Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (Retro Studios) - Impassable door in Main Research
Here we start moving on to the more serious issues that the average player could easily come across. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes featured a bug whereby the player could get locked out from progressing past the Main Research area. If you left the area before shooting all the sonic locks with your echo visor, you’d be unable to open the door when you returned. Short of performing some fancy glitch-based acrobatics, the only way to progress was to reset and restart. Ouch.
Metroid: Other M (Nintendo / Team Ninja) – Impassable door in Sector 3
Samus just can’t seem to get away from these troublesome glitches. Metroid: Other M featured a similarly progress-thwarting issue with a door glitch in Sector 3. This time you could send your save on an SD card (or your Wii if you preferred, with Nintendo covering shipping costs) to Nintendo and you would receive a freshly ‘repaired’ save file in place of your borked one.
Postage costs a fortune, so as a company this isn’t the sort of thing you’d want to make a habit of. Fortunately, Nintendo hasn’t let anything like this slip through the net since. What's that you say?...
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (Nintendo) - Song of the Hero quest
The Legend of Zelda has always been a complex series, and no stranger to glitches. In fact, part of the reason they make such good speedrunning material is the myriad ways gamers have found over the years to utterly 'break' the game and use any tiny opportunity to bust it wide open. For example, it was possible to reach the end of A Link To The Past in mere minutes by using a wall glitch, but why would you want to skip the fun of the adventure?
As Metroid fans know, though, things get serious quickly if you can’t progress and in huge games like the Zelda series, this is an equally huge problem. Twilight Princess featured a game-ender if you saved in the Cannon Room, but Nintendo also dropped the ball in Skyward Sword where you could get irrevocably stuck in the Song of the Hero quest. Nintendo’s solution this time around involved a bespoke downloadable file fix ‘channel’ on the Wii, although users not connected to the World Wide Web could still send their SD cards and consoles to be updated if they really wanted. By now Nintendo must have worked out some sort of special rate with the Post Office.
Pokémon X & Y (Game Freak) – Saving in Lumiose City
Slightly more common than the elusive MISSINGNO, saving your game in Lumiose City carried a risk of corrupting your 3DS save data – a huge issue for a time-sink game like Pokémon X, Y or otherwise. Once again, the solution Nintendo came up with involved issuing an app on the eShop to repair corrupted save data without needing to pop your cartridge in the post to Nintendo.
Just a few weeks after that Wii Fit U (of all things) also had a little problem of its own involving Mii characters being imported between the Wii and Wii U version of the game. Nightmare!
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo) – Welcome to Glitch City...
Finally, let’s go out on a high! While the glitches in both Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword had the potential to utterly ruin your experience, the bugs and quirks inherent to the many interlocking systems found in Breath of the Wild have provided many hours of entertainment. Don't get us wrong - this is still a massively polished game, with almost none of the Skyrim-style jank you’ll find in many open-world games, but with a game this complex (and popular), it’s only a matter of time before players start picking at the seams for their own amusement.
There are too many to list, really. We’ve had the Sidon-powered bookcase car, the one where you could wield a weapon on the Master Cycle Zero, the one where you could ride a Guardian through the sky, the ‘bullet time bounce’, the underwater walker and more. And they’re still being discovered, as proven by the more recent infinite jump glitch. As long as nothing crops up to corrupt our ‘255 hours or more’ save file, keep ‘em coming.
And finally, the Error that isn’t an error at all…
No, this isn't a glitch, but we couldn’t very well finish without a nod towards Nintendo's most famous Error of all – the irony being that he isn’t one.
The character of Error in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link is a programmer’s joke along with his counterpart Bagu, or ‘bug’ in Japanese. As explained by Clyde Mandelin of Legends of Localization fame, the two characters were intended to form a humorous duo, but the translator obviously missed the connection between them and Bagu’s name wasn’t translated. Error's "I AM ERROR" introduction is entirely appropriate, then, although players assumed it was an example of poor translation common back in the olden days of localisation. Error is spot-on, though; it's Bagu that is, in fact, the error.
So, be sure to correct the next wag who rags on the poor guy, for they speak in error of Error.
We’ve ignored integer overflow kill screen scenarios that only superhuman gaming gods can reach, although – oh yes! – we are definitely good enough to reach them. Ahem. There are plenty of other more minor issues in Nintendo-published games, though – let us know your 'favourites' or if you think we’ve missed something important below. We're off for a lie down after the overuse of the word 'error' in that last paragraph.
Comments 35
Zelda's got tons more glitches. Like the one in Link to the Past (that's still unfixed even in the NSO release) that lets you beat the entire game in about 3 minutes.
I remember getting wacked with the Skyward Sword one. Thank God Nintendo figured out how to use the internet in some capacity.
@SmaMan the one they mentioned in this very article.
@RiggsHB
Oh drat. I missed that. Durr!
I’m playing NES Final Fantasy now, and a whole host of spells are worthless (at least in the Western release) due to being bugged out. And a couple actually get way better (I’m thinking of a heal spell that works far better than it was intended to). None of these are gamebreaking at all — I actually find it kind of endearing that the first entry in such a seminal series was released in the West as almost a beta prototype (a bit of an exaggeration, but you get my point).
