Was it video card specific or anything?

4

Heh heh. One of my favourite head-to-head MW3 games, I did just that – on purpose, strategically. No self-immolation, though – instead of seeking out my opponent, I ran straight for a river and let him come for me. With the additional water-cooling, it’d just go to shut-down with every blast – and it guaranteed a one-shot kill at a ridiculous range, usually before my buddy could even get a shot off.

I got five or six frags in before he wised up and and forced me to take it to him. His cries of outrage were sweet, though. :smiley:

My favourite workaday configuration for mechs was always heavy laser groups balanced with another group of machine guns. Blast away with the lasers until the heat becomes a problem and then switch to the guns until you cool down enough to switch back. Non-stop hurt.

The weirdest glitch I remember was one time I was playing Quake II with the same buddy. We were playing co-operatively online, and buddy calls out “I can fly! I can fly!” We’d done a couple of tabs of acid earlier, so it took some elaboration. There was a courtyard in the map, and if you took a flying leap off the highest rooftop overlooking it (which was sure to be fatal) and immediately ducked, you wouldn’t fall. It was like you were on an invisible ceiling, which you could crawl around on. We wreaked absolute havoc in that map, because this gave us a position so high above the exposed courtyard that precision weapons were pretty ineffective – but concussion weapons were, of course, as deadly as ever – rockets or grenades that “almost” hit people on the ground sprayed gibs around – but all we had around us was open sky, so we were practically untouchable. We giggled like fools until the map changed.

I don’t know if it’s a glitch or something they didn’t think out very well, but in Starcraft Broodwar, Protoss have a totally unfair advantage. The build limit is designed to keep people’s armies about the same, right? Well, the Dark Archons can steal any enemy unit, and if you steal a peon from another race, you get a whole new build limit for units of that type. In a resource-rich map, you can crush all opposition if you’re not wiped out early. Defend and defend and defend, and then go after a poor guy who’s at his absolute limit of 200 Terrans, with a huge cloaked Protoss Carrier Fleet (maxed out), and waves and waves of Terran marines with medical support and Zerg hydralisks. There’s just no defense against it.

5

Possibly video card specific. It was on my laptop, which is pretty outdated even by JA’s standards, so I got a lot of odd glitches, sometimes good (like running from the Rancor on Hoth, leaving the cave, only to turn around and see it still after me, though happily killing enemies for me(though I couldn’t tempt it to follow me to the AT-AT, sadly)) sometimes bad (like not being able to turn my lightsaber on, which is pretty much instant death against a decent jedi/sith opponent). I’ll see if I can get some screencaps.

6

In 4 and onwards they dumbed it down significantly. From making the default viewpoint 3rd person to removing the indepentand targeting of the arms, Mechwarrior 3 was superior in just about every way to 4. The Mechs even looked better! And there’s no better weapon than heavy autocannons. You run out of ammo eventually, but until you do there’s no way to beat you in close/medium range :).

My favourite glitch was a critical hit I got in Fallout 2. I’m not even sure if it was a glitch or just really good luck but anyway: I was boxing in New Reno, got sick of using the gloves, took them off and did a targeted punch to the opponents torso. Got the message “You hit xxx for 0 damage. Unfortunately, his spine is now visible from the front.” And he died, and I lost the match for cheating!

7

This is intentional in the game, but it startled the crap out of me.
In Resident Evil 4, there’s a part where you have to get into a small motor boat and cross a lake. Of course, when you’re halfway across, this giant sea monster attacks your boat, and you have to get dragged all over the lake while trying to spear it with a harpoon. Very stressful. I died a few times, and was getting fed up with trying to kill it from the little boat. Instead, I decided to try and shoot it from the dock before ever getting on the boat. I thought I could maybe get it to show itself by firing some shots into the water. Bad idea. I shot the water a few times, but before I could react, the sea monster jumped out of the water and ATE me. Game over. It was funny as hell though.

8

In Postal 2, I was enjoying using hand grenades as booby traps. If you set one for contact explosion and leave it on the ground, it will sit there unnoticed until someone steps on it. If you set several together like that, the first explosion will set off all the other grenades, causing massive death and destruction.

