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As it says in the title, what are some of the strangest gaming moments that have happened to you while playing video games?


For me: When I was playing Europa Universalis III I was England and I wanted to see how the rest of the world was doing. So in the 1500 I have found out that France has conquered parts of southern Italy. How about you?

Why was that strange? It is just what they historically did/tried to do.

I generally don't play games with enough complexity for the really strange stuff to happen. The only things I can remember are both from Saints Row 3:
- After the bridges get raised, NPCs still try to drive over them. The few that make the jump have their cars catch fire, then explode.
- One dead end street where, if you stay there for any length of time doing nothing, NPCs will start crashing into each other, running over pedestrians, driving crazy. It's probably second only to the bridges in the number of NPC deaths that happen without players doing anything.

I have also come across this screenshot:

I once spent roughly 20 minutes on skype telling a friend a really long and complex story with multiple lead characters and interweaving plot points. And I finished it off by saying: "And that's basically my last game of Dwarf Fortress."

I was reading from the game without imagining anything.

Maybe the Dwarves Do It With Protection bug?

A bug in Dragon Age that causes the Dwarf protagonist to be wearing full plate during sex scenes.

Annoyingly, I can't find it on youtube or even google.

Im going back into the dark ages, Stunt Bike Racer for the Sinclair Spectrum. There was one particular level which had a flame fountain between phone boxes and if you could land on top of that just right the rider would come of the bike, leap into air having burned his arse then when your bike starts again it travels at about 5X speed.

The Test Drive 5 (IIRC) demo on a disc full of demos: At one point there's a median with a guard rail down the center of it. At a certain point, the guard rail stops, which would allow you to swap sides of the road. Well, if you scraped along it right it would make your car fly up in the air and do a barrel roll once the guard rail ended. It was... different. And amusing.

Then the myriad of strange things that have happened in Bethesda releases.

-'Might & Magic II'. The party gets into a fight with apparently female opponents, and since the battle progress text window was obviously set to maximum scroll speed (who gives a damn about the details, what matters is the outcome of the turn) so it took us a while to notice that apparently, the male party members weren't attacking. Slowing down the scroll speed we found out why-they were standing there drooling. Literally.
We had to look up what 'seductress' means but once we did, we laughed long and hard.
-The GoldBox games. 'Okay, why is my Paladin's movement rate slowed down to 3 squares?' Because he's lugging along 20,000 copper coins and back then money had weight?
-The Krynn series (which might have been a subset of the GoldBox games). 'Um my Paladin is doing virtually no damage. Why is my Paladin doing virtually no damage?' Because, as you would know if you hadn't set the text scroll speed to maximum (see my 'Might&Magic II' comment), he's now fighting barehanded because his sword is stuck in the sivak draconian that turned to stone when he killed it.
'Okay, this is the third aurak draconian that didn't explode upon being killed. What's going on?' The moment Bats found out how vorpal blades work in D&D (those games were really thin on the information they gave you about your gear).

my example is kind of hard to explain as it depends alot on the moment, but back in wrath we were killing the ugly spider at the end of spider wing, we had wiped for what ever reason and some (I think it was the mage himself) joked about mages wearing women's clothing (the typical joke about robes being dresses) so I asked the mage if that's why he wore his girlfriend's clothes (FYI:said girlfriend was also in the guild and might have even been on the raid then I can't remember) and he went "how did you know that?" or word to that effect we had big laugh since it was just joke we did while we were preparing for the next try, but it would looked really strange to an outsider.

And another from WoW though this one I didn't vitness personally just heard about it in guild chat, well 1 of my guildies at the time was doing an instance with a pug (as either the healer or the tank IIRC) and asked why one of the DPSer kept taunting the mobs they were fighting, the DPS replied that the taunt skill was part of his rotation and IIRC it wasn't even something like Death Grip that has function outside the "taunt" effect, but a skill like Taunt, Provoke(though it wasn't this as it was pre-MoP), Dark Command or similar.

btw these are 2 different guilds too as first one was on one of my ally chars and second on one of my horde chars

Ah man, Test Drive. We had TD3 for DOS and I remember it was my first experience with a game clock being tied to the PC clock. Running it on a 386SX was no big deal, but I found the disks a few years later and put it on my 133Mhz P1. Loaded it up and hit the up arrow key only to be instantly fly at 1 billion miles an hour into the first tree (I assume) and wreck out.

It's the same thing playing X-Com. The animations are at 1000mph. The Alien turns are usually followed with "WTF just happened?"

bilateralrope wrote: I have also come across this screenshot: <snip>

Aaah, Crusader Kings II. Love that game. That's also a great game for having strange things happen. Almost half of the event messages you get like that have the English garbled beyond recognition. The AI can be remarkably silly, too, with the Pope calling a Crusader over some small province in Sweden.

I used to play a lot of NBA2K12 and that game could get really weird. Strange graphics glitches (my favorite being one after a player dunks they randomly go flying into the crowd), referees calling offensive fouls on players that are on defense, the play-by-play announcers glitching out and either not speaking at all (leading to eerie fake applause and sneaker squeaking sounds) or repeating the same phrase again and again.

