10 Ways Players Accidentally Broke Video Games
When just playing the game bricks your save forever.
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00:00 As fun as it is sometimes to watch speedruns strategically use game-breaking tricks to
00:05 make a 50-odd hour game as short as a few hours long, it's not something that most
00:10 people like to try and do the first time they play through a title.
00:15 But that doesn't mean you can't still break the game outright, even when you're
00:19 not trying to.
00:20 So, with that in mind, I'm Josh from Wockulture.com and these are 10 Ways Players Accidentally
00:25 Broke Video Games.
00:27 10. Pretending to Have a Bike - Pokemon Red/Blue
00:30 While Pokemon isn't a game just for kids, it is a game with a huge young player base.
00:36 And while it's unfair to say that kids are more likely to do dumb things, it is fair
00:40 to say that they find perhaps a great sense of amusement in doing slightly impractical
00:46 things - largely because they haven't got as used to the tropes of gaming as many older
00:50 players have.
00:51 This in mind then, it's easy to imagine a kid repeatedly trying to get into Cycling
00:55 Road, which takes up routes 16, 17 and 18 without a bicycle in Pokemon Red/Blue.
01:02 This would be fine if it weren't for the fact that at a certain point, the game just
01:06 gives up and lets you on the road anyways, because god loves a trier I guess.
01:11 So while you can happily trot around Cycling Road this one time, you're likely a level
01:15 way too low if you don't have a bike for it.
01:19 Similarly, the fact that you've messed with the game's script by walking into an area
01:23 you shouldn't be in can cause all sorts of other issues along the way, which is maybe
01:27 what you get for tempting fate and going against Arceus' intentions.
01:32 9.
01:33 Killing Enemies Before Their Time - Deus Ex
01:35 One of the most interesting parts of Deus Ex is that, for the most part, you can take
01:39 out the bosses without even properly fighting them.
01:42 How?
01:43 Well, as ever, by doing something silly thinking it won't work, only for it to work all too
01:48 well.
01:49 This is because the boss battles are proximity triggered, meaning that it only properly starts
01:53 when you get close to the enemy.
01:55 So if you manage to hurt or kill them from a distance, you'll find that they carry
01:58 this damage or death through, meaning a casual pot shot at a boss can accidentally skip your
02:03 skirmish with them.
02:04 This isn't always possible of course, as certain bosses, like Ana Navare, have been
02:08 designed seemingly to avoid this pitfall.
02:11 But there's still a bunch of ways around them too, so if you've committed to the
02:15 lovable rogue style of play, you'll likely still find a vaguely cop-out way to beat them.
02:20 Now, it's interesting to think that with just one moment of wonder, you can discover
02:24 something that makes huge sections of the game basically a cakewalk.
02:29 Mercifully, this is a game that's easy to play more than once, so you can have a legit
02:33 playthrough and a silly one as well.
02:35 8.
02:36 Playing Around - The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild
02:39 Goofing about is a crucial part of any gaming experience.
02:42 I mean everyone has at least thought about putting a bucket over an NPC's head to
02:47 steal something right in front of their now-covered eyeballs.
02:50 Or some other similarly stupid but entertaining shenanigans.
02:54 Sometimes this isn't even really a matter of getting anything out of it, but the pure
02:57 reward of getting to mess around.
03:00 As such, it's easy to imagine a player innocently messing around in Breath of the Wild, learning
03:04 the shield surf mechanics, only to then accidentally clip themselves straight through a wall.
03:09 Now while speedrun players often use this to skip huge areas of the game, they do so
03:13 with clear intentions of which walls to go through and exactly where to go.
03:18 Should you manage to pull this off accidentally, then, things can go very wrong very fast.
03:22 Plenty of walls simply aren't meant to be walked through, that's why they're walls,
03:27 leaving you either stuck outside the area you need to be in, or otherwise just stuck
03:31 chilling out in the void.
03:32 And yeah, it's easy to watch this and think "well that would never happen to me",
03:36 but that involves purposefully ignoring every silly thing you've ever done in a video
03:40 game and generally, there's always at least once that this happens.
03:45 7.
