Hello all,
Been a bit busy as of late so been neglecting the blog a bit so apologies are in order!
Recently I gained a copy of the Witcher 3, so far I am loving it but have noticed several little glitches and some weird and wonderful sights. Now I've always found in games little oddities or defects in game to be a very enjoyable experience to fish out and find. I don't believe they ruin games (unless you play against someone in saints row who used standby on the modem.... but that's a story for another time ! :P).
I loved working out little kinks and defects with friends and remember when I was younger running to friends with excitement telling them what I had found! We would then go home sit on xbox live and then learn the ins and out of the treasure that surfaced...
I think one of the most enjoyable experience for finding glitches and cool little curve balls in the most recent years was the first gears of war game. Never managed to pick up any of the other titles but loved this game and played it to death. Myself and a few others as soon as we heard there was glitches in this game we used to hold several private games exploring all these really interesting abilities and bugs...
Falling through maps, monkey flips and the well known chainsaw glitch that would annoy several people. We never used these glitches against others online unless they used them first (our silly little badge of honor) but the most enjoyment came from trying to master the combinations of buttons and areas on the map to make these defects come to life!
My first ever experience of glitching though well the moment I understood more about games and whats going on behind them (Usually we called these cheats, whats cheat was that you used to get out the map?), silly I know but as a kid entering into the world of gaming and trying to get my head around things... yeah I was really naive and confused! Back to the point, first experience came from Halo 2 multiplayer; more so the ability to sword cancel or escape the maps... friends showed me the way and as a result this sparked my initial interest to learn more about how games work.
Learning the art of "glitching" with the help of the master chief and friend helped me truly acknowledge just how interesting and amazing video games were, more so just how much work went in behind them to make the end product. That might sound confusing but from my experiences with friends I went off to understand how games were made up, what programming was and in turn learned and strengthen my abilities as a designer. Obviously most would deem weird glitches and bugs to be bad but it led me to think were other people out there like me and were genuinely happy about finding a glitch? Which then showed me for the first time that there's many types of gamer/player and sometimes developers throw these little things into their games even if at first they see them as bad. They are left to add their own personal touch to the game and as a team they can look back and wonder how long it will take someone to find out that they can run through a wall if they perform a certain string of actions and scream like a banshee!
Looking back to the first thing that brought me to write this piece, the Witcher my favourite thing about the game so far outside the well written story and beautiful graphics/design (having never played a Witcher game before... which is bad I know). What i really like is the weirdness of the horse, having left it outside a pub in the first town, entering said pub and triggering a clip scene or two in the background there was my horse walking headfirst into the window of the pub from the outside... reminding me only of one thing...
Can't wait to see what I find next, obviously admiring the game itself as I go! :)
