# The Buggiest Game You've Ever Played **URL:** \ **Category:** The Game Room\ **Created:** [July 11, 2009, 8:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-buggiest-game-youve-ever-played/502660 "2009-07-11T08:01:05Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Sofis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e5b9ba/32.png) [@Sofis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sofis)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2009, 8:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-buggiest-game-youve-ever-played/502660/41 "2009-07-12T08:03:28Z")
> [@nevermore](#): > > I’m going to go way back and say **Quest for Glory IV**. I always play a thief, and you literally couldn’t finish the game out of the box as a thief. I don’t remember exactly what the bug was, but it was such that the thief’s way of getting to a particular item/location simply did not work, so you couldn’t move forward past that point in the plot. As it was an adventure game, there was no other way to get to the damn thing besides the one broken-ass way they wrote it. > > I’m sure it was fixed with a patch later, but by then I’d already lost interest. Sucks, though, because I missed a good chunk of story between IV and V. That’s the one I thought of when I saw the thread title. I don’t remember any thief-specific bugs, but then I didn’t play much as a thief… I suspect you’re wrong about being locked into the thiefly method of getting things done, though. The games were very good about allowing you to solve the puzzles by any method, as long as you had the skills/stats for it (though you’d generally get more points by doing it the way appropriate for your class). Quest for Glory 3 was pretty buggy too, though not showstoppingly that I recall. Those were some damn good games, but it sure wasn’t because of the programming quality. ---
**Author:** ![Trepa\_Mayfield](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/edb3f5/32.png) [@Trepa\_Mayfield](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trepa_Mayfield)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2009, 8:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-buggiest-game-youve-ever-played/502660/42 "2009-07-12T08:54:56Z")
> [@Jihi](#): > > Though I’ve never played it this is undoubtedly the correct answer. Six years after it’s release _Big Rigs_ is still legendary for it’s horribleness. > > The guy who was credited as Lead Programmer on the project claims to have had no input into the game. He licensed the engine to a budget gaming company called ‘Stellar Stone’ and it was developed in the Ukraine over the course of a couple of months. It was blatantly unfinished. > > The AI is nonexistent. Your opponents don’t move at all. The level geometry and collision detection is nearly so as you can drive through anything like it wasn’t there. Buildings, trees, walls, it didn’t matter. And if you saw a bridge and tried to drive across it you’d fall completely out the level. And one of the ‘tracks’ wasn’t even implemented. If you clicked on it in the menu the game just crashed completely. > > At least it, (presumably), didn’t erase your hard drive when you went to uninstall it. You forgot about the infinite acceleration when pressing reverse. That was a fun day. ---
**Author:** ![VinylTurnip](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/b2d939/32.png) [@VinylTurnip](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/VinylTurnip)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2009, 1:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-buggiest-game-youve-ever-played/502660/43 "2009-07-12T13:56:03Z")
> [@Carnick](#): > > I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Big Rigs isn’t that bad, when you factor in expectations. Big Rigs was an unknown budget game from an unknown developer starring big rigs. Did anyone expect it to be anything more than a half aborted fetus of a game? Less \*Howard the Duck \*and more “WORST YOUTUBE VID EVAR!!@”, for sure. Its existence would never have been known if not for the GameSpot review that immortalized it. That it was actually sold as a retail product (rather than withering away on some Ukranian’s hard drive) is what beggars belief—even budget titles tend to have \*some \*semblance of gameplay. \*Big Rigs \*has no gameplay; there is no race. Your opponents never leave the starting line. As an entertainment experience, it would be like paying $15 for a movie ticket only to watch a few seconds of illegible credits scroll sideways across the screen followed by a few frame shudders and then a splash of melted celluloid from the hot projector bulb. Lights go up; thanks for coming, folks! ---
**Author:** ![Jolly\_Roger](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/91b2a8/32.png) [@Jolly\_Roger](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jolly_Roger)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2009, 2:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-buggiest-game-youve-ever-played/502660/44 "2009-07-12T14:05:36Z")
As someone said above **Age of Conan** was awful at release. Not a bug, but **NWN2: Storm of Zehir’s** SecuROM pretty much axed that game for me. The game was choppy on my laptop, but the SecuROM dicked up my DVD rom so badly I can’t even use it for anything but that game. I’ve tried to uninstall SecuROM several times, but the drive is still essentially useless. At this point the only way I can think of fixing it is to wipe the hard drvive and reinstall the OS. Which then means I’d have to reinstall everything else. So that game is on my “Advise friends not to buy” list. Going back a decade \*\*Civilization Call to Power \*\*was pretty bad. ---