03:46 Escaping Prison - Phantasy Star 3 While you're tasked with escaping from prison
03:50 in Phantasy Star 3, many players likely had the same thought as to how to leave the area
03:54 through less legit means.
03:56 That's because before you get trapped, you're able to buy an item called the escape pipe,
04:01 which allows you to escape from a dungeon upon use.
04:03 For anyone struggling with figuring out how to escape the prison, or just looking for
04:07 an easier way to do so, I mean after all, work smarter not harder amirite?
04:11 This seemed like a surefire way to leave the prison early, and then continue the story
04:16 a little quicker than otherwise.
04:18 While the escape pipe does let you leave the prison early, it's not so helpful with the
04:23 second part.
04:24 Though you've escaped, the game can't quite figure out how, and thus the dialogue
04:28 you need to have to continue the story isn't accessible after this method of escape.
04:32 Instead, you can only mourn that this creative route is effectively useless, and go back
04:37 to your previous save.
04:39 This one is at least at the beginning of the game though, so if things go wrong, you haven't
04:42 ruined hundreds of hours of your life.
04:44 6.
04:45 Moving in a Cutscene - Half-Life Being given the ability to move in a cutscene
04:50 is a strange little gift.
04:51 You're stuck in the cutscene obviously, so you can't just leave, but it's also
04:56 surprisingly nice to just be able to jitter yourself around a little bit while someone
05:00 talks to you, instead of being trapped in a total freeze frame.
05:03 Well, it's nice until it accidentally breaks your game at least.
05:07 In the original versions of Half-Life however, moving in some scenes could actually risk
05:12 you breaking the game entirely.
05:14 In particular, when you get caught by marines, moving can actually totally sabotage the game's
05:18 script, leaving it unable to free you from your tiny, dark prison.
05:22 Which is especially awkward if you don't realise, and instead just wait around hopelessly
05:26 for whatever comes next.
05:28 After all, when stuff goes wrong, it doesn't give you a heads up about it and you wouldn't
05:32 presume that the whole thing had just broken for you so you could be there a long time.
05:37 Later editions of the game fixed this issue, but likely only because so many poor souls
05:41 sat in a dark room for way, way longer than they deserved.
05:45 5.
05:46 Killing Strangers - The Elder Scrolls III - Morrowind
05:49 Now let it be known that this particular way of breaking Morrowind was more the game teaching
05:54 you an important moral lesson.
05:56 It's not a good idea to go out and kill people all willy nilly.
06:00 Because unlike later additions to the series, in Morrowind you can, theoretically, kill
06:05 whoever you want.
06:06 This sounds great in theory, as we've all had that one NPC we desperately wanted to
06:11 see the back of, but in practice it had some pretty serious drawbacks.
06:15 Should you be unfortunate enough to slay someone you needed for a quest, you'd be unable to
06:19 finish it, since the person you needed to chat with to continue or end it was now sort
06:23 of a little busy being dead.
06:26 If you weren't lucky enough to have killed a person vital for the main quest, then this
06:29 became infinitely, infinitely more worse.
06:32 So if you made a habit of killing NPCs, or just happened to kill one by accident, this
06:36 could mean that many, many hours later, you'd suddenly realise that they were secretly an
06:41 important character, and you'd have to either go back to the point you killed them, or just
06:45 deal with never properly finishing the game.
06:47 Safe to say, nobody enjoys making that choice.
06:50 4.
06:51 Selling Your Stuff - Champions of Norrath
06:53 RPGs have always been largely about organisation.
06:57 Sorting all your characters to have abilities that fit with the rest of the team, making
07:01 sure your equipment is tip-top, and just generally optimising everything you can, is basically
07:06 RPG 101.
07:08 As much as most players desperately hate it, inventory management is also a big part of
07:13 this.
07:14 Making sure you have room for more drops, and remembering to sell what you don't want
07:17 to keep, is vital for a whole lot of these games, not to mention the lion's share of
07:22 most MMOs.
07:23 And so it's especially cruel that Champions of Norrath punishes you for this, even if
07:27 it does appear to be by total accident.
07:30 See, after killing the suitably unnerving Spider Queen Sheloth, players who've remembered
07:34 their teleport can quickly pop back to sell all the gross spider goodies that she just
07:38 dropped, likely feeling pretty good about themselves for being so prepared.
