The most broken/glitchiest video game you've played

I don't play that many games anymore, but historically there are two that stick out for me as being the most glitchy.

Driver 2 was essentially a weaponless GTA game before GTA went 3D, that came out in 2000 for the Playstation 1 by Britain's Reflections. It had a really horribly rendered graphics engine which was far worse than that of Driver the previous year and which people would laugh at today for the game type. If there was too much stuff to load on the screen, like if you were driving too fast or had too many police cars chasing you, the visuals would start lagging, juddering and freeze jumping whilst the audio of engine sounds and sirens remained. Occasionally this would recover but you would immediately crash into a suddenly appearing lamp post or something; but most of the time it would just freeze on a single frame with an increasing mess of slightly out of sync siren sounds that gradually duplicated and became louder until you rest the console.

There was also a free roam level on the game set in Chicago, where you could jump over a bridge across the river as it was opening, except there was no river and just a massive glitch, filled with the background sky and city scenery, which again had you resetting the console if you fell into it. Madness. Fortunately, Reflections managed to fix these bugs by the time the great, but difficult, Stuntman came out in 2002, followed by the far more impressive Driver 3 in '04.


The second game which was astonishingly bad was Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) for PC. Rush re-branded to be used in the marketing for film of the same name in the same year, this was really a sequel to 2000's Sea Dogs, made by Russia's Akella and published by Bethesda Softworks. However, outside of a few sparse references, the game was Sea Dogs 2 in all but name. The game was horribly filled with inescapable glitches of inescapable missing dialogue boxes and action freezes. There were almost routinely occurring bugs on the many loading screens between areas which would crash the whole game and lose all of your progress, which would take ages to re-do due to the massive open world nature of the game and the unpredictable nature of when or where the bugs would hit worst. It was so bad, that a manual was released some years later which gave instructions how to re-write the missing code in the game files.

This aside, the game was somehow both irritatingly bad and yet lovingly addictive, and for better or worse I continued to buy the sequels which were released under the name Age of Pirates, which were mercifully lacking in the previous loading screen crashes, yet typically continued to frustratingly feature areas of unfinished or badly rendered gameplay.

 

I have played a few games mentioned here, but I've been lucky enough not to experience glitches firsthand. Even if I've seen glitches a-plenty from folks in Let's Plays.

The biggest bit of dumb luck I've had is not encountering game-breaking glitches the one time I played Sonic 06 (or as my brother calls it, "Sonic Oh Shit"). The game still sucks, though.