glitches
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One Shots: WAR gets colorful
Those weird and crazy graphical glitches keep coming in from Warhammer Online players. First we saw a guard in her skimpy nothings, then we saw some crazy rubberbanding, and today we've got a combination of strange missing and rainbow textures. This screenshot comes in to us from Kriestov, who notes the oddness: This screenshot [is] from Warhammer Online. Not sure what caused [this], but I had to close & restart WAR for it to go away! Looks kind of futuristic with all the weird colours - boyfriend liked it, I didn't at all!For all that they are kind of strange, glitches can be kind of fun to look at - if nothing more, it makes you stop and wonder what the heck caused it! If you've run across any weird glitches in your travels - in WAR or elsewhere - grab a quick screenshot and send those in to us at oneshots AT massively DOT com. Be sure to add your name and the game it comes from so we can pontificate on what went wonky.%Gallery-9798%
Site updates around WoW Insider
There have been a few tweaks and updates the past few days around here at WoW Insider. First of all, you've probably noticed that our comments system has been upgraded a bit, and now in addition to signing in with your standard Weblogs, Inc. name and password (more information about how to do that here), you can choose to sign in with with your AOL or AIM screenname. Unfortunately, there is no way to link your Weblogs, Inc. profile (which you can see by clicking on your name in any of your comments) with your AIM screenname, so you'll have to recreate your profile (or just keep using your old signin). But if you're new to the comments section, you can now use your AOL SN to leave a comment. This is a fairly new system, so there are still a few glitches floating around -- if you have a problem with anything, let us know, and we'll try to fix it and/or get back to you.Since we're talking about profiles, now might also be a good time to point out that you can change that default picture that goes with your profile. We've got lots of icons to choose from (and even more here), so if you're still using that boring gray question mark face (what are you, a low level questgiver?) spice it up a little bit by clicking on your profile page and putting a picture in there. The more colorful our comments section can get, the better.And finally, some good news for iPhone and iPod touch users -- while you can always see the full version of our site on those devices by using MobileSafari to go to wow.com, you can now see an iPhone-formatted page at i.wow.com. And if we may say so, our designers did a really great job on it. They continue to work hard to make our site better all the time, so stay tuned for more updates to WoW Insider and the other sites in the Joystiq network.
Breakfast Topic: Buggy memories
Some of my fondest memories in WoW are things that never really should have ever happened. I don't mean random happenstance taking the wheel of life from me, nothing like that. I mean glitches, bugs and things that the Blizzard devs really never intended to happen. Sure, some bugs are not so fun, like losing equipment you worked hard for or getting blocked in a raid because a boss isn't working right, but there have been a lot of really awesome ones, too.Take, for example, the screenshot above. It probably doesn't count because it happened on the Wrath beta and of course there are bugs there, but it was the beginning of a night that made me laugh for hours. If you can't tell what's going on... I'm piloting an airplane, my buddy tried to hop in with me but his chair is floating a few feet over my head for some reason, and someone decided to park their siege tank twenty feet up a wall, inside of the wall. That pretty much sums up the current state of Lake Wintergrasp, in case you were wondering.If that doesn't count, there's the time a few years back when some friends and I ran Zul'Farrak, and a basilisk we aggro'd threw us twenty feet backwards for some reason, into another basilisk that threw us right back. We cried tears of laughter through about twenty minutes of the two basilisks playing catch with our flailing bodies before we were coherent enough to try and figure out what the heck was going on.Do you guys have any memories like this? Do you ever wish you could go out and do them again for the nostalgia of it all, or are you pretty content keeping it a one time thing?
Friday Video: Super Glitch Bros. Brawl
Sure, last week we highlighted Smash Bros. Brawl, but we felt the need to do it again. The above video, which is a collection of glitches and tricks you can pull off in Brawl, was too much to pass up. So, give it a watch, as it features a very cheap Sonic, a pair of Luigis pulling off ridiculous combos mid-air and Bowser being trapped in a very small space.%Gallery-3347% Each week, our Friday Video segment takes a look at the gaming landscape online and brings forth an interesting video that (hopefully) gets the dialog started. Past entries included a look at Mario going berserk, The Simpsons Game in a brief clip and Donkey Kong done with LEGOs.
