6 Strange Bugs That Broke Our Games (And Brains)

6 Miles Morales Is The Spectacular Brick-Man

We're pleased to drop some good news for those of you hoping the PS5 to bring about a revolution when it comes to glitches. While players might not be strangers to Spider-Man errors where random NPCs get visually all messed-up, Spider-Man: Miles Morales finally brings that "feature" to the playable character. In addition to one-upping Peter's abilities with electric stings and invisibility, Miles now apparently has Kirby's brick-change powers. (Was he bit by a radioactive wall?)

While doing everything a brick can, the random glitch also allows players to use Brick-Man as if he were still a healthy version of Spider-Man for a while until the game realizes that dumb brick is a DC character and straight-up crashes.

Best of all is how it's not just bricks, but pretty much any random object like a cardboard box ...

... a fridge ...

... or even a copy of Amazing Spider-Man 2:

5 Middle-Earth: Shadow of War Does Interdimensional Necromancy

Middle-Earth: Shadow of War introduced the "Nemesis" mechanic. It allows players to apparently form even more of a hate-hate bond with orcs than they normally would. It's great for the most part, but not so much for IGN's Brendan Graeber, whose experience with the nemesis system went so awry he had to write an extensive report detailing all the messed up stuff the game threw at him.

In his playthrough, we learn of Bruz, an Olog-Hai (all the Uruk-Hai were sold-out) troll who prevented Brendan to advance in his quest by glitching out and coming back from the dead to hunt him down. Now, we know this is Lord of the Rings, where stuff comes back to life all the time, and also, the hunting down humans part is like, the only thing trolls do, right? Well, yeah, thing is, now his voice lines were just random Tim Allen grunts, and he was unkillable.

That wasn't even the literal and figurative troll's most frustrating thing to deal with; it was that this Bruz wasn't the one from Brendan's campaign. He was coming not just from a different save file but from a deleted one. This troll shouldn't exist here or anywhere in the gaming multiverse that exists inside Brendan's console. Brendan's doomed testimonial concludes with the ominous statement that Bruz found a way to replicate himself.

The Outer Worlds is the successful return of the people who made the critically acclaimed despite ultra-buggy Fallout: New Vegas. The good news is that Outer Worlds not only lives up to the bug-hype but also completely surpasses it. At some points in the adventure, players might become unable to further progress in the game because their companions are dead. That would make sense ... if not for the fact that companions in Outer Worlds can't die.

The bug was so weird that the team had no idea how it even came about during development, so they just said screw it and just hoped players would never come across it ... meaning players came across it almost immediately. After a hell of a lot of people started complaining about their undead teammates, the devs started looking for answers. Tons of digging later, they found out that the problem was actually about climbing. During conversations, the companion AI got bored and randomly started climbing stairs. That would be fine if not for the fact that during said conversations, the NPCs aren't confined to the physical limitations of the ship and keep climbing out of the ship, right into space.

We're sure responses that missing characters were 'moving up Uranus' didn't help.

The head developer says this was the hardest he ever had to work to fix a bug in his entire career. We say we're saddened by seeing someone so hell-bent on undoing his masterpiece.

3 Flight Simulator's Insane Chasm

Physics seems to have gone on an indefinite strike on a Brazilian airfield in the newest iteration of Microsoft Flight Simulator, as one of the supposed landing strips got replaced by an immense abyss. A random hole magically appearing in a game isn't usually enough of a glitch to write home about, but there's a lot more to this gigantic void fans have already found the perfect name for.

The more you look into "Holesonaro," the more mesmerizing it gets. Players brave enough to dive into it will notice that the landing strip didn't simply get replaced by a player-swallowing void. The strip is still there, just way, way underneath. With enough skill, one can actually land on it, but due to the strip's short length and the colossally high wall surrounding it, no one who goes in manages to get out.

2 FIFA's Ball That Shouldn't Be

FIFA 2021 is shaping up to be as much of a great soccer simulation as its predecessor, which means it's very good at having its players' names spelled correctly. While most people don't care much for soccer in the US because it is illegal, we presume most know that the soccer ball is just as immune to gravity as the balls used in US sports and that the goalposts don't get drenched in glue before the start of the game.

So how the hell do you explain this mess caused by Redditor BuschLatte146? 

One could wisely argue that allowing for things to go awry actually brings a soccer game closer to a realistic depiction of the actual thing, sure. But one thing is to have a ball getting stuck on a goal post, and another is seeing every otherwise dumb bot on the pitch become aware that they're witnessing something that shouldn't be happening and collectively lose their minds over it.

Ghost of Tsushima might not be the faithful representation of feudal Japan that American anime purists wanted it to be, but we'll take it. Yet, while it's easy to take haikus four hundred years before they were invented, the same cannot be said for automatic bows. Ghost of Tsushima's ability system allows players to level-up their auto-heal ability to the degree that the amount of healing gained from it far surpasses the damage received by incoming arrows. This is pretty cool, but it also seems to aggravate the enemies so much they bring out their timely equivalent of AR-15s.

Now, what happens when you put an army capable of shooting infinite arrows against a character who's leveled up to auto-heal beyond the damage he gets from getting hit by arrows? Players get to witness the main character become not just immortal but also eternally stuck in the air by an arrow-fueled flight.

See you Space Samurai