Similar situation in GTA IV- if you kill a certain person instead of saving them (you're given a choice) you can't 100% the game because they need to be alive for a side mission.   


 

Ikari Warriors was one of the first NES games I had. "Game ending glitch" is pretty much the inevitable result of playing that game in 2 player mode using the ABBA code. One player respawns inside the wall, then the other one can no longer scroll the screen.

I had Link's Awakening that I was never able to beat, I heard years that there was a glitch in the game. But I'll never know for sure if that was the problem, as I left the cart at an ex-gf's house long ago.

Early versions of Castlevania freezing up when you spam holy water in the hall before the Grim Reaper. That's when you learn to get really handy with the boomerang cross.

"Occasionally, fielders may temporarily disappear from the screen. This is not a malfuction."  - black box Baseball manual

 

dp

I got a new champion for us


Might and Magic III for SNES. You can trigger a glitch that locks the game and wipes your save.

Did I also mention it might be the longest game on the system?  20+ hours down the drain.

Ps3 lord of the rings war in the north had a horrible game ending glitch if you didnt know about it. I got the game for my brother back in the day since he loved third age so much. Told him i heard there was a horrible glitch when researching the gsme to buy. So he avoided it.

I don't know if this counts but those *fucking* bricks that come out of the wall on Stage 4 of Double Dragon. If those aren't bugged I'll eat my hat.

Any Bethesda game?

DD has a lot of glitches but the blocks aren't one of them. Someone figured out the pattern.




 

Also when you cross the Bridge of Eldin the first time.  The bridge is damaged once you cross, but if you save and quit before entering the Twilight Realm on the other side, when you reload your save you are on the wrong side of the bridge to proceed and there is no way to cross to continue the game.  It's about a third of the way through the game I believe.  It may have been fixed in the HD version but I haven't wanted to find that one out on my own.

Oh wow. have been playing this game for 25 years and did not know this.

Gemini Man disappeared on me the first time I played Mega Man 3. That is part of the reason I am really sour on Mega Man 3 and consider it a buggy mess (which it is).

At the very, very end of Might and Magic III: Isles of Terra there are stones that age your characters (causing them to die). Literally the last section of the last dungeon. If you wander and explore too much it literally kills your party and makes you unable to beat it if you saved without realizing your characters were senior citizens about the keel over.

I will add to this, I had it happen on my first play through. If you save in the room where you have to teleport the cannon. The kid you have to talk that sits ontop of the cannon will disappear. Preventing you from proceeding, and reloading the save will not fix this issue. You have to start a new game.

 

A new copy of God of War would freeze at the Zeus fight. I had to replay the final boss battles three times before I could beat the game.

A used copy of God of War II kept glitching and then eventually just froze at a certain point. I had to order a new copy in order to finally beat the game.

Why are used disc games always so scratched up?

Food Fight on the Atari 7800 would crash once you reached level 107.

They fixed it in a newer release; you can tell by the bold print on the end label.

GoW 1 or 2 (I don't remember which) killed my first PS2. Froze up in the final boss fight and it never played another disc after that.

 

I've encountered a ton of game-ending glitches over the years, ranging from the random to the reproducible. One that comes to mind on the SNES is Porky Pig's Haunted Holiday -- it's very easy to accidentally clip through the scenery in that game, and sometimes it can softlock you. Another one is Harley's Humongous Adventure, which is famous for crashing with a "FATAL ERROR".

Other systems...I once had a winning run on Tower of Doom (Intellivision) spoiled when I mysteriously ended up outside the dungeon walls. Hard to know if that's failing hardware, a bug in the game engine, or what.

Also on the Intellivision, you can softlock Championship Tennis by checking your score at the wrong time. And I've had USCF Chess softlock on me repeatedly if the game follows certain sequences of moves. The Atari 2600 Video Chess game also has the reputation of softlocking/bugging out but it never happened to me.

A laserdisc FMV game I played, Kingdom II: Shadoan (Mac version), seems to have a bug that makes the game unwinnable on the lower difficulty setting (a key scene never becomes available).

Getting back to RPGs: Beggar Prince on the Genesis has a famous bug that can make the game unwinnable if you revisit a previous area, but I avoided it. However a later release from the same company, Star Odyssey, mysteriously corrupted my save game right before the final boss -- I had to replay the whole thing.

Getting knocked off a ledge in Ninja Gaiden?

Instant game ender for me.

Morrowind would freeze and I wouldn't be able to remember the last time I saved.

Just encountered one in the PAL exclusive Noah's Ark.
I got stuck at the 5th boss (a snowman). I got stuck at the left top side of the screen, I jumped again and Noah got off screen. Never to return again (I could hear him jumpong and shooting but no matter what I tried he didn't return on-screen).

Sucks big time.

I had a similar situation (saving the game in a situation that prevents you from beating the game) in the original Resident Evil. My save file was right before the last boss encounter, with too little ammo to kill him and no way to obtain any more ammo. Game over.

What happened to your knife?

the tick snes game is full of glitches. Snes contest it glitched out on stage 3 for 2 different people I believe(1 being me)

I can definitely think of games where if you hit a savepoint with very low health, it is impossible to progress, and impossible to go back and do anything about it without a full restart. When I was a kid my Dad and I did a full playthrough of the original Tomb Raider over the span of about a year every weekend, and we got permanently stuck at the final boss because we saved with almost no health and no medpacks. We could have tried to restart the level and do it all over again but we never did.

On Skies of Arcadia for Dreamcast, on my second playthrough (thankfully didn't happen to me the first time) I saved right before you are confronted by the first one of those gigantic bosses in an airship battle, same type of deal where if you save at the save point with low health and low items you literally have to start the entire game over as far as I'm aware, it's impossible to defeat the boss, and you can't go backward either.