Level 80 legendary tabard spotted
Like Bigfoot, it's so elusive that photographs are rare, but some WoW players have caught a glimpse of what may be an upcoming PvP reward from Wrath. Or maybe it's just a bug. Or -- and I have a nickel bet on this one -- it's a nice little prank Blizzard's playing on us in return for our snooping around for information on the expansion. Whatever it is, though, it has left at least one footprint. We've gotten a few tips that upon inspecting a player's Tabard of Summer Flames, the Horde side reward from the Shards of Ahune quest, the tabard's tooltip describes a very different item called Tabard of the Victor. Even though the tabard's design matched the Midsummer quest reward, the description was quite different. First of all, the Tabard of the Victor requires Level 80, which was our first clue that it was probably not meant for pre-Wrath eyes. The tabard binds on pick-up, provides 250 Armor, +20 Stamina, +10 to All Resistances. Upon equipping it, your resilience rating improves by 15 and it increases movement speed and life regeneration rate. The funniest part -- and what makes me think this could be a prank by our dear game designers -- is the tabard's use is described as: "Use: Show how heroic you are! (55 Secs Cooldown)" and the bottom line description is, "The Mark of a True Hero." It seems that perhaps the glitch was caused by an error in the cache because when it was cleared the tabard's description correctly matched the Summer Flames tabard.[Thanks, Jagoex and James Vertovec!]
One Shots: The mystery of the murdered Necroelemesmer
Look! Up in the Guild Wars sky! It's a bird, it's a plane, it's super-goth! (We can't quite peg the class, so those of you out there who play Guild Wars, help us out with this necroelemesmer class puzzle.) Seriously, though -- this One Shot today from reader Mike shows what happens when a dead character meets a clip plane. It looks like he's flying until you notice the half-rendered steps just to the lower right of this picture. The really creepy thing is that his eyes are still open. We hope someone came along and gave the poor guy a rez! Do you have a screen of an unfortunate and untimely (or funny) death? Did your guild finally get that annoying boss down after a bunch of attempts? How about some off-the wall graphical glitches in your game of choice? Whatever the story, we want to see your screens! All MMOs are welcome from Anarchy Online to Zu Online and everything in between. Drop them in the mail to oneshots AT massively DOT com along with whatever information you'd like to give us. Your screens could be next!%Gallery-9798%
Around Azeroth: Glitchstravaganza winner!
Well, you have voted, and the votes have been counted. (Note to Michigan and Florida residents: Your votes have not been counted because you tried to move your primary up too early. Sorry.) This blood elf with an undead face, courtesy of Rhodarr of <no way out> on Nera'thor-EU, is the winner of the first Glitchstravaganza. Rhodarr barely squeaked by Gnatt of <Vanquished> on Dath'Remar's glitched graphics card, winning by a plurality of 27.1% to 26.4%. Sorry, Gnatt -- there'll be no recount here. A pat on the back goes to Guydebord of <Suicidal Tendencies> on Gnomeregan, who somehow managed to place below "None" in the voting. Welcome to the gallery, Rhodarr, and proudly proclaim yourself the victor! Do you have any unusual World of Warcraft images that are just collecting dust in your screenshots folder? We'd love to see it on Around Azeroth! Sharing your screenshot is as simple as e-mailing aroundazeroth@wow.com with a copy of your shot and a brief explanation of the scene. You could be featured here next! Remember to include your player name, server and/or guild if you want it mentioned. We prefer full screen shots without the UI showing. Thanks for participating in Glitchstravaganza, everyone!%Gallery-1816%
Around Azeroth: Glitchstravaganza
As you may recall, during yesterday's Around Azeroth, I requested submissions for today's Glitchstravaganza -- a celebration of all things glitchy in WoW. The response was so good that it was difficult picking out the top five. I gave consideration to UI placement, uniqueness of the bug, and overall visual impact of the picture. I cropped a couple, as we had some technical difficulties with the gallery on this one and had to rely on the smaller shots instead. Finally, we had five photos that dealt with five different bugs. An honorable mention goes to Fulminate of Dragonmaw-US, who sent in the sixth-best bug: the arakkoa to the right of us, who appears to have mated with a member of the Consortium and gone into a sort of half-existence. Ready to move on to the top five? Read on past the jump for the contenders, and the final poll, where you can pick your favorite of the featured glitches (including the first one.) Polling continues until April 24; the winner will be honored next Friday.
