Favorite game-crashing/softlocking glitches?

[CharlesAverill]

I'm looking around for easy ways to crash or soft lock a game, such as door glitching into a wall in NES Metroid. What are some similar glitches in other games that serve no other real purpose than to crash or soft lock the game?

 

[H1B1Esquire]

Comix Zone--stand on a crate nearly close-ish to a wall, stand on crate, get hit by an enemy, gamefreeze......or Sketch Turner freeze, because the enemies still move.......but can't detect you.....and the music keeps jammin'!

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

There are thousands of them, you can find lists of them all over the place if you do some googling.

One of my favorites, in Shadow of the Colossus if you dive into a tiny puddle, you can cause the game to completely crash. But only on the console itself, doing so PCSX2 will just teleport you in the air instead of crashing.

Link's Awakening you can softlock the game if you buy two shovels during one of the trade quests, since you can't throw away items and you only have enough item spaces for all the items needed in the game.

In the OG Grim Fandango with it's original release, there are parts of the games that can run too fast if your CPU is too fast, in some cases causing the game to freak out and stop at certain places. A patch released to fix this one though.

Mario Kart DS you can force the game to crash by holding down A and B on one of the sets of stairs in the Luigi's Mansion course, if you start turning the game will crash randomly. If you do it while online, and someone sees you do it, you can crash anyone's game

In BattleTanx, one of my favorite N64 games, if you use the infinite health cheat, sometimes you can't deactivate it which can cause an infinite loop in a bonus level.

 

[tan-tan]

Some of my favorite game crashing glitches include:

Kirby's Adventure - Stone glitch.

Sonic Adventure- This glitch with Big the Cat.

Donkey Kong Country 2's infamous Castle Crush glitch.

Sonic 1's Labyrinth Zone glitch.

Then we have Lufia II, which has a laundry list of bugs ranging from minor to catastrophic. My favorite is probably being able to scroll the sound settings selection past 'mono' to a glitched setting that causes all manner of corruption.

 

[Milenko]

Castle crush has always been my favourite, trying to get different results is fun

 

[Taleweaver]

My favorite is of a game I never actually played myself: Golden Eye 64 (achieved by wiggling the cartridge, apparently). I mean...look at this:

Spoiler

TBH I only know of two bugs that made things...weird (not lock up or something). These all stem from my youth:

One was in the original fallout game...and an illegal copy we got some long defunct warez distribution channel on CD (meaning: it was probably more buggy than it should've been). if you took a few specific actions, you got a dog as sidekick. You couldn't bring this dog to a certain area, though. Because if you did, he'd go invisible to you. At first me and my friends thought this was awesome ("look...we're accompanied by a ghost dog "...as the howl and grunts were still shown ). Then it turned out that the enemies could still see and shoot him. And that it took up a side character slot.

The other one was in simcity 2000. This is my favorite because it had some very practical use. You could plant trees on empty soil with a 'tree' button, but if you held down a couple buttons (shift, I think. Perhaps another key as well) it would "gum out" larger buildings. Those buildings were still there, but the trees overwrote that part. So a police station was a 3x3 building, but you could erase bits of it to put something else. From most angles you'd just see a HOM (hall of mirrors) on the remaining spots, but you really could see the impartial building from one angle. This was pretty useful if you really wanted to stack up on citizens, as you could put multiple arco's "into" each other.