The most memorable bugs I've encountered in retro gaming | Retro Gaming Blogging Challenge #7

This post marks the halfway point in the Retro Gaming Blogging Challenge. Today we're taking a look at some memorable bugs. Most bugs I've encountered in my gaming youth stems from A Bug's Life. This game is propped full of bugs. There's ants, flies, wasps, cockroaches, mites, grasshoppers and the list goes on.

Another game that has bugs are the Pokemon games. There's Caterpie and Pinsir to name a few, but they also hold the type of bugs that this post is actually gonna focus on. Namely an error, flaw or or fault in a program that's unintended from the developers side. Source

I've probably encountered countless bugs and glitches in my plethora of games that I've forgotten about. The Pokemon series on the Gameboy hold the brightest memories when it comes to bugs and glitches. Those will be the focus of the day.

Source: Pokemon Wiki


MissingNo.

MissingNo. has to be the most known glitch in the Pokemon series. @kuronokenshi has already covered it in his edition of this post. Read it here.

I remember how huge the discovery of MissingNo was in our community at the time. No one had any idea what a bug was, or that games even had them. We all thought that this was some huge secret that someone had found. A secret left in by the developers. While the discovery of a weird glitched out Pokemon was huge in itself the item duplication glitch that accompanied it was really grand.

Whenever you encountered MissingNo the 6th item in your item list would, for some reason, increase the quantity of the item by 128 given that you already had less than 128 of the item. This would lead to the duplication of several items and especially the rare candy which, if given to a Pokemon, would increase it's level by one. It made that leveling grind that I myself was quite obsessed with a lot easier.

I remember that I would do a full new playthrough of the game so that I could duplicate the master ball which had a 100% capture rate on any Pokemon. I had already used the one master ball that you get on every save on something. God knows what. A Nidoran probably.

Source: Wired


Cloning glitch

Next on the list is the cloning glitches that were encountered in several Pokemon games. This was another huge discovery in our little community of Pokemon trainers. This glitch allowed you to clone or duplicate Pokemon.

To do so you would need a game link cable. This of course made that one guy in our group who had the link cable extremely popular. The link cable would allow you to trade and battle with your friends. It was quite great. What was later discovered was that if you disconnected the cable at the right time during a Pokemon trade you could clone Pokemon.

I didn't know about the technicalities behind this until now. Basically what it does is exploit how the link cable functions. As it's only possible for the link cable to transfer data one way a time. One Pokemon would be sent from one Gameboy and then received by the other. The process is then repeated the other way. Interrupting the trade at the right time would cause the first Pokemon being transferred to show up on both Gameboys while the second Pokemon had been sacrificed. Source

This was also quite risky. I remember one of my friends losing his whole save file while we were doing this. We had no idea it could happen so it was quite shocking at the time. We started using this glitch a little less frequently after that.

Source: Bulbapedia


Glitch City

The last but not at least as memorable glitch I encountered in the Pokemon games were Glitch City. This was a special glitched out area which looked a lot like a city. You could enter it by entering and leaving the Safari Zone in a special way. How to access it can be found here.

Again, we had no idea that this was a glitch. In our young and ignorant minds this was a secret and a super cool one at that. One thing I really liked was that Glitch City looked different depending on where you entered it from. It sort of took on this glitched out and warped look of where you were prior.

Glitch City was risky to do if you werent paying attention. The game save couldn't be corrupted by it and you didn't stand the chance of losing your progress or Pokemon, but you could get stuck there. You could leave safely anytime with Fly or Teleport. If you didn't bring these you would be stuck. Closing the game and reloading your save was of course an option.

It was however possible to crash the game while in Glitch City if one of the tiles were open to the outside of the map. You could wander on outside of the map into the nothingness beyond and the game would eventually crash. How it didn't dawn on us that this wasn't intentional I'll never understand.

I would duplicate this glitch over and over. Trying to enter it from different places to see how it changed. I would search every nook and cranny for secret items or some new unknown Pokemon to catch. I did of course not find anything.

Source: Bulbapedia


That concludes this post. These were the most memorable bugs and glitches I've encountered in my gaming of old. Remember to check out the #retrogamingchallenge tag as to not miss a post in this great challenge. I check the tag once or twice every day to make sure I can read them all. It's been one huge nostalgia trip. Luckily it's not over yet as there's still plenty of topics to cover.


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