**Author:** ![aruvqan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aruvqan/32/2891_2.png) [@aruvqan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aruvqan)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2009, 2:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-buggiest-game-youve-ever-played/502660/45 "2009-07-12T14:29:22Z")
> [@Kobal2](#): > > Wooah, blast from the past. I remember, back in high school, copying by hand all entries on the Sim City antipiracy booklet during history class. Printed purple on burgundy paper, smallest font. Population numbers of something like 800 real world cities, plus some kind of Rosicrucian drawing for each. Good times 😃 Ha! That’s it, Sim City! Anybody ever play DungeonKeeper? The game where you are the bad guys and try to kill off and torture all the good guys? I loved the female demon that was the one that cracked the whip =) ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2009, 2:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-buggiest-game-youve-ever-played/502660/46 "2009-07-12T14:32:11Z")
_Privateer 2: the Darkening._ The thing is, if there weren’t a 50% chance that the game would crash at the end of a mission, and if the gameplay weren’t basically broken, it would have been considered a terrific game. The missions were complex and varied, the worlds had a uniquely twisted feel to them, and the cutscenes (this is from the FMV era of computer gaming) had one of the most interesting casts I’ve ever seen in a computer game: Christopher Walken, John Hurt, Brian Blessed, Jürgen Prochnow and, as the player, a young Clive Owen! ---
**Author:** ![FinnAgain](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/finnagain/32/12500_2.png) [@FinnAgain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FinnAgain)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2009, 2:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-buggiest-game-youve-ever-played/502660/47 "2009-07-12T14:41:21Z")
> [@aruvqan](#): > > Anybody ever play DungeonKeeper? The game where you are the bad guys and try to kill off and torture all the good guys? I loved the female demon that was the one that cracked the whip =) Awesome game. DK II was also good. Sadly, can’t get 'em to run on a modern computer (or at least, I can’t). ---
**Author:** ![Khadaji](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/9e8a1a/32.png) [@Khadaji](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Khadaji)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2009, 4:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-buggiest-game-youve-ever-played/502660/48 "2009-07-12T16:02:47Z")
Daikatana. I still won’t play anything that I know Romero is associated with. ---
**Author:** ![FinnAgain](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/finnagain/32/12500_2.png) [@FinnAgain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FinnAgain)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2009, 4:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-buggiest-game-youve-ever-played/502660/49 "2009-07-12T16:14:29Z")
So… he _didn’t_ make you his bitch? ---
**Author:** ![Airman\_Doors\_USAF](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e36b37/32.png) [@Airman\_Doors\_USAF](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Airman_Doors_USAF)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2009, 4:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-buggiest-game-youve-ever-played/502660/50 "2009-07-12T16:17:20Z")
> [@FinnAgain](#): > > So… he _didn’t_ make you his bitch? He just couldn’t suck it down, that’s all. ---
**Author:** ![Kamino\_Neko](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kamino_neko/32/34_2.png) [@Kamino\_Neko](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kamino_Neko)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2009, 4:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-buggiest-game-youve-ever-played/502660/51 "2009-07-12T16:31:30Z")
> [@FinnAgain](#): > > Awesome game. DK II was also good. Sadly, can’t get 'em to run on a modern computer (or at least, I can’t). Are they DOS games? If so, get DOSBox, and D-Fend Reloaded (the best DOSBox front-end, IMO). If not, I got nothin’… ---
**Author:** ![Lamia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/8e7dd6/32.png) [@Lamia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lamia)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2009, 4:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-buggiest-game-youve-ever-played/502660/52 "2009-07-12T16:43:10Z")
> [@nevermore](#): > > I’m going to go way back and say **Quest for Glory IV**. I always play a thief, and you literally couldn’t finish the game out of the box as a thief. I don’t remember exactly what the bug was, but it was such that the thief’s way of getting to a particular item/location simply did not work, so you couldn’t move forward past that point in the plot. As it was an adventure game, there was no other way to get to the damn thing besides the one broken-ass way they wrote it. > > I’m sure it was fixed with a patch later, but by then I’d already lost interest. Sucks, though, because I missed a good chunk of story between IV and V. There were several bugs in **QfG4** that were NOT fixed, not even when the game was re-released as part of a **QfG** compilation. I know because that’s the version of the game I have. There were a number of things that would make it crash; sometimes it was possible to avoid these actions, sometimes not. There were a couple of places where some necessary action would sometimes lead to a crash, making it impossible to proceed. The compilation actually included saved game files that would allow you to skip one common bug, although doing this meant you couldn’t import your character from one of the previous games. There’s another bug that can occur right at the end of the game, preventing you from