Game-ending Bugs

[Thalzon]

So I was playin' Red Steel 2 and just beat the second boss (Shinjiro? Anyway), and I'm told to go back to the dojo. Great! I think to myself, I can do that.

Or not.

Exiting the area is impossible, because I already pressed the button to get out of the area once before. It doesn't work anymore, and the door is closed. So I'm forever trapped within the Kusagari Tower.

Fucking BALLS, man. And I was enjoying it up until then.

To ease my frustrations, I made this thread. Solutions to game-ending bugs or other game-ending bugs, particularly in modern games, is the topic at hand.

[Brandon Strader]

I got stuck at a save point area in God of War 2 after a boss battle... could never find the way out of the little jungle area and I gave up on the game. Weird cause I finished the first game in about 5 hours. I think the second game was just more of the same and it was too boring and dragging on for me to want to start AGAIN from the beginning. I might do it one of these days though, since it's been a few years.

[The Phalanx]

To ease my frustrations, I made this thread. Solutions to game-ending bugs or other game-ending bugs, particularly in modern games, is the topic at hand.

I take it you saved just before the bug kicked in? Otherwise I'd say reload from last save/last checkpoint; failing that, just restart the system and it should fix things. Well, hopefully anyway.

I had a game-ending bug in Blaster Master, wherein I clipped through a wall inside my tank and couldn't climb out. On the NES days, after spending 4 hours on the game as a kid? Pure, soul-destroying rage.

[sephfire]

Far Cry: Instinct

Game was awesome and played beautifully until the final boss. He was undefeatable. No matter how many times you shot him, he never died. I even turned on an invincibility cheat and emptied every bullet I had into him. No luck.

A real sour way to finish an otherwise fun game.

[WaywardSon]

Got stuck in Baldur's Gate after clearing and flooding a mine. I walked out the same way I came in, instead of just walking to a teleport (in my defense, I never saw the damned thing, and if it hadn't been for a walkthrough, I would've never known about it). The dwarves flooded the mines, and next thing I know, I'm locked out of Baldur's Gate (the city). City gates were down, and there was no (regular) way of getting in. And I've been saving my game in a single slot. So... Uhm... Yeah.

Then there's that bug in XBox 360 version of Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands. A friend of mine fell a long way down after failing to grab on to a ledge (he was out of those rewind thingies), and the game's autosave feature kicked in. The game reloads from the last save, only to have him stuck in an area he had cleared quite some time ago, with all the gates / exits locked. Had it been me, I would've stopped playing the game, but he decided to restart it completely.

[DragonAvenger]

My cart of Lufia II used to erase anywhere from 1 to 3 of the save slots, meaning my brother got preference (his system) to save in all four slots. I didn't finally get to play the game until years later on an emulator (easier for the 100-level dungeon anyways).

The FFVII disk 2 I had was scratched, and would freeze during the cut scene right after the battle with Diamond WEAPON. I had to beat the thing like 10 times and finally through some miracle the game loaded past that spot.

[Doulifée]

The FFVII disk 2 I had was scratched, and would freeze during the cut scene right after the battle with Diamond WEAPON. I had to beat the thing like 10 times and finally through some miracle the game loaded past that spot.

i had the same problem during a fmv. solution? switch disk 2 and 3, watch cutscene from disk 3, reswitch back, resume your game from disk 2.

[Skummel Maske]

That's a really clever workaround!

I remember having the same problem, but with FFVIII (I believe it was when you released Adel or something).

[DragonAvenger]

Oh, and another. Tactics Ogre for Playstation would not load saves. I was pretty disappointed that I had to give up on that one. I even tried it on my cousin's PS to no avail.

[Cecilff2]

STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl has you help this guy called "Mole" out near the military base. After you do so he runs to this open sewer manhole and tells you to get inside. If you do not actually talk to him before you jump in, you can NEVER complete the game. You can leave the sewers and talk to him afterwards but he won't advance the missions status and it'll be stuck.

So reload a save before the event and make sure you talk to him.

[noTuX]

ALWAYS have two save slots for one game.

[The Orichalcon]

I don't know if anyone here ever played Ultima VIII: Pagan, but that game was full of game-stopping bugs. Funnily enough, it didn't destroy the game.

U8 was similar to Dragon Age, in that you could choose what you say to people, and pretty much control who was involved in the story and who wasn't. The problem is the control went too far. You could kill off main character who were integral to the storyline at some point in the future. You could even kill yourself at one point and return to visit your exploded corpse later on, thanks to a scripted event where you absolutely have to be alive. (You light a bomb in your backpack, then trigger the scripted event. You blow up into chunky pieces halfway through, but miraculously turn up alive in the next scene.)

The game had an inbuilt security system against this bug, but it was easily avoided. If you hurt anyone in the main city (where the storyline integral people roamed) the local sorcerer would show up and brutally slaughter you, and there was nothing you could do about it. But you could avoid this by simply lighting a bomb next to anyone you wanted to kill, then running so they were off-screen when it blew up. When you return, you can click on their corpse and even loot them. You could even do this to the sorcerer himself and he would no longer show up to kick your ass if you misbehaved.

I enjoyed the game more by trying to kill everyone I could while still being able to finish the game. Harder than you think! Luckily you can completely bypass most of the game thanks to a couple of other big bugs.

[Gollgagh]

ALWAYS have two save slots for one game.