I remember when I felt really clever finding a glitch in Mario 64 after running around the circular section of the castle exterior's central spire and then jump-lunging into the front wall. Jumped through the wall and fell to the other side of the door, which I could run around in, and if you went through the door from this side, you'd end up with the interior of the castle, but on the outside of the door. You could jump through the wall from there and resume normal gameplay.
Not a Nintendo Published game But I lost a 127 hours save in The Elders Scrolls V do to a bug. From that day on i learned to always create a backup save.
I heard a long time ago about a glitch in the Original Metroid. If you glitched through a specific wall that didn’t have a room on the other side of it, it would randomly generate a room. Then it would keep randomly generating rooms as you kept going through doors. Because of the way the NES was programmed, every single game would randomly generate it in the exact same way every time. Gamers originally thought it was a secret super hard labyrinth put in by the developers only for super players, but eventually word got back to the developers and they figured out that it was just a weird glitch.
I haven’t found any detailed information about this story online, so I’m not sure if it’s true or not.
I love Error. Just that one line alone makes him one of the best Zelda NPCs.
The "finish Super Mario 3 in three seconds" glitch (performed by TASBOT) is my favourite glitch.
https://youtu.be/EHfw-BEuRO8?t=4409
I never ever encountered the Glitch in Skyward Sword because I didn't know that you could go to any part of the Song you want. I always do Faron, Eldin, & Lanayru in that order.
@ALinkttPresent NES Zelda has a row of screens that are accessable through a burning bush glitch due to the number of vertical and horizontal screens needing to fit a specific ratio. Sounds similar.
"feel free to discuss in the comments section which ones are legitimate and which would get you ejected from your local 4-player session). Game-breaking? This broke relationships."
I simply love Nintendolife! Thank you guys for all the giggles!
@SockJones Yeah that does sound like a similar concept. I had never heard of the Zelda glitch before.
@ALinkttPresent https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/03/zelda-has-a-minus-world/amp/ it’s a relatively recently discovered glitch. I saw several articles on it when it was discovered since it’s so rare to find a big glitch in a 30 year old game.
I see the thumbnail and I came exclusively to say that Error was not a glitch since another NPC specifically tells you to talk to Error to get something. Luckily I read the article first because I learned something new. Bagu was supposed to be named Bug as a joke but they made a mistake? That's actually pretty funny!
Does anyone remember that glitch from M&L Dream Team that prevented some people from finishing Mt. Pajamaja? Nintendo had to patch it so the puzzle was finishable for those who messed up.
Ganon’s forces have slain most of the Hylians. One stalwart warrior stood against them defiant, refusing to move an inch.
“I AM ERROR” He stated.
The Metroid password one is great! Haha!
I don't think it's fair to say Bagu was a mistake, it sounds more like a name, perhaps they just went with it for that reason
Thoroughly enjoyed the article and even the caption, great job Gavin! ^^
A more technical reason for SMB's "Minus World" is that the warp zone 3 pipe set is actually one in-game object. It is one object, used 3 times in the game, 1-2, 4-2 above ground, 4-2 below ground. Before the values reset, once the warp zone properly loads, the 1-2 warp leads to the same areas as the 4-2 below ground; this is why the middle pipe leads to World 5-1.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv_h_R3o9r8
I'm surprised they didn't go with Justin Bailey.
Ridley's awesome lol. And I thought Samuel L. Jackson say what again in pulp fiction was intimidating.
“Nintendo games are consistently polished!”
Me: Glances at Mario and Luigi paper jam
No mention of the Master Hand glitch from Melee?
Ahhhh... Missingno... How many times did i catch it on Pokémon Blue on my Game Boy to get l.100 pokémon hehehe😁I remember going to my friend's house to play Pokémon Stadium on his N64 and Missingno then popped up as a Starmie but with incredibly weak defence! 🤣
I remember borrowing Super Paper Mario from a friend and getting stuck due to a glitch that crashed the entire console on level 2-2.
@CurryPowderKeg79 back when I bought it on the PS3 Skyrim is the main reason why I relentlessly save every game so often nowadays.
I think it was Mario Kart on the 3DS that had the worst exploit on one of the Wuhu Island maps, where falling off the edge at just the right spot early in the race would reset your kart just feet from the finish line.
@ALinkttPresent Thank you! – The NES Metroid door jump into the “Secret Worlds” glitch! (that is the keyword to search for your questions btw). This was not only a glitch, it was a chance to explore and report to the then budding online gaming community with a sense of a tiny-frontier. There were advanced tech tips to door jump down, etc. it all seems so quaint by today’s internet standards.
Yes, only a few interesting areas were ever found. Sure, it was mostly the idea of finding something that was fun; not filling in graph paper or being unable to see the sprite in most of the secret areas (or even worse only getting stuck inconclusively in a wall). Yet, as one of those who purchased the cartridge specifically for this added adventure, the glitches give games a bit of fun we miss when every single problem is updated away.
Imagine Metroid without the door jump glitch at all. Oh my!
My favourite was the original gameboy zelda, where if you pressed the menu button just as you moved from one screen to another, it would warp you to the other side of the screen, often to parts of the map that you were never supposed to be able to go in. I spent hours experimenting with this, discovering wierd 'behind the scenes' rooms and things.
I always assumed his name was Errol and he was introducing himself, and it was a typo.
Lol at that Ridley one! Oh, and Error finally explained.
Tap here to load 35 comments
Leave A Comment
Hold on there, you need to login to post a comment...