A major bug in The Witch and the Hundred Knight that can occur at seemingly any time will force the game to return to the system menu, losing all unsaved progress as a result. This became a common critique in the game's reviews, leading it to not be received as favorably by some. While The Witch and the Hundred Knight: Revival Edition did not fully fix this glitch, it occurs much less frequently, with playing for extended periods of time being noted as a possible factor.
In the original release of the game, the monster that the player could summon to attack the city was a thinly veiled parody of Godzilla, right down to using the character's iconic roar from the film series; the sound effect is even named "God" in the game's files, furthering the reference. The Godzilla parody is also depicted on the game's box art, gleefully waving at the viewer.
According to programmer Don Hopkins, who notably ported SimCity to numerous versions of Unix, Maxis ended up getting sued by Toho, the owners of the Godzilla franchise; additional details were recounted to him by Maxis CEO Jeff Braun:
"We never referred to the name Godzilla, our monster on the box cover was a T-Rex looking character, but... a few magazine reviews called the monster, Godzilla. That was all it took. Toho called it "confusion in the marketplace". We paid $50k for Godzilla to go away. In all honesty, Toho liked Maxis, they said $50k was the minimum they take for Godzilla infringement."
As a result of this suit, the monster was redesigned in the v1.2 release to resemble a giant orange salamander. The creature's roar is also changed and the game's box art is redesigned to replace the Godzilla parody with a tornado. In the v1.3 release, the salamander is given a slightly larger and more detailed sprite to fit the revised art style, but its roar (now internally renamed "Monster") is corrupted.
The language select screen in It's Mr. Pants has a bug that makes the sound clips played for each language overlap when they are being selected. Paul Machacek, a designer for the game, says that when QA testers approached the development team with this bug, they overruled it because they felt it was funnier than they intended it to be, keeping it in the final release.
Certain in-game enemies are only able to be fought by Mario & Luigi or Bowser. Despite this, a few Bowser-oriented enemies have unique behaviors for Mario & Luigi, which can only be seen through hacking the game:
• All of Naplock's attacks can be dodged or countered by jumping, with its snot bubble attack also missing Mario & Luigi entirely even if nothing is done. • Dark Mechawful's punch attack can be countered with Mario & Luigi's hammers, while its countdown attack is replaced by the same star attack used by the Dark Mechawful head, which can fight Mario & Luigi in normal gameplay if Bowser inhales it. However, in a hacked Dark Mechawful fight, this attack progresses extremely slowly. • The smoke signals at the start of Choomba's charge attack are changed from fist and shell icons to "M" and "L" ones, indicating which brothers it will charge at and in which order; the attack can also be countered by hammering. • Dark Trashure's thrown items can be avoided or countered by jumping, similarly to its standard counterpart. However, the items move far faster than those thrown by a regular Trashure or a Dark Trashure fought by Bowser.
While most of these behaviors appear to be failsafes, Choomba is unique in that the "M" and "L" smoke signals are not present anywhere else in the game, indicating that at one point in development, Mario & Luigi would've been able to explore the Tunnel, where Choombas are fought.
Meanwhile, when hacking the game to allow Bowser to fight enemies that can only be encountered by Mario & Luigi, most of them will either crash the game, flee immediately, or display glitchy behavior. One unique case is Magifoofas, which can be inhaled by Bowser (despite the Vacuum Block not indicating this), indicating that the developers considered letting him encounter them in some form.
Due to a programming error, the player has a random chance of accessing debug mode in Super Mario Bros. 3 (specifically the one from the NES version of the game, which is carried over to the Super Mario All-Stars port). The debug mode only activates if a value of 80 is stored at the RAM address 7E0160, which can be manually edited by a devkit.
The NES version initializes the equivalent RAM address to 00 whenever the game is turned on, preventing the player from encountering debug mode during the normal course of play. However, due to an oversight, this does not occur in the SNES version, resulting in Super Mario All-Stars reading whatever value is generated by the console itself. Because this value is randomized during bootup, this means that the game has a small chance of activating debug mode in Super Mario Bros. 3 on a retail unit. While the theoretical probability of this occurring is 1/256, it can vary depending on the console's build and the power grid that it is connected to.
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Explosive Fighter Patton from 1988 is believed to be the first video game to use the swear word "fuck", referring to the Famicom Disk System as the "fucking box". It is not known if this is an in-joke or a translation error.
This is followed by Skweek for Amstrad CPC in 1989, whose development builds leaked to the UK market, featuring a variety of vulgar in-joke placeholder phrases. The swearing version of the game has not known to be preserved, but it is alleged that one of these quotes was "fuck your mother!". This would make it the first use of "fuck" to be known for a fact to have been intentional, even if its distribution wasn't.