I know Red Dead Redemption was famous for weird glitches. Sometimes when an animal spawned it for some reason would occasionally use a human skin by mistake (I believe this was only in the release version before it got patched). So, you would look up in the sky and see a demented cowboy's boy trying to flap like a vulture and such.

Two things that immediately come to mind happened last year during my first week of GTA V.

First, I was riding a bicycle down this dirt road that runs past the south side of Fort Zancudo. It was like ten at night ingame and getting pretty dark, and I was literally the only one on the road. As I got about halfway down, I started to see taillights ahead of me. Curious, I tried to catch up to the car and pull in front of it so it'd stop. It took me a while, but I managed to do so. I got off my bike and walked over to the car, and NO ONE WAS DRIVING IT HOLY SHIT WTF

A few days later, it'd been a while since I'd had a mission available as Trevor so I hadn't switched to him lately. I had last left him in a dinghy after diving for all the submarine pieces. He showed up to save Michael at the Kortz Center, up in the hills around Los Santos, and what was he wearing? Fucking scuba gear.

This alone was funny enough, and since he removed it when I switched to him during the mission, I figured that was the end of it. Oh, no.

Later, as Franklin, I rolled up on the sawmill to rescue Lamar, and Michael and Trevor were waiting. Guess what? Fucking scuba gear again. Like last time, he took it off when I switched to him. After that, I did a few missions as Michael, getting through most of the Epsilon Program and the movie premiere.

Finally, it was time to start preparing for the last heist. I went to the strip club to meet with everyone and start planning, and what was Trevor wearing through the whole cutscene? That's right, fucking scuba gear, with a full scuba mask too this time, and everyone else in the room was just acting like it was the most normal thing in the world:

Patch notes for the sims:
http://kotaku.com/pregnant-sims-can-no- ... 1506014739

'Pregnant Sims can no longer brawl'.
'Sims that have been turned into a Ghost will no longer receive an extra diploma.'
'Sims can no longer "Try for Baby" with the Grim Reaper.'

Three things on that list:

Dead relatives will no longer appear alive in your Sims' family trees while traveling to Egypt, China, or France.
Fire Engines will now maintain all functionality after Sims drive them in Egypt, China, or France.
Fixed an issue that caused Sim relationships to break when traveling to Egypt, China, or France.

What was so special about Egypt, China and France in the code to make those specific countries break things ?

Eating specific prepared meals no longer has an impact on an unborn baby's gender.

Okay, so I had someone in a biology class who literally believed that's how things work. I guess she got a job with EA after graduating?

In the original Half-life, I witnessed a lone security guard gun down an entire squad of marines. I remember him fondly as until I lured him in there, I was not able to clear that room as I was low on health and ammo.

bilateralrope wrote:What was so special about Egypt, China and France in the code to make those specific countries break things ?

The World Adventures thing was one of the very first expansions, and the other countries were actually totally separate towns it loaded. So it was basically like saving your original town, throwing it away, importing your "vacationing" sims to a totally new town, doing stuff with them, then exporting those sims, throwing out the new town, loading the old one, and then inserting the newly-vacationed sims in place of their old selves in your saved copy of your original town. It's very easy to imagine a case where it doesn't think the updated, vacationed sims are the same sims as their older non-vacationing copies, and thus destroying a great deal of their connectedness with their original town.

Batman wrote:-The GoldBox games. 'Okay, why is my Paladin's movement rate slowed down to 3 squares?' Because he's lugging along 20,000 copper coins and back then money had weight?

That was a recurring problem in Everquest. I would occasionally pick up discarded copper at popular camp sites, then accidentally die walking down a hill heading back into town.

Original Driver on the PS. Think I was playing survival in San Francisco, getting battered by police cars then got hit in just the right way as to send the car flying into the air and land, wheels down, on top of one of the buildings.

World of Tanks: I'm in my Churchill exchanging pot shots with two panzers in a forest whilst I hide behind the broken stumps of a bridge when all of a sudden an M5 lands on me from 30m above causing me to explode.

He was my team mate - guess he was trying to make the jump over the broken bridge sections.

Executor32 wrote:First, I was riding a bicycle down this dirt road that runs past the south side of Fort Zancudo. It was like ten at night ingame and getting pretty dark, and I was literally the only one on the road. As I got about halfway down, I started to see taillights ahead of me. Curious, I tried to catch up to the car and pull in front of it so it'd stop. It took me a while, but I managed to do so. I got off my bike and walked over to the car, and NO ONE WAS DRIVING IT HOLY SHIT WTF

The programmers do some crazy things to deal with memory limitations.... among other things. I remember from my limited GTA4 playing, I dropped Roland off from bowling and a car pulled around to try and get around me on the passenger side, but had to stop, blocking the door. So Roland just cold cocked me and got out the driver's side.

Beth games are almost not even worth mentioning. Steal a cup the Greybeards set out specifically for you after the "get everyone to stop killing each other" meeting and it's go time as every NPCs unloads on you. Same with the random robber events in Riften. At odd intervals, an NPC will steal something and the entire fucking town will draw down on him and ruthlessly murder him. But nothing tops the walking mannequins. I've never had it happen to me personally, but just youtube videos of them freak me the Hell out.

