Good Bad Bugs / Sports Game

• Madden NFL:
  • The series has had a number of persistent examples over the years, with them being "good" or "bad" depending on whether you're the one exploiting them or being victimized, respectively. To note some of the more prominent:
    • "Rocket Catching", where the receiver gets a speed burst (beyond what his ratings should allow for) in order to catch the ball.
    • "Jet Packing", where the receiver jumps several feet into the air (again beyond what his ratings should allow for) in order to make a catch.
    • The "WR Snap glitch", where a series of audibles is used to abuse the AI until the center snaps the ball directly out to a wide receiver in physics-defying fashion, allowing for an easy catch-and-run. Similar is the abuse of the "option" plays while in the Wildcat formation. Simply motion the receiver out wide and then "pitch" the option as soon as the ball is snapped. It results in an unerringly accurate and lightning-fast turning the play into a defacto WR screen pass for easy yardage.
  • Typos in player attributes have led to several over the years. Some of the more prominent examples:
    • In one roster update for 06, the developers mistakenly listed one player as six inches tall instead of six feet. He was still able to interact with the rest of the players as if he was full-sized, which led to some hilarious animations.
    • This happened again at launch for 15. Browns linebacker Christian Kirksey was mistakenly listed at 1'2" rather than 6'2", and was incorrectly depicted as a member of the Tennessee Titans. One video of the glitch that showed him picking up a fumble with the ball twice his size was particularly hilarious.
    • This can also occur with player ratings, leading to some humorous and even useful results. Frequently, digits will be swapped, leading to, for example, a defensive tackle who was supposed to have a 69 Acceleration rating instead getting a 96, turning him into a massively disruptive monster. (These are almost always patched in the next roster update.)
  • John Madden Football '92 features an ambulance that retrieves injured players, which also end up running over any other player that get in the way. See the hilarity in all its 16-bit glory.
  • In the late 2000s iterations of the series, AI controlled teams largely devalued their own draft picks during the season. If your team was doing well, you could trade your draft picks for equivalent-round picks (and sometimes more, particularly in 06) of the worst team in the league right before the trade deadline (just before the midway point of the season). While you couldn't guarantee the team you swindled would be the worst overall by the end of the season, they would almost always end up picking in the top five. Having an almost guaranteed top-five pick every year made it substantially easier to keep your team stocked with top talent in a long-running franchise. Late iterations would heavily Nerf this strategy.
  • Also from the late 2000s era, the performance-based ratings progression from around this time was extremely flawed when it came to quarterbacks. While all players got some sort of rating increases or decreases after each quarter of the season based on how they performed, quarterbacks had especially high benchmarks for progression. This meant that very few of the quarterbacks generated for each year's draft class would progress, leading to a dearth of quality quarterbacks in the league once you played through a few seasons and had the real life quarterbacks start to retire. Winning consistently was quite easy when you had some of the only good QBs in the league, but it did make things less interesting...
  • Madden 25, celebrating the series' 25th iteration, in particular had a few of these:
    • A glitch causes a quarterback's throw power, ordinarily one of the most expensive ratings to improve, to get cheaper with each rank. While it's still expensive, a user skilled in achieving goals as a QB can have it raised to 99 THP in only a few seasons.
    • In Connected Franchise mode, one of the fictional head coaches you can hire is Tomas Single. Sometimes in the middle of the game, his face will vertically stretch and his eyes will become blank.
• In NHL 09, if a goal ricochets into the net off a defender's stick, that defender will be shown celebrating with the other team in the goal cutscene. It's just too funny to eliminate.
  • It gets better. If you pokecheck the puck from the opponent's goalie into the net, he celebrates with your team. Goalies should celebrate goals more often in real life.
  • Another bug allows players in the Online Team Play mode to glitch themselves to 99 Overall stats (rather than the 75-85 most have). Some actually prefer this because it speeds the game up quite a bit.
• The Amiga rugby game International Rugby Challenge keeps running the match timer while the game is paused. Stuart Campbell's review in Amiga Power magazine—which awarded a score of 2%, for numerous other bugs—pointed out that it's possible to win any game by scoring an initial try, and then pausing for the remainder of the match.
• Along similar lines, the infamously poor Amiga football/soccer game Kick Off 96 features a bug whereby the player can line up for free kicks, penalties, etc. indefinitely, while the match timer continued to count down. The player can exploit the exact same match-winning bug as in International Rugby Challenge by scoring a goal early in the game, getting a goal kick, and waiting for the clock to run out.
  • Some of the glitches of other Kick Off games are more fondly-remembered. For one, sometimes when the ball strikes a goalpost it ricochets off with far more velocity than it previously had. This can result in a goal at the other end of the pitch!
  • For two, a player who falls over as part of a legal tackle sometimes stays on the ground but is able to move around like a normal player. Well, almost like a normal player: they also have super speed!
• A glitch in Skate 2 allows you to fling yourself into the air under the right circumstances. If you drop your board to send it rolling along angled or uneven ground, then press a set of buttons with the right timing (in the case of the 360 version, it's X to jump, then the left trigger, Y and Right on the left analog stick all at the same time), your skater will grab his board in mid-jump, and his feet will snap onto it like magnets, causing him to hit the ground body-first and bounce high into the air. It doesn't work everywhere and it won't work online, but it makes for some hilarious bails once you get it right.
