​The Best And Most Messed Up Bugs And Glitches In Video Game History

There are undoubtedly ups and downs to the era of digital downloads. On the positive side, the ability to download the latest blockbuster game directly to your PS4 or Xbox without even leaving your house means you don't have to have those awkward conversations with game shop staff who try and flog you a dodgy, own brand, and ultimately broken control pad as part of some made up bundle.

On the downside, unless you have a speedy internet connection, downloading the latest FIFA can take the best part of an entire season. Seriously, you'd find more pace in Man United's back line under Louis Van Gaal (Little gag for all the City/Liverpool/Arsenal fans out there, that one).

However, the other big downside (or indeed upside, depending on your point of view) is that, knowing games can be updating by scores of forced patches and updates, developers often push out titles that are unfinished - buggy, glitchy and plainly not ready. That means, if you're a day one kind of guy or girl, chances are you're going to stumble across some major bumps in the road when you start the game up for the first time.

The long and short of it is, in-game bugs are now more common than ever. Which is why the internet is having a field day documenting every single glitch, every single fault on YouTube.

1. Assassin's Creed: Unity's Bad Trip

To be frank, if we were to document every single bug in the original retail release of Assassin's Creed: Unity, you'd have to book a week off work just to read through it. Safe to say, if you paid £50 for Unity back in November 2014, you'll have encountered everything from faces without skin to the ability to walk through walls and floors before then getting trapped firmly on the other side.

And by 'the other side', I mean the blank white space hidden away in play that you were never meant to see, but you can easily kid yourself that it's heaven if you're so inclined.
Oh, and the AI was a treat. With a game so populated with NPCs, it wasn't at all uncommon to see members of crowds walking on thin air, falling through buildings and generally behaving as if they were suffering from a particularly bad trip.

Of course, if gamers love anything it's doing things they're not meant to within play, which meant that plenty of folk actually rushed to pick up Unity before Ubisoft moved to iron out its bevvy of bugs. And boy, were they rewarded. Sadly for us, however, most of these glitches have now been wiped from existence, leaving YouTube as the only way to sample such delights in 2016. Shame.

2. NBA 2K15's Scary Faces

Ever wanted to see yourself in a video game? Stupid question. Ever want to see how you'd look if your face was made of plastic and you'd left it out under a hot lamp for a bit too long? You're still with us, right?

NBA 2K15 made that dream come true - albeit entirely unwittingly. The idea was simple; you scanned your face into the game using either Xbox One's Kinect or PS4's official camera, you let the game map it onto a player's head, and - voila - you're in the game.

Only problem was, NBA 2K15's requirements for a successful head scan were rather picky. The wrong lighting, the wrong expression, the wrong movement of your head during the photo, and... well, we'll let the video below do the talking. Safe to say, so hideous and downright inhuman were many of the results that NBA 2K15's killer features quickly became an internet sensation.

The following year's release came with the exact same feature and, luckily for hilarious YouTubers everywhere, was just as much of a car crash.

Another big Ubisoft game, and another title seemingly pushed out too soon with more bugs hiding under its covers than in a mattress in a dodgy B&B in Doncaster.

Watch Dogs was meant to be the French publisher's big new IP - a major new release on what were then next-gen consoles capable of taking on the likes of GTA. Sales were nothing to be sniffed at, but the pressure of living up to those expectations meant Watch Dogs hit retail arguably half finished.

Buildings would disappear, folk would spin around 360 degrees without rhyme or reason and cars could be catapulted up into the sky with ease. It was, in short, a playground, which is no doubt exactly what Ubisoft intended, but perhaps not in the manner it achieved it.

This may be our personal favourite. Heavy Rain was the much-hyped but ultimately disappointing big PlayStation blockbuster that rolled out on PS3 ten years ago from writer and director David Cage. The premise? You play the role of a Dad, Ethan, searching for his son Shaun, who has gone missing.

A chunk of play involves you hitting the 'X' button to call out "Shaun" in the kind of dramatic fashion typically reserved for an EastEnders end-of-episode-duff-duff cliffhanger. These call outs weren't meant to go on for the entire game, however.

Nevertheless, a bug in play saw one player get trapped in a Shaun-howling loop, with hitting X triggering the very same call out throughout the entirety of play - including cut-scenes. The end result was something rather glorious, something rather amazing, and possibly the most amusing bug anyone has ever stumbled across in the history of games. Or maybe we're over-egging things because our happy pills have just kicked in. We'll let you make up your own mind.

Words by Keith Andrew

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