Bugs in video games can spark hatred for any title, a sign of a lack of polish and an underbaked experience, but sometimes, you just don’t care.
Certain games can either be so fundamentally solid that even a mountain of bugs can’t drag them down, or they show enough promise and good ideas for a fanbase to form.
10 Incredibly Janky Games We All Loved Anyway
The phrase ‘warts and all’ springs to mind.
While nowadays, patches can completely smooth over any rough patches a game has, it’ll still retain the notoriety of being broken on launch, even if it’s better nowadays.
Some of these bugs shift the narrative from the game being a broken piece of garbage to a lovable game with funny quirks, and that goes for all of these games.
10Cyberpunk 2077
Saved By Anime
Cyberpunk 2077
Cyberpunk 2077is one of the most infamous disasters of the modern-day gaming industry, known for being nearly unplayable at launch, with everything unloading being a very common bug.
Nowadays, you’ll find quite a few people on social media coming off the anime adaption, playing the game, and then saying, “Wait, Cyberpunk 2077 was actually really good?”
Truth be told, it wasn’t for a long time, but the devs remained dedicated, adding in more content and polishing over the biggest issues, but it’s still quite the buggy affair.
You’ll still see floating coffee cups, random invisible walls for motorbikes, and quite a few crashes on PC. Yet, the really passionate and solid experience underneath all that still wins over many people.
9Sonic Heroes
Collect Ten Hermit Crabs
Sonic Heroes
I thought of including several differentSonicgames for this list, namely 06 orAdventure, but I think Heroes is the epitome of why freaks like me love this blue idiot.
Sure, scripted segments can break and kill you seemingly at random, and sure, you can just clip out of bounds and instantly game over, but this game has heart, damn it.
It’s a top 5 best-selling Sonic game for good reason: having a way more upbeat and easy-to-follow narrative and level themes that fall in line with the classic games.
It just feels like an encapsulation of this era’s sauce, that irreplaceable vibe and irresistible jank,it’s why Sonic is so greatdespite his reputation. Even when it’s hard to play, it’s still fun to experience.
8No Man’s Sky
Better Than Day One
No Man’s Sky
Perhaps the most incredible redemption arc in video game history,No Man’s Skyis still quite the buggy game, but it went from broken and boring to broken and really fun.
The focus isusually on adding banger content, patching up the biggest game-breaking issues, and rolling with all that, which leaves a ton of smaller bugs piled up from every update.
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If you’re looking for games that fulfill your desire to explore the outermost reaches of space, the following picks are worth your time.
Even recently, there have been bugs that did so much as completely erase save data, but luckily, we’re rid of that and just have awesome space exploration and colony building in its place.
They’ve also been on a hell of a hot streak, fulfilling every promise they made pre-launch and more, with multiplayer, genuinely unique worlds, and a massive amount of new content, all for free, which has built up a ton of goodwill.
7Pokémon Legends: Arceus
The Right Direction
Pokemon Legends: Arceus
ModernPokémongames are really quite a mess, with the Pokémon Company not handling the transition from the 3DS to the Switch all that well, the visuals a massive part of that.
These games not only look rough, but also have massive bugs, with objects deciding not to render, a ton of pop-in, animations playing at the wrong time, and a million other things.
Yet,Pokémon Legends: Arceusstill managed to rekindle the flame so many people had lost from this series, having a genuinely fun and innovative take on the gameplay that the series sorely needed.
Plus, much to my elation, this one opted to serve as a solo venture instead of using the dated and inconvenient dual-release strategy that all the mainline games use. This is one of the most beloved and janky Pokémon games ever.
6The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Easy to Ignore
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Still standing as the highest-rated game of all time on Metacritic,Ocarina of Timeis one of the jankiest games out there, but pulls out such a captivating experience that it hardly matters.
There are too many massive bugs to count in this game, some of my favorites being clipping through almost any wall, 12 sticks with a constant hitbox, and the ability to execute arbitrary code,which led to the best GDQ run ever.