Rockstar working 'around the clock' to quell 360's Bully issues
Having forked over their precious lunch money to recent current-gen graduate, Bully: Scholarship Edition, some Xbox 360 owners have expressed dissatisfaction with the game's technical performance. Though it's unclear whether the issues are widespread, several forum users have noted unsteady framerates, audio glitches and freezing within Rockstar's school daze sim.The company has issued a statement in response to online complaints, vowing to work "around the clock to rectify this situation." A "horrifed" Rockstar president, Sam Houser, pinned the blame on "some older 360s," explaining that none of the technical issues occurred during the game's QA phase. "We would never shove anything out the door - we never have and never will," said Houser. "We apologise to everyone affected for the inconvenience."
Wii version of Bully might be the better port
On numerous gaming forums, we've been reading about people having problems with the Xbox 360 port of Bully: Scholarship Edition. According to many owners of the game, the 360 version constantly freezes and suffers from poor framerates. There have also been some complaints about glitches and audio drops, which have led many to conclude that it's a shoddily made port.Fortunately, it seems like these issue aren't present in the Wii game, but we figured we'd check with our readers to be sure. Have any of you picked up a copy of Bully yet? If so, have you encountered any problems, or is the game running smoothly for you? Gallery: Bully
See a few Ratchet & Clank Future mishaps
Despite Ratchet & Clank: Future being one of the very best games currently available on the PS3, it's certainly not without a few quirks. Courtesy of Project Mod Gaming, we're shown a few in particular. Pretty silly video with some decent tunes to back it up.And before anyone says so, yes, it's been a pretty slow news day.
The end of the (patch) day
It's the end of the day (or nearly there) and, if you've logged on at all, you've patched WoW up to the latest version. Oftentimes, patch days are fraught with server instability and all sorts of other issues in game. On top of those problems, UI mods get thrown out of whack and usually must be updated in order to avoid screens filled with annoying error messages.Personally, this patch day was one of the smoothest I can recall in recent memory. Once the servers came back up, I was able to log on right away with no queue and no apparent latency. As the afternoon wore on into evening, there were a few rough patches of lag, but they smoothed out after a little while, never to return. My most important mods were already updated and I can live without the rest for a couple of days. I purposefully try to avoid a reliance on UI mods, which is always helpful on patch days, so I'm not sure that my experience was shared by many other WoW players. Even so, my guildmates who rely on mods more than I do also seemed pretty happy with the transition to the new patch, so hopefully things went well for the majority of WoW fans. How did the patch treat you today? Did you bother logging on at all? If you did, have you had a good experience thus far?
Ratchet & Clank Future glitch may halt play
It looks like the early release of Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction is not without consequence. Shacknews reports that some American PlayStation 3 owners may encounter a glitch which prevents them from playing Insomniac's latest platformer. Unlike the sudden loss of your arms or a critical lack of money, however, you can entirely blame someone in the quality assurance department for this predicament*.Insomniac community manager James Stevenson describes the issue, which presents itself during the game's setup, as such: "With specific amounts of free space on your drive, you may see a screen that tells you have insufficient space to create game data even though there is plenty of free space on your drive." He remains decidedly non-specific regarding said "specific amounts," but at least the man provides a workaround. If you encounter the problem, "either delete or add about 500MB of data to your hard drive and the problem will go away." You'll know you've won when you can actually play the game. *Excluding the unlikely circumstance of an insane QA manager capturing you and lopping off your arms. We've heard stories.