• In Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, doing many tricks rapidly in succession causes the player to pick up speed. This gives alternative methods to get to certain areas (it is possible for instance to launch off a concrete bank in School 2 to find an alternative route to the area containing the Carlsbad gap that is usually used as the exit from that spot in the game), and it's pretty much the only simple way to do the Love gap. It can also be used in the Marseilles level to do 1080s and 1260s, or a "360 the 900".
  • It's also possible to rack up massive rotations if you do donuts in front of non-standard gaps such as the loop in The Bullring or the pass-through on the Enma Chen ramp at Skate Heaven then rolling through the gap.
• This video shows how in Major League Baseball 2K6 an outfielder in Fenway Park can rob a home run by jumping the 37+ feet (over 11 meters) of the Green Monster In a Single Bound.
• Any of the various bugs that exists in Football Manager that aren't outright cheats but still give the human player an advantage if they choose to use them. The most well known are the "Corner Bugs"; when given a specific set of instructions at corner kicks, they will result in more goals than usual. Over the years they have included firing the ball out to the edge of the penalty box for a long shot, moving all but your best player away from the near post then having the corner taken there, and the same but the back post.
  • Another well-known bug is setting a player to be sold to another team with international appearance clauses. While you're manager of the international team. Every so often, a version of the game will come out where the AI doesn't recognise this situation and will happily include a "play 10 games and pay 50 million pounds" clause because they see that the player they are buying isn't likely to play internationally, but doesn't realise that the human player can easily bring them into the team and play them and get the money.
  • Then there are the overall Game-Breaker tactics. The most well known was the Diablo tactic for Championship Manager 03/04. To this day, the top tactics are compared to it.
• Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 has a bug made famous by a YouTube video, where a ball landing in a water hazard can actually float on the surface and the game counts it as a playable lie. The end result would be Tiger Woods walking on water to hit the ball. EA Sports actually recreated the glitch in live action with Tiger Woods himself for a Tiger Woods 09 promo and jokingly claimed, "It's not a glitch. He's just that good."
• NFL Street 2 has a exploit in one of the NFL Challenge mode challenges, in which you earn a certain number of development points for your player character. Said exploit involves doing the challenge over and over again without exiting from it, meaning not only does the game not progress the days for the final tournament, but you can also have all the development points you want to turn your players into superstars.
• An odd bug in the NES version of Punch-Out!! makes Soda Popinski pathetically easy. If Mac ducks when Popinski crouches to throw an uppercut, Popinski will freeze for a couple seconds. Mac can throw a body blow and usually get a star. Even stranger, this glitch will cause Soda to be knocked down after any star punch.
• Pro Evolution Soccer 4 has an oversight where going to Replay in the pause menu straight after a goal has been scored will add another goal for the scoring team. Exiting to the pause menu and returning to Replay adds another goal so repeating the process will run up the score.
• The Commodore 64 game International Soccer features the glitch that you can run the length of the pitch, and score, with the ball bouncing on your head.
• Skate 3 is absolutely FULL of these. There's a glitch to get your board stuck in a piece of plywood which will then lift off like a magic carpet (with you on it) and fly around the map. There's a glitch where you can get your board stuck under a manny pad while doing a setup and take off into the sky. There's a glitch that allows you to launch yourself off any ramp at high speeds and get all sorts of places the developers didn't intend for you to be. There are several pipes with the geometry reversed that your skater can get stuck inside and become a scrambled squirming mess. There's a glitch that makes you shoot off into the sky in a superdude position. There's a glitch that makes your skater explode into a rapidly flailing ball of twisted limbs. There's a glitch that makes you fall through the ground and into an endless void of darkness (or inside a building). There's a glitch where half your board gets stuck underground and pushing off causes your legs to bend and rotate in hilarious ways. There are trash cans that spawn inside of benches and go flying. And there's more. So much more. It's actually possible to identify Skate 3 just from the sound of its physics engine freaking out.
  • A Youtube user by the name of HelixSnake relishes this trope fully, as he/she has a cornucopia of hilarious Skate 3 videos, along with other videos from other titles such as GTA IV/V and so forth.
• In the Triple Play series, it's possible to have two fielders catch a fly ball at the same time (though only one fielder will have the ball in his hands). Both fielders in the center of the bullseye marking the ball's destination will be shown doing the "clap, clap, catch" animation no matter who gets it.
• In a FIFA game, there was an unlockable cheat that turned all the sidelines into invisible walls, meaning the ball would ricochet instead of going out of play. With this cheat active, shooting to deliberately hit the ball over the bar would still cause the opposition keeper to dive for the ball. When the ball rebounded to your player's feet, you'd then have an open goal.
• PC Fútbol 4.0 had an extremely useful bug when it came to selling players. Initially, you'd put one of your best players on sale at an outrageous price. You'd eventually get an offer from another team, upon which you are supposed to click on Accept (which instantly sells the player) or Reject, without the option to do anything else as the window the offer shows up does not let you click anywhere else... but you can use the arrow keys to put focus away from that window. Then, you can go the Squad window and change your star player with one of your worst players (as you could only put one player on sale at the same time), then return to the main screen. The offer would show up again, but on the new player, with the same value. This allows players to get massive amounts of money by selling poor players.
• In WWE Smackdown vs Raw: Normally characters can't lift an opponent that's more than one weight-class heavier than them. Example - women can only normally lift a cruiser-weight (ie Rey Mysterio), but wrestling moves on grounded opponents and table/ladder moves bypass the weight restriction. So you can have Trish Stratus powerbomb Andre the Giant through a table that's propped against a turnbuckle, or have Victoria do a Black Widow (powerbomb from the floor) on a fallen Andre.

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