Well, during the “cash your paycheck at the bank” mission, a gang of robbers burst in followed by the police, and mayhem ensues. After getting killed a couple of times, I decided to have some fun and set about twenty hand grenades in the bank entrance, then walked over to the teller to cash my check and trigger the cutscene of the robbers coming in. I figured when the panicking customers tried to flee, they’d set off the trap and maybe kill some of the troublemakers.

The cutscene begins: tire screech, car door slam, “Ok, this is a stick- WHAMMMMMM!!!” Then silence as the camera moved to follow where the crooks would be if they hadn’t just been blown to bits.

This was the first time I’d ever seen a cutscene that actually took into account what I’d been doing in the game.

9

My friend was playing Combat Flight Simulator 3 when he suddenly noticed that one of the enemy battleships was happily making its way across land - he sent me a screenshot to prove it.

Then, of course, there are the graphics glitches in Hitman - some great examples here:

http://www.3dactionplanet.com/hitman47/pota/

10

One of the games I’m testing right now involves protecting a crew of firefighters from gang attacks while they try to put out a burning building. One level takes place in an auto shop, and has a big-ass engine block hanging from the ceiling from chains. If you position yourself right, you can get it so one of the fireman following you runs head first into the engine block, sending it swinging wildly, while the fireman doesn’t slow down for a second. I knew firemen were tough, but goddamn!

11

I’m pretty sure it was intentional, since in the final Protoss mission, there’s a mini-base of Zerg in between your two starting bases, which just begs to be MCed. In “normal” play, it’s generally tough to steal a peon from one of your opponents and get away with it (at least, before you’ve won the game anyway), so they probably figured that that balanced the game. But in multiplayer, a teammate can easily send you a worker (or a whole transport full of them), which makes that trick very powerful (though it still takes a while to build up your terran and zerg bases). There’s a similar trick in Warcraft III, but everyone eats the same kind of “food”, so it doesn’t actually increase the size of your army, and you can’t use it on friendly units.

Speaking of that trick, if in one of the single-player campaign missions you possessed an enemy worker, and built that race’s altar, you could summon that race’s heroes. But you weren’t limited to three: If, for instance, you took over a human (or High Elf) worker, you could build as many paladins, mountain kings, and archmages as you had food for. Then, if you did that, the debriefing screen at the end would list you as only having used three heroes, but they’d be all wrong, none of the heroes (your own or the stolen ones) you actually used. You could also make some of the special, mission-only units this way, some of which were much better for their cost than your own.

Another quirk I see sometimes: In Diablo II, most items have randomly-generated names and properties. This sometimes leads to odd combinations like a Freezing Amulet of Thawing, or a Maiden’s Maiden’s Spear (both of which I’ve seen). It also sometimes gives a random item the same name as a unique item: Raven Claw is the name of the unique long bow, for instance, but it can also be the name for a random rare katar.

Related to Sublight’s grenade booby-traps, Myth II had a deformable environment: Explosions left craters, etc. Well, in one of the Easter-egg missions, you’re based in a town and hunting deer… With the odd effect that some of the deer charge you and explode. It’s not too hard to use the town entrance as a chokepoint to safely kill off the exploding deer, but if you kill too many there, the crater can get so deep that you can no longer leave the town, and can’t finish the mission.

12

I heard a few years ago on rec.games.roguelike.nethack, that if your Nethack character dies on the first turn, there’s a special message.

So I tried it:


Welcome to Nethack!  You are a lawful Human Knight
#mount {doesn't use up a turn}
Which direction?
You slip while trying to mount the pony.
#mount
Which direction?
You slip while trying to mount the pony.
You die...

And sure enough, then came a special message! Feel free to download Nethack (it’s free), and try the same thing. The Dev Team Thinks Of Everything.

But the time I accidentially died on turn #2, there was no special message, and I felt mildly cheated.

Scuba Ben, killed by a bag.