It’s not just speedrun stuff, though, you can play the ocarina while boiling in lava, fall through the world for getting a Gold Skulltula, or use the Magic Lens for free by just playing the Song of Storms.
Every single bug in this game seems to skirt the line of genuinely inconvenient and really fun tricks to pull off, and I think it’s better for it, and given some of these bugs got put in the 3DS remake, Nintendo seems to agree.
5Minecraft
Two Messy Editions
Minecraftis the best-selling game ever, so you might wonder how it managed to get on this list. I’m just wondering how the hell BUD powering works.
We put up with massive stutters and terrible performance on Java, chunks not loading,along with weird Redstone mechanicsthat the community refuses to let Mojang touch without outrage.
It’s even worse on the Bedrock edition, though, with a ton of random shader errors, Redstone feeling completely random, and the game-deciding to kill you for no reason, which seems great for Hardcore players.
There’s a massive cavalcade of bugs, but more often than not, they get embraced as unique quirks and fun things to play around with, despite still being completely unintended behavior.
4Half-Life
Mostly Playable
PC games have a tendency to age terribly without frequent updates, and while Valve does a better job at keeping the originalHalf-Lifealive than most other developers would, it’s still a relic of its time.
You might think the remake, Half-Life Source, would fix a lot of the issues, but it just added more and changed things for the worse, in what might be one of the worst remakes ever made.
The original game went on to be the definitive version as usual, even though you’re able to move backward at the speed of sound, objects can clip out of bounds, and NPCs can randomly decide not to do what they should and softlock you.
That said, the janky behavior of grabbing objects or moving quickly by bunny hopping are incredibly iconic, broken things that the game just wouldn’t be the same without, and Valve has preserved most of that with their semi-recent patches.
3The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Horsing Around
Skyrimis rather infamous for two things: being ported to every system on the planet and having horses that do double duty as climbing gear because of how busted this game is.
Bethesda has a tendency to keep bugs in a game if they’re hilarious, so NPCs won’t see you commit crimes if you put a bucket on their head, and Giants can send them flying.
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There’s still a rather large mountain of less fun bugs to contend with, though, and all of them vary wildly depending on what you’re playing on, so whether your save data gets deleted or dead horses spawn in front of you is up to your choice of device.
I think that this game’s jank and unpolished nature is perhaps a massive reason for its success, as everyone can manifest the image of weird, unintentional, or odd behavior in Skyrim. If only this was a one-off thing and not still present in Starfield.
2Super Smash Bros. Melee
Competitive Glitches
Super Smash Bros. Melee
Potentially the game with the most longevity ever, still being actively played by a large competitive community to this day,Super Smash Bros. Meleeis a game born of development hell, and it shows.
While it feels solid on the surface, the cracks form the more you play, and soon Ness' yo-yo can hit from all the way across the stage, Link’s nair hitbox never ends, and Ice Climbers, need a say more?
It’s especially seen in competitive play, and while wave dashing is arguably intended behavior, not receiving a knockback after hitting someone’s shield and landing certainly isn’t supposed to happen.
You can point to a few hundred different clips of Melee players encountering a new level of jank that no one’s ever seen before, and it’s honestly even better because of it. You never know what you’re going to get.
1Fallout: New Vegas
Duct-Taped Together
Fallout: New Vegas
Fallout: New Vegasis a cult classic game made on a shoestring budget in record time, and it’s seemingly held together by those same shoestrings with the aid of a little duct tape.
Bethesda gave the team high expectations and 18 months of development time, and it’s a product of that hellish creative process, with hundreds of bugs and flaws that make it overwhelmingly hard to play.
Namely, the game refuses to launch on a lot of modern computers; the pip-boy can flashbang you and become unreadable, items disappear if you buy them too quickly, and many other annoyances.
The game just feels more open-ended and interesting thanany Fallout game that came before or after it, so despite the fact that the world is tearing apart at the poorly threaded seams, it’s a great time.
Skyrim Lead Developer Explains The Buggy State Of Bethesda Titles
In an interview, the Skyrim lead developer explained why Bethesda games often come out unpolished and the internal struggles behind them.