07:43 Only when they try to return to the boss area, they'll soon realise the key issue with this.
07:48 The boss room is locked.
07:50 Since an NPC opens this area for you, you're unable to unlock the door yourself, meaning
07:54 it's time to do another classic RPG manoeuvre of desperately looking through older save
07:59 files to figure out which one you can use to restart.
08:02 3.
08:03 Believing in the Green Lantern - LEGO Batman 2 DC Super Heroes
08:07 When it comes to superheroes, Green Lantern is perhaps the most easily overlooked.
08:12 His title, of course, used to belong to Aquaman, but since the DC film made the smart move
08:17 of casting Jason Momoa as him, the fish puns have gently died down.
08:21 As such, it is instead the unfortunate Emerald Protectors of the Realm who now appear to
08:26 many like dorks.
08:28 But in LEGO Batman 2, Green Lantern can fly, which still serves to make him one of the
08:32 more useful characters in the game.
08:34 However, it turns out that relying on flying characters can have some major downsides,
08:39 especially with Green Lantern, who the game seems to presume that you just won't want
08:43 to play as at all.
08:45 As such, in one particularly unwieldy section of the game, flying to the area's exit,
08:49 which should allow you to go to the next area, will just instead get you stuck there.
08:54 Now at this point you might be thinking, is the game just freaking out that you chose
08:58 to optionally play as a character who historically was weak to wood and the colour yellow?
09:03 Or is it so delighted it just couldn't go on?
09:07 We'll simply never know.
09:08 Number 2 - Losing Your Duster Psychonauts
09:11 If you were one of the unlucky players to be graced with a bug that meant you lost your
09:15 cobweb duster in Psychonauts, you likely didn't consider it a big deal at the time.
09:20 You won't be able to get all the collectibles, but not everyone wants to go around finding
09:24 every pesky hidden item anyway, so it's easy to realise that it's gone and just
09:28 kinda shrug it off.
09:29 You'll get it next time.
09:30 Only, as it turns out, this is the worst thing you can do, because the final level requires
09:35 you to get rid of some cobwebs to get through the fun of the nightmarish meat circus, meaning
09:39 that if you don't have the duster, you can't clear the level and finish the game.
09:44 But the duster is sold in the shop at the hub world, so it's no biggie right?
09:48 You can just go on and buy another and carry on with your life, happy as a person who just
09:52 narrowly avoided a game-based despair.
09:56 Well unfortunately for you at this point you've gone beyond the time in the game where you
09:59 can go to the shop, so unless you have a save file from before then, you're plum out
10:04 of luck.
10:05 So on, finishing the game, Batman Arkham Asylum.
10:07 The first installment of the Arkham series is just about the perfect length to 100% complete.
10:13 You won't find everything on your first roam around, but it also won't take worlds
10:16 of time to scout around afterwards and find all the extra riddler trophies after you've
10:21 completed the game, and you can always just google the riddles when and if you get sick
10:25 of trying to figure them out.
10:27 But with all silver linings come clouds, and this is no exception.
10:31 That's because Arkham Asylum can have a uniquely heartbreaking bug where all the saved
10:36 data containing your adventures with the Spandex Crusader can become corrupted, forcing you
10:41 to either restart the whole game from scratch or to quit in a fit of rage.
10:45 Worse yet, the painful issue can be triggered by finishing the main story, meaning that
10:49 you could finally experience the joy of finishing the game and it's weird as hell final boss,
10:54 only to find out that you've been blocked from getting that sweet 100% completion.
10:59 And even if you bravely go back through all of it, you do so aware of an awful possibility
11:04 that there's nothing to stop it happening again.
11:07 So that's our list, I want to know what you guys think down in the comments below,
11:10 did you ever encounter any of these game breaking glitches and are there any infuriating ones
11:15 I missed off here?
11:16 While you're down there as well, could you please give us a like, share, subscribe and
11:18 head over to whatculture.com for more lists and news like this every single day.
11:22 Even if you don't though, I've been Josh, thanks so much for watching and I'll see
11:25 you soon.
11:25 (classical music)