Electronic games are now much better than they used too, far more
engaging, complex, interactive and visually appealing. Now with that
truism out of the way, along with all the good stuff in games come some
interesting features, usually unintended, sometimes fun, others
frustrating.
I found a fun and useful glitch in “Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando”. When in the frozen planet level, if you kill one of the monsters that pop up from the holes in the ground at the right moment, it will freeze in mid-air and block other monsters from appearing from the same hole, which is a good thing as those monsters are annoying and can reduce Ratchet’s health very fast when they attack in groups. On the left there is a screenshot of a frozen monster. Timing seems to be one of the variables for this glitch and a big gun helps too :-).
Lately, I’ve been playing “Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2”, and I’ve
found some interesting behaviors:
- Sometimes I’ve seen that some of the computer controlled cars can move at astonishing speeds, e.g. I was leading a race by about 18 seconds (with the NFS Aston Martin V12 Vanquish), and all of a sudden the following car (another V12 Vanquish) cut that lead to about 4 seconds in an extremely short period of time (perhaps 4 or 5 seconds of wall-clock time), and it was not because of a shortcut. Funny thing is that I’ve not been able to figure out a pattern for this glitch.
- When doing jumps, sometimes if you get it at the correct angle and speed, you can get a very high/long jump, the problem is that if your trajectory ends on a part of scenery your car can get stuck there, and no matter what you do, it won’t budge. I’ve gotten cars stuck this way in the big tree trunk over the road before the first tunnel in the National Forest track, or the fuel truck before the ramp that makes you jump through the ad panel in the Desert Heat track (see picture on the right). In the second case, I was going to take the jump on the adjacent dirt road and ramp, but veered too much to the right and ended up jumping over towards the truck.
- There is a side-effect with the “Zone cams” option, a very cool effect that freezes the action and moves the camera 360 degrees around your car. I found out that when using this while your car is just crossing the finish line in one of the laps of a race, you get a many more points (180,000) in comparison with the regular bonus (usually 1,000). This is a known glitch apparently (just found it on a game FAQ).
The ultra-high-speed catch up glitch is also known to happen in a another car sim “Grand Turismo 3”, although I’ve never managed to have a long enough lead to test that.
BTW, all of these are Playstation 2 games.