13

Not really an accident, but I’ve noticed that in Dynasty Warriors 5 the collision detection box for your horse doesn’t extend very far past the saddle, so you can park him against a wall in such a way that it looks like he’s been decapitated. :smiley:

14

Operation Flashpoint. We (me and some AI soldiers) were out in the country by a road waiting for an officer to come meet us and give us our mission. I waited and waited, but nobody showed up. I walked up the road a ways and found a wrecked jeep, and the 2 guys inside were dead. So much for AI driving skills! Had to replay the mission, next time it worked IIRC.

15

Planetside had some rather hilarious clipping issues. The best way to describe this is as such: Aircraft were allergic to the ground. Flying around, great. Hovering, spiffy. Sitting on level ground with the engine off, no problem. But idling? Or doing nape-of-the-earth flying? Hilarity ensues. Among the possibly crazy things that can happen-

-The aircraft clips in the ground and gets stuck underground. This is actually pretty convenient during base seiges- a full transport can drop off troops directly INSIDE the base. Sometimes, though, it would get stuck inside the base. As a defender, it was quite amusing to hear this crash then see half an aircraft poking through the wall, with gunfights still going on (the aircraft could still shoot, apparently).

-One time I was at a rally point, massing for a large-scale attack. I was bored, so to kill time I tried to land a bomber on top of a dropship. Planetside’s physics engine evidently shat itself when I attempted this, because my bomber and the dropship got stuck in a tangled mass, which then enveloped a nearby tank (think Katamari Daimacy for the mental image :slight_smile: ) and the whole mess rolled down a hillside and into a lake :eek: Best part, the Platoon leader screaming his head off on Voice chat, “who the fuck did that?!”

-Like WoW, if you log in, it has you at the exact spot you logged off. However, bases change hands frequently in this game- a friendly base one night can be an enemy base another night. Usually, the battle lines shift really rapidly, so if you respawn in an enemy base it is often unoccupied, save for automated defenses (which suck). One time I was in a MAX (exosekeleton) and respawned near where people tend to get vehicles. I had to blink for a second when I realized the crowd of players around me were enemies. I kind of sniggered to myself compulsively, realizing that none of those players saw this giant blue robot standing in their midst, then unleashed hell, mowing down a dozen of them before dying myself. It must have been a colossal WTF moment for them.

I then tried to reinact this trick, but I guess they got wise to it because they started planting mines in places people would respawn (people would respawn en massed to basically ‘teleport’ in an enemy base and take it over quickly). One time, however, I logged in, BAM died from a mine, BAM so did seven enemy players who were standing right next to me.

The best part is the game penalizes the engineer who planted the mine for friendly fire, even if he had nothing to do with it. That game was hilarious :smiley:

16

I was playing GTA San Andreas and I got the first girlfriend up to 100% which gives you some special benefits. But after you’ve reached that stat, there’s no point in keeping her around any longer and she’ll keep calling you and calling you until her stat works its way back down to 0 at which point she’ll dump you. I didn’t feel like taking 30 or so bitchy phone calls from her so I decided to just kill her. I got behind her and used the silent kill method of a targeted knife attack. Unfortunately I did this just as a cop was walking towards us. The cop started chasing me right away and I ran back to my hideout. But somehow the girlfriend was still alive. Even though I had cut her throat and left her bloody corpse on the street, she somehow managed to come back to life. The next time I saw her I used a gun and that worked much better.

I also accidentally shot one of the NPCs in Soldier of Fortune. In one level you have to storm a hotel that has been taken over by bad guys. You come upon some police officers who are under fire and you have to rescue them. I walked right up to the barricade they were hiding behind, aimed right at my enemy’s face and pulled the trigger… blasting the head off of the cop in front of me who chose that very moment to stand up. That was good for an instant “mission failed.”

17

Actually, I applaud that: it shows that the game world is consistent. I like games where the world appears to progress even when you’re not around - lends a real sense of realism. Makes me want to play that game.

18

Yeah, but it means you can’t complete the mission and you just have to restart the game. There’s no backup way to get the info.

19

I see. In that case, they need to provide an alternative game path; for example, they could make it so you can search the bodies to get the mission info.

20

City of Villains: Cutscenes can work the same way. In the first Snake mission with a cutscene, if you’re a mastermind and very good, you can send your pets in to attack while the scene is going on.