6 Accidentally Awesome Glitches in Famous Video Games

6 Assassin's Creed IV -- the Lazarus Boat

It seems there's something about Assassin's Creed that lends itself to hilarious and creepy glitches (that "something" might be Ubisoft's irresistible urge to shove ambitious games out the door before they've actually finished coding them). As the series gets bigger and more ambitious, the bugs get more bewildering -- which brings us to Assassin's Creed IV. It expanded on the seafaring pirate ship adventures introduced in the previous game, and in the process, plunged the player into a whirling vortex of madness.

For example, if you claim a ship called the Jackdaw, you might show up to the dock and find a hollow space-time vacuum instead, leaving behind a bizarre boat-shaped dent in the water, as if the Bermuda Triangle had decided to come to you:

And that's not even the strangest part -- though the ship is gone, your crew appears to have stuck around. They're suspended in the void, screaming the entire time because they're spoiled babies who get whiny the moment all laws of physics are torn asunder before their eyes. Occasionally, additional crew drop into the abyss below, surely to come flying out of a wormhole at the opposite end of the galaxy somewhere.

Then, they are inexplicably taken into the sky, as if the aliens and/or strange Lovecraftian gods who took the boat have returned to finish the job:

But as it turns out, they were simply making room for your boat's triumphant return from the dark abyss:

Yes, as easily as it vanished, the good ship Lazarus rises and takes its rightful place in the harbor. Once you set sail, your crew magically returns, never mentioning the unspeakable thing that happened to them, singing the same goddamn songs over and over again in the hope that this, if nothing else, will suppress the memory.

Incredibly, this is not the most ridiculous boating glitch on the list ...

Aside from some historically bad voice acting, the Resident Evil series isn't known for its sense of humor. Unless, of course, you come across the right glitch, such as the one we get during the epic climax of Resident Evil 4. Leon Kennedy has just rescued Ashley Graham, the President's daughter, who was being held captive by a dwarf who commands an army of monsters and a giant robot. The zombie-infested facility they're in is about to self-destruct, and their only method of escape is a nearby jet ski. You have the key for it, but if you dick around in your inventory before selecting it, you trigger something called the Ditman glitch. And then this happens:

Thanks to previously-unannounced warlock powers, Leon darts off on his own, leaving both Ashley and the Kawasaki behind, Leon floating along on what is presumably a blast of magic emanating from his asshole.

This, however, is only the second-most-hilarious jet ski glitch in the game. It's also possible that your jet ski decides to fuck off without you, leaving Leon to hilariously hover over the water, slowly glancing down like Wile E. Coyote the moment he realizes he's run off the cliff:

Then a moment later, he calmly goes zipping off after it, while a bewildered Ashley presumably watches from the dock and wonders if the whole adventure hasn't in fact been one long peyote trip.

The genius of open-world sandbox games like Grand Theft Auto V is you can do pretty much anything you want, even if it has nothing to do with committing grand thefts of autos or anything else. For instance, you can take a break from your hardened criminal life and relax on the golf course. But this is still a violent world, and if you manage to strike another golfer with the ball, all hell breaks loose:

Walloping some poor polo-shirt-clad richbro in the head with your tiny ball isn't just a violation of the "course rules" -- it's somehow enough to make your character literally go catatonic with guilt. Try as you might, you can't move him. He simply lets the club drop from his hands and awaits death. And death shall swiftly come. Cops apparently have a standing kill-on-sight order for anybody who dares harm the country club's favorite Chad. All you can do is watch as your character is brutally gunned down.

In fact, the overriding message of the game seems to be that nonsensical horror awaits anyone who devotes time to non-criminal activity. Here's what can happen when you try to take a leisurely bike ride along the beach:

Shit, bicycles are dangerous, better take a cab!

Okay, we're not sure that one is so much "glitch" as it is "the programmers amusing themselves" -- if you catch a cab and accidentally set the destination for the open sea, by God the driver will do what you ask. If you skip the cab ride animation, the taxi spontaneously plops into the Pacific Ocean, the driver consigning himself to his own watery death. He died doing what he loved.

3 EA Sports UFC -- Bones and Gravity Have No Place in the Octagon

When EA Sports took over the UFC video game license from THQ (or stole it, depending on which set of lawyers you prefer), fans were hoping for the best. What they got was a twisted orgy of nightmares. It's a game where realistic-looking humans fight other realistic-looking humans, in a world where reality itself has been twisted into a mind-bending horror.

For instance, here's Jon "Bones" Jones, sans bones:

And yet he keeps kicking, his legs nothing but floppy sacks of skin, his fragile mind unable to comprehend the madness.

But soon, his opponent, Alexander Gustafsson, finds that the glitch gods spare no one. After sticking to the canvas like somebody slathered it with Gorilla Glue, Gustafsson miraculously flips into the air without even bothering to stand up first ...

... and then finds himself able to sail across the ring with the majesty of a mannequin flying out of the back of a speeding dump truck:

And speaking of glitches that actually improve sports games ...

2 MLB The Show '14 -- Fuck Baseball, the Ice Cream Man is Here!

Baseball video games have been around forever, and they're all pretty much the same. Hit the ball, run to first, another guy hits the ball, run to second, keep going until somebody wins or everybody gets bored and decides to screw around on Mario Kart instead. But stick with MLB The Show 14, and you will be rewarded with hilarity. Such as the moment when you hit a single, and then the player ... keeps running, forever, Forrest-Gump-style:

What could possibly make the batter bolt off into the night? Does the catcher chasing him have a knife? Did he see the love of his life up in the right field stands, waving and calling his name, having changed her mind about moving to Europe, because this is not a video game but rather the ending to a romantic comedy that's probably titled something like Cupid Throws a Curve?

But it's not over -- the opposing team's shortstop, for whatever reason, decides that he's not going to put up with that shit. He goes streaking off after the rogue batter, and is also apparently The Flash:

Maybe he's the other man in this love triangle? Maybe they're going to have a fight to win the girl's heart? Meanwhile, the other players can only stand and watch, along with the dead-eyed spectators in the half-filled stadium.

1 Watch Dogs -- Everything is Broken

Some say Watch Dogs is just Grand Theft Auto with a hacking gimmick. But what it is instead is a dystopian future in which hacking has gotten so out of control that the fabric of reality itself has been "hacked." Watch while our hacker hacks a steam vent while his sports car is parked over it:

Yes! Our favorite part is where he jumps out and kind of lounges among the clouds for a moment. What exactly did this hack accomplish? Only a hacker would understand, motherfucker. Sometimes a hack is its own reward -- why else would a man hack his way right through the street itself:

Check it out! In an instant, the pavement is gone and you are plunged into a watery underworld that only hackers know exists. Your natural survival instincts kicking in, you swim for safety, only to find that safety is actually Limbo, the endless void between life and death:

Once there, you have two choices: either wait it out for the next 50,000 years until the God of Hackers decides to admit you into His Kingdom, or hit reset while swearing like a heathen. Oh, look, here's a passing truck. For a normal man, there are numerous ways to stop that vehicle. For a hacker, it's time to hack your skull right into his rear tire. Check out my ragdoll physics, bitch!

That's right -- you totally survive that, even though your cranium was jarred loose by a vicious impact from another speeding vehicle. That's because the world of video games is a magical place where anything is possible. Consider this: in the future, when they've jacked all of our brains into a virtual computer-generated world, everyday life will look just like that.

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For more video game screw-ups, check out The 5 Most Hilarious Abuses of Video Game Glitches and The 8 Creepiest Glitches Hidden in Popular Video Games.

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