You’re Dead And You Don’t Even Know It In Lunar
Lunar hands you the noose and lets you hang yourself with this absurdly cruel glitch. Even explaining it is tough! So let’s start from the beginning — as shared by ResetEra user Rei no Otaku — it’s possible to completely screw yourself right at the start of the JRPG Lunar on PS1. In the demo, you’re given a limited inventory and an item called the Flute. It’s possible to trade the Flute to another character, then save your demo file and transfer it to the main game.
Everything sounds normal so far, right? Well, at the end of Lunar, after defeating the last boss, you’ll need to finally use that plot-important Flute to trigger the ending cutscene. There’s just one problem; the Flute can’t be traded in the main game, only in the demo. If you traded this plot-critical item away, an item you never need to use until the very end, you’ll have to restart the entire game just to see the ending. Now that’s what I call a soul-destroying bug.
Marvel’s Avengers Traps You In A HARM-ful State
Let’s end this list with something more recent. Marvel’s Avengers is a massive live-serve game, giving you access to Earth’s Mightiest Heroes as they attempt to save the world from the evil clutches of AIM. The yellow-clad army of super-scientists can cause trouble for our heroes, but there was something far worse waiting for early adopters — game-breaking bugs.
At release, the developers begged players to avoid the in-game training HARM rooms. These tutorial stages explain how to use each hero, and give you some future challenges to complete after the story. Unlucky heroes entering the HARM rooms could potentially fall through the floor. If you don’t immediately close the game, the autosave feature will trigger and trap you in the bottomless void forever.
Maybe patches aren’t such a bad thing after all. In this case, afflicted players just needed to wait for a proper patch and wouldn’t lose all of their progress. It just mean they couldn’t play the game for a few agonizing days. It just goes to show that game-breaking bugs aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Here’s hoping the next-generation gets better QA.
These are some of the most noteworthy bugs we can dredge up from the cursed games of gaming’s past. I can only hope the bugs don’t get worse than this in the future.