1990's Paranoia, the Japanese version of Psychosis features an 8-bit sound effect upon stage clear that appears to be made to evoke the phrase "fuck you!", which is played in accompaniment with an alien flipping the bird. This is technically the first vocalized use of "fuck", but is not a recording of a human voice, and is the first for-a-fact intentionally included use of "fuck".
1991's Llamatron contained a voice sample of the word "oh, fuck!" which was cut off. A glitch made it so that if you paused the game upon dying, it would play uncensored, making it the first clear vocalised use of "fuck", even if still not intentionally added.
1995's The Orion Conspiracy contains one of the earliest known uses of "fuck" that was clearly spoken, uncensored, and known for a fact to not be an oversight. Also of note is Discworld, released in the same year, having an Easter egg referencing John Cleese's 1989 eulogy to the late Monty Python member Graham Chapman. While both games released in the same year, it is unknown which game came out first as Discworld is the only one of the two to have a known release date, coming out on March 17, 1995.
Normally, when the player decides to build a public works project, Isabelle will prevent the player from going to the beach while scouting out a potential site due to the instability of the sand there. However, if the player uses cheats or glitches to bring Isabelle to the beach and then talks to her, she will give them the option to state whether or not they want to start construction. Despite this, she will deny the request anyway if the player answers yes; however, she will not cite the quality of the ground, but rather will state that there is no available space. Depending on where they are standing, she will state that the proposed site is either too close to the ocean or too close to the cliff, statements which do not otherwise come up in normal gameplay. This dialogue implies that building public works projects on the beach was considered at one point in development.
In 2012, The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie was ported to the PlayStation 3's PlayStation Network under the PlayStation 2 Classics line. However, it was taken down shortly afterwards with no official explanation. Audiences quickly inferred that the port's withdrawal was due to the poor reception it drew thanks to various emulation issues involved with it, though it may have also been due to THQ going bankrupt and Activision acquiring the license to make games based on Nickelodeon properties around the same time. Among these emulation issues, the 16:9 display (which was the default option) stretched the game rather than properly re-rendering it at a higher aspect ratio, the audio for in-engine cutscenes frequently stuttered and fell behind by up to a second, certain textures were noticeably blurry due to the game being displayed at a higher resolution than what it was designed for, and gameplay suffered from prominent input lag compared to the original release.
While bottled Blue Fire is meant to be used to melt Red Ice in the Ice Cavern, it can also be used to destroy brown stone Weak Walls that normally need to be destroyed with Bombs. However, it can only be used to break this specific kind of bombable wall and this function is never actually mentioned in the game, suggesting that it may be a glitch.
The Brazilian release of the Nintendo GameCube has special code that patches a crash glitch that can only be found in NBA Courtside 2002. This patch does not exist in any other version of the hardware.
On January 29, 2024, the Steam version of Postal III received a large content update adding various features and improvements originally made by the developers of the Zoom Platform version of the game as well as fixes and content by the series' fan community. The update notably included streamlined mod support, a high quality release of the official soundtrack, several bug and graphical fixes pointed out and contributed by players, updated versions of the game's official German and Japanese localizations, three new localizations in Portuguese/Brazilian, French and Polish translated by fans, and worldwide access to the previously Russian-only Fart Gun DLC.
The Nintendo DS version of LEGO Friends has a failsafe for out-of-bounds glitches where the player character will respawn after falling for longer than any moment in the game requires her to (1 second). This failsafe notably has its own voice clip saying "Uh, oh!" that is not used anywhere else in the game.
It is possible to feed the Hungry Pumkin indefinitely past the maximum score. If one right clicks after feeding him and presses "Play", the Pumkin will repeat the eating animation, which can be done repeatedly far beyond the game's end at 25 items. The Pumkin's weight, which increases very slightly every time he eats, does not have a cap, so he can eventually become so large that he covers the entire screen (note that in the attached image, the score listed is missing its last digit, so he has eaten over 470 items, not 47).
In the level "Helms Deep", there is a section where the player must climb a ladder to reach the top of a wall, and once atop it they must shoot and kill a certain number of crossbowmen to clear this section and activate a cutscene to get to the next area. As the crossbowmen spawn, they will occasionally push each other out of bounds rendering them unkillable. When this happens, the player will be forced to wait until the game activates the cutscene rather than having it activate upon killing the designated number of enemies.
The initial US release of Bubble Bobble Revolution contained multiple large bugs, including palette errors and multiple instances of enemies not spawning or dying instantly. Round 30 of the game's boss does not summon, impeding players from progressing beyond that stage, rendering 70 of the game's 100 levels inaccessible. As compensation, replacement copies were provided to those who complained, along with a free copy of Rainbow Islands Revolution and a printed apology.