beating the final villain. Very frustrating. > [@Sofis](#): > > That’s the one I thought of when I saw the thread title. I don’t remember any thief-specific bugs, but then I didn’t play much as a thief… I suspect you’re wrong about being locked into the thiefly method of getting things done, though. The games were very good about allowing you to solve the puzzles by any method, as long as you had the skills/stats for it (though you’d generally get more points by doing it the way appropriate for your class). I have played through the game (which, aside from the bugs, is really great) with all the different character classes and never encountered a problem that a thief could not solve. I may have had to use skills associated with another class though, I can’t remember. There is a bug that keeps the thief from obtaining a certain item at a certain time, but you should be able to go back on a different night and get it then. ---
**Author:** ![FinnAgain](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/finnagain/32/12500_2.png) [@FinnAgain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FinnAgain)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2009, 5:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-buggiest-game-youve-ever-played/502660/53 "2009-07-12T17:15:31Z")
> [@Tengu](#): > > Are they DOS games? If so, get DOSBox, and D-Fend Reloaded (the best DOSBox front-end, IMO). Pretty sure that they’re windows games. ---
**Author:** ![Darkhold](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/90db22/32.png) [@Darkhold](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darkhold)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2009, 5:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-buggiest-game-youve-ever-played/502660/54 "2009-07-12T17:42:42Z")
**Pools of Radiance** was already mentioned but I’d like to add I couldn’t even install the game. It would flatly refuse to acknowledge your ability to install on any drive but C:. My C: drive was full. Some people posted a work around that involved you editing your registry and that worked. Also the company later released a patch that would allow you to install the damn thing on another drive (but it would still check your C: drive for size limits and STILL refuse to install if C: didn’t have enough space) by the time I actually got the thing installed I didn’t want to play it anymore. I uninstalled it and never touched it again. What a waste. For constancy I give credit to the **X** series. First game I got **X2 The Threat** on release was a buggy mass of mistakes. Things like mobile mining were on the box but not in the actual game. You never knew where the next crash was coming form or what next would go screwy for no reason. Later the game company patched it and added a bunch of nice stuff to the game. So far every other in the series has been the same ( **X3: The Reunion, X3: Terran Conflict** ) buggy beyond words on release. Patched and tons of extra content over time. Almost makes up for it. ---
**Author:** ![Tixenfleaz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e9a140/32.png) [@Tixenfleaz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tixenfleaz)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2009, 5:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-buggiest-game-youve-ever-played/502660/55 "2009-07-12T17:59:52Z")
> [@John\_DiFool](#): > > Yeah, they’ve managed to squash all those bugs, but it is still running on an outdated engine. Combine that with the glacial pace of addons (still no new theatres, just the Western Front, navies are still an afterthought), and it’s a no-sale for me. /Hijack/. I signed up for a free trial of **WWII:Online** and thought that it was the internet version of a practical joke. One year later and I’m still playing it. Sometimes obsessively. Most of your criticisms are valid. The mediocre graphics are explainable due to the vast size of the game world and the ballistics modeling. Add in the fact that several hundred people may be battling over the same city and thats a lotta calculations going on. More addons would be nice, but that’s not likely to happen save for the occasional addition of new vehicles. Suprisingly, the player base doesn’t seem too concerned about the lack of new stuff. I graduated to WWII:Online from the Battlefied series, and it is very much an acquired taste. What sold me was the ability to take part in large scale battles with clear winners and losers. In BF I could score 30 kills and not remember a one of them. In WWII I may score only 3-4 kills in a night, but they are both memorable and satisfying. Not to mention that that I may have scored them in a Sherman, or a Spitfire, or manning a Bofors AA. A campaign can go for months and I’ve definitely had an impact on some of them, whether it’s by capping a spawn point, or blowing up a forward base. It’s more of a strategy game than an FPS, but it’s worth giving the free trial a chance if you’re bored with the stuff you’re playing now. ---
**Author:** ![SmashTheState](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e36b37/32.png) [@SmashTheState](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SmashTheState)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2009, 7:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-buggiest-game-youve-ever-played/502660/56 "2009-07-12T19:19:39Z")
> [@Tixenfleaz](#): > > In BF I could score 30 kills and not remember a one of them. I stopped playing BF2 because I got tired of the choke points on every map being occupied by 13 year old Koreans flinging an endless stream of grenades. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2009, 5:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-buggiest-game-youve-ever-played/502660/57 "2009-07-13T05:15:04Z")