There's an odd little glitch in WoW. One of the vanity items that drops off a rare mob in Pandland turns you into a Mogu statue for 5 minutes. During this time, you cannot be targetted. I use it on Timeless Isle while trying to get a world-boss group together so it's much harder to get ganked. The asses would have to AOE and hit the guards which would ruin their day. Anyways, if you accept a cross-realm invite, the effect ends, but the game will not load your character model client-side. Your weapon also seems to be counted as your model since the animations no longer match up. So you end up being a floating weapon that "runs" until you do something that modifies your character model. Even porting won't fix it. You have to use another shape-change ability like the Orb of Sindorei.

It's interesting fighting Ordos as a floating staff.

Another fun one is the pathing for the loot ship in Ice Crown Citadel. The ship seems to be able to exist in different places server and client side. I've had the fight start and the ship take off normally, without me on it. I'm left standing on open air. Then the game "grabs" me and starts flying me over the middle of the citadel well the fight goes on. After a while, I figure it just doesn't know what to do with my character and drops me into the abyss. It's one of the few times in a video game I can get a bad case of vertigo (same when you fall out of the map in other games).

The worst case had to be the "spawn in space as your character model" in the early Star Trek Online Beta. Your character model is huge and you just start falling "down." If you've got the hardware, the draw distance is also insane. I've actually had to walk away from my computer because it's unnerving.

The funniest, and also strangest thing I've ever seen, was way back on the N64. My brother, a friend, and I were playing Mario Party 3 with a hard Wario computer as the fourth player.

We're all tied, Wario is last in the turn, on the second to last turn. All of us but him are a good roll's distance from the star. Naturally, he uses the genie's lamp he'd gotten some turns earlier. It brings him right to the star and... he says no. Easily had enough coins to get a star, used the item that brings him straight to the tool of victory, and he says no. Still just as funny to me now as it was when I was six.


Best glitch I ever saw was one I caused myself. Experimenting with map triggers and zones in the WarCraft 3 World Editor to make a teleporter. Screwed up and when I tested it, the footman I sent into it existed in two places at once. Then my computer got a BSOD. Good times.

I don't know if you can call it strange or creepy easter egg but one time I'd started a new game of the Star Trek computer game Star Fleet Command on Halloween and noticed after a while playing that I had started with a Legendary Security Officer. Well at first I didn't think too much about it, just a nice random perk until I noticed that while my marines were having a higher rate of success when sent on missions they hardly ever came back. Then I looked at the name of the Legendary Security Officer, it was Marion Bates.......and it suddenly all made sense.

FIFA 2000 - I was messing around on the lowest difficulty trying to foul as much as possible and somehow an AI player had me dead to rights for an embarassing goal. He kicked the ball......and then ran forward into the goal mouth and headed it back out thus intercepting his own goal. I know it was on the lowest difficulty but still......

Grand Theft Auto - A cop was chasing me down the street taking potshots with his pistol. A civiilian screams "He's got a gun!".

Grand Theft Auto 2 - Red shirt NPCs are muggers who will, to the game's credit, mug other NPCs as well. Unusually, one spawned under martial law and began to ply his trade on an on duty soldier. With mechanical efficiency 5 soldiers surrounded and gunned him down. Fair enough.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas - "Look at you man, you're not even keeping it real!" This line was scripted, wearing the gimp costume while having it said to me was not. Also. in the same playthrough, failing a mission because the main character's brother got killed trying to cross a quiet road. He just stepped out in front a moving car and got splatted. This is made all the more hilarious by the fact that you've just spent half of the game trying to get him out of jail, a goal which was only accomplished by working for a spy which involved learning to fly planes and stealing a harrier.

Hitman: Blood Money - Guards getting suspicious for stupid reasons is hardly strange in the Hitman franchise. What really tipped off the guards in the White House that I wasn't the chef was the fact that I was holding the chefs knife......in the kitchen. The president wasn't hungry I guess?

Clock Tower - This was a point and click game. I was trying to click on a drawer but just as I pressed the confirm button the cursor would slip to the mirror above. This happened 6 times. Normally, in a point and click game, especially one so old, clicking the same object 5 times and getting the same reponse means it's guaranteed to do nothing new so you can imagine the surprise when I accidently clicked that thing a 6th time and it strangled the protagonist to death. I hadn't encountered any supernatural elements in the game so far, there no was apparant reason why that cursor kept slipping onto that mirror, and the odds of that random event make it pretty improbable that you'd manage to touch that mirror 5 times without it trying to strangle you. Basically, several factors had come to together to create a legitimately good jump scare far better than the game, good though it is, could have managed by design.

Over in my heavily-modded Fallout 3, the Radscorpion became a thing. Every now and then, regardless of where I was in the world, with a terrific battering and crashing, this giant radscorpion that had been mangled by the game's physics engine whickered through the air near me, bounced off the ground and whickered off again. It became a good luck symbol to me and sometimes I'd wait for a while when setting out in order to see whether my journey was blessed by this bizzare god.