More academic discussion of Animal Crossing
Animal Crossing is more interesting than we thought, it seems! Whereas we (read: I) found the improvements in Wild World a poor trade for NES games, and not enough to hold our interest after a year or so of Gamecube Crossing, academics are speaking out in appreciation of Nintendo's pointless-by-design communication game.The latest essay on Henry Jenkins' blog, is an excerpt from a thesis by Kristina Drzaic, about "secrets" in Animal Crossing. The idea is that other games feature glitches that allow the player to redesign the game in small ways and alter the basic experience, whereas Animal Crossing features such "glitch-like" abilities as part of the natural design of the game, and allows even more customization than the engine was designed for. One example showed a player creating a narrative conflict between herself and Tom Nook just by trying and failing to buy some candy. We were just wondering aloud why customizable content was so compelling! Good thing there are people smarter than us out there.[Via GameSetWatch]
Post update Gears problems surface
Gears of War's latest auto update has been released for a few days now and the overall consensus has been pretty positive. A new gametype, check. More balancing of weapons, check. Sticking to every damn wall and glitching still not fixed, check. Wait ... still sticking to walls and cheaters still able to glitch? Yes, it's true friends, the latest auto update is far from perfect not fixing all our glitching woes and even making one annoyance worse.
More Crackdown glitch videos
Adding to our continuing coverage of various Crackdown cheats and glitches, the guys over at playinghalotoday sent us a few more Crackdown glitches from their library. In the video above you can see something they call "sand surfing" on the sandy beaches of Pacific City. It sort of reminds us of Marty's hoverboarding adventures in Back to the Future, ride on Marty ... ride on. The other two videos are embedded after the break featuring the Crackdown "teleport" and the "float". If we've piqued your curiosity then go watch more glitching videos after the break.
Blurry R&C video walkthrough & glitches
IGN Boards user Biozell should become a game tester. This incredible Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters fan has burst open the secrets of the game. See his high-flying acrobatics find all the Titanium Bolts in the game (helpful!). Then, check out his videos of glitches he's discovered by jumping in all the right places. Seriously: how did he find all of this stuff?There's one unfortunate drawback to the mayhem: the videos are really, really blurry. We know that the PSP screen is hard to capture, simply because cameras don't seem to want to focus on it correctly. If you think you can handle the (very blurry) secrets of Ratchet & Clank, check out Zellhazard's YouTube page now.
Crackdown glitches already found
The Crackdown demo has only been available since yesterday, and glitches are already popping up. Posted on the Flickr account of im_the_real_scooby are several images of glitchified Crackdown in action. It looks as though he managed to fall through the map and look at its undersides from the ocean below. We can't help but think of Saints Row (and its fabulous musical). With any game of this scale, glitches are bound to be discovered, but we never expected them to be found so quickly. Considering that Crackdown is already gold, it looks like the glitches are here to stay, too. Hit the "read" link to see more images.
GOW glitch: delayed chainsaw death
In Joystiq's latest game video of the day, we have yet another new glitch in Gears of War. This glitch gives you the ability to manually "detonate" another player, causing them to explode. In reality, you're just tricking the game into causing a delayed chainsaw death. The glitch involves a lot of weapon switching and a troika, and it's not particularly useful, but at least it's fun to watch. Frankly, we enjoy actually playing the game, but different strokes for different folks, right? Check out the video after the break.
GOW presents: exploding toilet man
We found this toilet themed Gears of War video on Joystiq and were immediately faced with a conundrum. You see, those fancy lads at Playing Halo Today found a dead man on a toilet in Gears of War. So, do we expound on the effort it must have taken for crafty -- perhaps bored -- gamers to find this secret? Or, do we simply jump straight to toilet humor? We mulled it over for a good long while, and we're happy to say that we made the obvious choice, the right choice. Watch the video after the break.
