glitches

Castle Crush (Diddy's Kong Quest): one of my favorite glitches of all time is the Castle Crush glitch in Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest. i've never really played any Donkey Kong games, but i literally played this entire game using an emulator just so i could fuck around with this glitch. if you want a detailed description, go here, but to sum it up, on the 30th level (Castle Crush), you pick up a barrel, hold it to a wall, drop it, then pick it up again, causing it to break improperly. the effects of this glitch are very random, but it often causes the game to crash. even though this is a game-breaking glitch, it won't cause permanent damage to physical hardware. however, SRAM save files can still be corrupted or deleted, which is why it's best to practice this glitch in an emulator with save states.

Action 52 (all of it): Action 52 is an unlicensed NES cartridge containing 52 games, most of them being very low quality. Normally, this wouldn't be anything noteworthy, if it weren't for the $200 price tag. Nearly every game on the cartridge has at least one bug and some either fail to load or quickly crash (you can read about all of them here). There are two revisions of this cartridge, Rev A and Rev B (which fixed a few crashes and other bugs, it can be played here). Ooze, pictured on the left, is one game that crashed in the first revision and was also planned to be part of a contest in which whoever could beat level 6 would win a cash prize. However, the game would always crash on level 2, so the contest was cancelled and a new revision was released.

MissingNo. (Pokemon Gen. 1): MissingNo. is one of the most well-known glitches and somewhat of a gaming legend. In Red and Blue, MissingNo. appears as a Bird/Normal-type and the most common method of encountering it is by talking to the Old Man in Viridian City, flying to Cinnabar Island, and surfing on the coast. Its most common form is the block form, but it can appear in different forms depending on the player's name. In Yellow, it has a unique form, appearing as a mass of yellow and red boxes, and encountering it will often cause the game to freeze or crash. If MissingNo. is viewed in Pokemon Stadium, it appears as a substitute doll, and if it's viewed in Pokemon Stadium 2, it appears as a Ditto. Simply encountering MissingNo. can have several effects, such as corrupting Hall of Fame data and scrambling sprites. One of its effects is actually very useful, that being the ability to duplicate items in the 6th bag slot up to 128, which can give the player something like 128 Master Balls or Rare Candies.