If you write a string of text longer than 2 sentences in Secret Writer's Society then press the text-to-speech button two times, the robot voice will begin to list off a string of swear words. This was supposedly added by a disgruntled programmer who was paid by RTMark (an anti-consumerist advocacy group that had previously - albeit falsely - claimed responsibility for the shirtless men Easter egg in SimCopter and an infamous incident where unsold Barbie dolls and G.I. Joe action figures had their voice boxes swapped) to insert the Easter egg as a way to warn parents and teachers of the dangers of over-relying on educational software instead of committing to communication with their child. This would eventually be proven to be false like the other RTMark claims, as the profanity was simply a bizarre bug based on the game's censorship filter.
Thrash the Tasmanian Devil, a character introduced in Archie's Sonic the Hedgehog comics, is based on a purple sprite that is created for several milliseconds on the game's title screen if the player quickly switches between Sonic and Knuckles' sprites. Notably, Ian Flynn stated in the graphic novel "Sonic Universe 3: Knuckles Returns" that Thrash was meant to be another rogue of Knuckles who could "throw down with Knuckles and have it mean something", which did not line up with his role in his debut during "Sonic Universe" Issue #11. However, this would later be conveyed during the "Endangered Species" story arc of the main comic, where it's revealed that he has a strong hatred towards the Echidna species due to their actions against his ancestors. When asked about the possibility of bringing Thrash back in the comic's reboot, Ian Flynn said he would love to bring him back, but "it comes with all that baggage... We can't really bring him back without people going 'Oh boy! And here we go!'"
Action 52 came with a leaflet explaining that the games Alfred and the Fetucini's[sic] and Jigsaw could only be unlocked by completing Ooze. In reality, the prior two games are not playable on NES hardware and the latter game is unwinnable.
In Episode 7 of Sirena Beach, if the player defeats Shadow Mario on the staircase inside of the Hotel Delfino, the Shine Sprite will become bugged, and when grabbed Mario will clip into the stairs. You are still able to exit the level through the menu, but your progress will be lost in the level.
In the original release of the game, the monster that the player could summon to attack the city was a thinly veiled parody of Godzilla, right down to using the character's iconic roar from the film series; the sound effect is even named "God" in the game's files, furthering the reference. The Godzilla parody is also depicted on the game's box art, gleefully waving at the viewer.
Certain in-game enemies are only able to be fought by Mario & Luigi or Bowser. Despite this, a few Bowser-oriented enemies have unique behaviors for Mario & Luigi, which can only be seen through hacking the game:
The Nintendo DS version of LEGO Friends has a failsafe for out-of-bounds glitches where the player character will respawn after falling for longer than any moment in the game requires her to (1 second). This failsafe notably has its own voice clip saying "Uh, oh!" that is not used anywhere else in the game.
It is possible to feed the Hungry Pumkin indefinitely past the maximum score. If one right clicks after feeding him and presses "Play", the Pumkin will repeat the eating animation, which can be done repeatedly far beyond the game's end at 25 items. The Pumkin's weight, which increases very slightly every time he eats, does not have a cap, so he can eventually become so large that he covers the entire screen (note that in the attached image, the score listed is missing its last digit, so he has eaten over 470 items, not 47).
The initial US release of Bubble Bobble Revolution contained multiple large bugs, including palette errors and multiple instances of enemies not spawning or dying instantly. Round 30 of the game's boss does not summon, impeding players from progressing beyond that stage, rendering 70 of the game's 100 levels inaccessible. As compensation, replacement copies were provided to those who complained, along with a free copy of Rainbow Islands Revolution and a printed apology.
Thrash the Tasmanian Devil, a character introduced in Archie's Sonic the Hedgehog comics, is based on a purple sprite that is created for several milliseconds on the game's title screen if the player quickly switches between Sonic and Knuckles' sprites. Notably, Ian Flynn stated in the graphic novel "Sonic Universe 3: Knuckles Returns" that Thrash was meant to be another rogue of Knuckles who could "throw down with Knuckles and have it mean something", which did not line up with his role in his debut during "Sonic Universe" Issue #11. However, this would later be conveyed during the "Endangered Species" story arc of the main comic, where it's revealed that he has a strong hatred towards the Echidna species due to their actions against his ancestors. When asked about the possibility of bringing Thrash back in the comic's reboot, Ian Flynn said he would love to bring him back, but "it comes with all that baggage... We can't really bring him back without people going 'Oh boy! And here we go!'"
Action 52 came with a leaflet explaining that the games Alfred and the Fetucini's[sic] and Jigsaw could only be unlocked by completing Ooze. In reality, the prior two games are not playable on NES hardware and the latter game is unwinnable.