I use, like, 20

[Thalzon]

Red Steel 2 auto-saves so there's no way to load an earlier save. It saved immediately after the boss.

Hopefully a nice, hard reset is all it'll take to fix the issue.

[The Phalanx]

Oh yeah, another one.

The Suffering: Ties That Bind. A pretty mediocre sequel to what I found to be an enjoyable game overall, but I was pretty hell-bent on beating it with the best ending I could manage. That is, save all the important NPC's and generally be an upstanding guy.

The prison warden, while escorting him, ended up stuck on top of a computer console and wouldn't budge. I tried moving to another room in the hopes that he'd follow me but when I did it auto-saved, and when I went back he was dead. With no enemies around. Motherfucker.

The second glitch, during the same game, was similar; I tried to kill a boss while this scottish dude was trapped in a wall of fire. The guy RAN OUT OF THE FIRE and dashed into another room, wreathed in flames and running around in circles screaming "JAYSUS CHRIST" and "WHY WON'T YOU SAVE ME." Even after beating the boss he kept doing it.

Whats worse is that both counted as being killed, so no good ending.

Not that I could BEAT the game, since the final boss was a combination of teeth-grindingly difficult and bug-ridden instant-death mess.

[Darklink42]

Got stuck in Baldur's Gate after clearing and flooding a mine. I walked out the same way I came in, instead of just walking to a teleport (in my defense, I never saw the damned thing, and if it hadn't been for a walkthrough, I would've never known about it). The dwarves flooded the mines, and next thing I know, I'm locked out of Baldur's Gate (the city). City gates were down, and there was no (regular) way of getting in. And I've been saving my game in a single slot. So... Uhm... Yeah.

I had so many problems with this game, but the worst was when I found a door in one of the towns that was locked, successfully picked it, and the game froze as soon as I tried to enter it, taking my saves with it. I can't say I've played that game since.

[wildfire]

A few years ago, I had just recently gotten a used copy of Dragon Warrior 7, and about 12 hours in, I get to this cursed town, only to find that the item that uncurses it, which you get by saving a previous town, is not in my inventory.

I scrapped that save (ocviously), and never played from that disk again. I didn't trust that bastard. I did finally get past that point, when I played it on my PSP.

[kitty]

My sister was playing Parasite Eve and neglected to pick up the rocket launcher needed to kill a boss. Well she saved and couldn't head back to get it so she couldn't kill the boss. Can't say she ever put the disk back in the console ever.

[Garpocalypse]

Not really an ingame bug but back in the day I had a PSOne Memory card that bragged about its 25x storage or something like that. What I didn't realize was that it used crap compression to cram all of those "blocks" in there. Well I had used the card to play FF7 and once when I was all the way through the extra side quests on the third disc and about to head into the crater the memory card corrupted all of my saves. Thankfully I had saved on a different card but the last save I did was all the way back in Cosmo Canyon.

So I played like hell one weekend to get back to where I was. Not really a game ending bug but oh well. Moving On.

-Gar

Does Bug! for the Saturn count? I rented that once and didn't play any games on the system again until it became "ritually clean" a few weeks later. Game ending bug. Same deal with Blackfire though I kind of liked the game in a weird way.

[Scufo]

Playing through the original Half-Life, I was unfortunate enough to encounter the "mad scientists glitch". In a middle-ish part of the game, you encounter three scientists who offer to open a door for you, thereby allowing you to continue. You're supposed to escort them to said door. But, for some reason, their AI sometimes bugs out, causing them to freak out and run scared all around Black Mesa. They become too preoccupied with their sudden, rampant paranoia to open the door for you.

As far as I know the only way to get around this is to noclip.

[Less Ashamed Of Self]

2 come to mind;

Once in Chronomaster, a point/click adventure PC title, I had everything done correctly up until a certain point, but there was a conversation loop that let me not join a necessary poker table. That save was broken.

and I've noticed that with Super Mario Kart, both with the SNES and the Wii-ware versions, I've managed to 'immediately select quit' due to controller failure. Weird.

[MaxFrost]

I've had 5 year olds happen to two seperate games. They loaded up the game, and proceded to wipe out every single save state on the carts, including the grindcore "know every spell possible for every character, and best equipment" save.

[Kureejii Lea]

That "Bermuda Triangle" glitch in Secret of Evermore... you fly over a certain section of the world map and find yourself teleported back to a town. With no airship. Which you need to continue the game. Yeah, multiple save files are probably a good idea in general.

[SirChadlyOC]

That "Bermuda Triangle" glitch in Secret of Evermore... you fly over a certain section of the world map and find yourself teleported back to a town. With no airship. Which you need to continue the game. Yeah, multiple save files are probably a good idea in general.

There was a very similar one in Secret of Mana, if I remember. Can't you land in your hometown with Flamie and save, but not be able to exit?

Also, I got killed in Secret of Evermore myself, but somewhere else. (This was ~15 years ago, so I don't perfectly remember the details, but...)

At the end of a big forest labyrinth, you fight a boss on a big chess board. Apparently, you can leave the fight by walking off the right side of the map. You can never fight the boss again, and you can never collect the hidden spaceship component, and you can't get to where you need to go. Of course, I did backtrack on foot as far back as the flee market area before I realized that I could never finish this save file.

[DragonAvenger]

If I remember, there's another glitch in Secret of Evermore where the game won't continue, even if you have the items you need. You could sometimes bypass it by talking to someone repeatedly, or something like that. Anyone have that happen or know the details further?