5. Jurassic Park: Trespasser
Jurassic Park: Trespasser suffered from being too ambitious for its own good, as it attempted to implement so many unique ideas but failed to pull any of them with competency. Upon release the game was widely criticized for its dodgy physics engine, which saw weapons held by players swishing from left to right in front of their faces in order to add “realism”, and its crippling amount of game bugs.
These bugs ranged from the game’s dinosaurs (of which there were curiously very few) morphing into objects in the environment and their legs twitching uncontrollably, as is evidenced in the above video of a disco-dancing velociraptor.
The game, which prior to its release was touted as being “revolutionary” for PC gaming, sold only 50,000 copies and is now looked upon as one of the biggest disappointments in gaming history.
4. Goat Simulator
Goat Simulator is an oddity in that its whole concept is based around its glitches.
Rather than tasking the player with actually simulating the mundane life of a goat, Goat Simulator instead sets you loose in an open-world environment for you to create as much mayhem in as physically possible, and there is a LOT of mayhem to be caused.
Aside from the standard glitches such as falling off the map, falling through the floor of the world and somehow becoming embedded within the game world itself, Goat Simulator will also see your goats’ limbs contort into ghastly shapes as its sent through the air via an explosion or three, and there’s even a way to turn your goat into a ‘Demon Goat’ which sees you flying through the sky using a press of a button. This goat doesn’t fly gracefully, though – it instead shuttles through the air at a breakneck pace, unable to control itself and twisting itself into a variety of uncomfortable positions. Being a goat must be boring, but being the goat in Goat Simulator would be downright painful.
3. Sonic The Hedgehog (Sonic ’06)
Playing Sonic The Hedgehog (or Sonic ’06, as it is more commonly known as) was like going to watch the reunion gig of your old favorite band, only to find that they’d all put on a few stone and could barely stand up due to years of drug use, let alone play through their classics with a modicum of dignity.
In the past few years SEGA has been doing everything it can to true to rid us of the memory of Sonic ’06, even releasing a couple of decent games along the way (let’s not mention Sonic: Lost World), but Sonic ’06 is unforgettable in the worst possible way.
Its frequent glitches included, but were not limited to: falling through the world; becoming stuck in the walls of its environment; being trapped in an endless loop of attacks during the Silver boss fight; and defying physics by being able to walk around loop-de-loops. Needless to say, the game was a broken mess, and served to damage SEGA and Sonic’s credibility irreparably.
2. Cheetahmen II
The NES game Cheetahmen II was so bad that it was never released, and it was only made available to gamers because all existing copies of it were stolen from a warehouse. These copies now float around eBay and the like, selling for a ridiculous amount of money to collectors.
Cheetahmen II was a sequel to a game found on Action 52, a mini-game collection on the NES that was also notoriously terrible. However, Cheetahmen II somehow raises the bar when it comes to sheer awfulness, taking what made the first game so bad and amplifying it until it barely walks.
In Cheetahmen II, enemies can walk through platforms and hit you, you can abuse a jumping glitch that allows you to hop through the air until an enemy hits you, and jumping from a platform onto the floor kills you. If that wasn’t enough the game is also fundamentally broken, as the boss in level 3 disappears midway through your fight, meaning that you cannot progress to level 4. Is there a level 4? Who knows. All that we know is that it’s thoroughly depressing that this game can sell for over $2,000 on eBay.
1. Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing
Aside from frequently being touted as the worst game ever made, Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing is also by far the most glitchy.
The entire game is essentially one elongated glitch, as your truck can inexplicably pass through every object in the environment, actually speed up when it drives over hills and disappear when it races along bridges.
Big Rigs is poorly developed that your CPU opponent in the game doesn’t even move past the starting line, meaning that it fails to even perform its most basic feature of placing players in a race. You’ll never lose a game of Big Rigs, but despite this the game is so bad that you’ll never feel like a winner, either.
The most baffling of these glitches, though, is that reversing your truck sends it hurtling backwards at a jaw-dropping speed, shooting it off of the edge of the map which swiftly disappears into the distance. There is nothing about Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing that works as it should, and as such it is undeniably the most glitchy game ever.