> [@FinnAgain](#): > > Pretty sure that they’re windows games. A quick look on Wikipedia shows that there was a DOS version of [Dungeon Keeper](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_Keeper), but getting Dosbox to emulate a 100Mhx 486DX2 takes a fairly strong computer. On the other hand, it says that the Windows version still works on XP, at least. The [article on DKII](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_Keeper_2), on the other hand, includes no extra information, other than it requires Windows. As for the OP: [Superman 64](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman_64) is the only one I can remember playing. I believe there were bugs that made the controls stop working. As the game itself was awful, I didn’t play it much. But considering that one very basic bug, I’d assume that there were probably a lot more. ---
**Author:** ![Mosier](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7ea924/32.png) [@Mosier](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mosier)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2009, 6:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-buggiest-game-youve-ever-played/502660/58 "2009-07-13T06:39:18Z")
> [@Jolly\_Roger](#): > > Going back a decade \*\*Civilization Call to Power \*\*was pretty bad. The computer civs would reach a point where they stopped working after awhile. No developed lands, no unit construction, no nothing! I don’t know for sure what caused the bug, but I suspect it was the fucked-up technology tree, where you could get advanced techs without researching any of the prerequisites. Once the computer civs got a tech this, they tried building the advanced unit/building, but it was hopelessly expensive, bogging down the entire civ to the point where it would just stall, doing nothing for hundreds of turns. It was extremely rare for a civ to make it to the genetic age without stalling out like this, and I never once saw a diamond age computer civ. ---
**Author:** ![asterion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/4da419/32.png) [@asterion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asterion)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2009, 10:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-buggiest-game-youve-ever-played/502660/59 "2009-07-13T10:25:08Z")
Outpost by Sierra On-line is up there. Great concept and the game seems to play just fine in the beginning. However, something like half the ideas mentioned in the online help simply don’t exist in the game. It had a number of other bugs as well. I don’t know if it is/was just my computer, but I could never get Wing Commander IV to run. ---
**Author:** ![Meeko](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e495f1/32.png) [@Meeko](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Meeko)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2009, 2:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-buggiest-game-youve-ever-played/502660/60 "2009-07-13T14:05:07Z")
> [@kaylasdad99](#): > > Gotta be [Cootie.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cootie_(game)) Win Sir. Win. > [@Chronos](#): > > It may not have been the buggiest in absolute terms, but _Scorched Earth_ had to have had the largest number of exploitable bugs. Apparently most of the game state was stored directly in the video memory, so if you could make it look like something would happen on the screen, you could make it actually happen. So you could, for instance, drive through a mountain by overwriting the mountain pixels with pixels from your turret, or drive across chasms on a “bridge” made out of the mouse cursor. You could also exploit the hill-climbing mechanism to cause your tank to levitate straight up into the air, or various other tricks (I’ve been known to beat a set of enemies without firing a single shot). > > There were also some other less pleasant bugs, too: The game would usually crash after about a dozen rounds in a row, the “save game” feature was completely unusable, and occasionally a projectile would get stuck on a wall and never detonate, forcing you to use the “Mass Kill” feature to end the round. But those are all fairly mundane, compared to the exploitable ones. **Wow. I am so going to go do this.** But, A dozen games, Chronos? I always wanted to just sit down and play 1000 rounds of Scorch, but, well, I think my patience ended around round 8. But yeah, I guess the game did not escape bug free. I knew about using the fuel tank (The mountain climbing) glitch, but, that was the only one I ever knew about. What I liked about Scorch, is that you could edit the “Talk Files”, so that your own messages could appear above the tanks. But, I like Scorch. You can verify that with **my** following Youtube video. (Again, my Ideas suffer from my implementation. On Second thought, probably better to watch this one with out sound.) [![](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/_dtq5Y9H9Lk/hqdefault.jpg "Live Action Scorched Earth") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dtq5Y9H9Lk) I recently bought “American Billiards” for my Vista box. Barely got through one game with it. I must have repressed most of it, but the graphics didn’t render correctly, or were simply not there. Virtual pool, this is not But, perhaps you guys have seen the Commercial for gamefly? About never buying a bad game again? All of the gamers in the commercial go ape shit after buying a crap game. Yeah, I was pretty much there. I’ve found just as good [bad] games at the Dollar store. (Then again, I also found Civ. II at the dollar store. So, go figure). [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-buggiest-game-youve-ever-played/502660.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-buggiest-game-youve-ever-played/502660.md?page=4)