A Brief History of (Unintentionally) Unbeatable Games

Publisher Aspyr last week officially recognized There is a glitch that breaks the game in the last Switch port Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II. This glitch, which causes the game to crash after the “Basilisk Crash” scene on the planet Onderon, has an uncomfortable side effect of the Switch version. Totally unbeatable.

While Aspyr promised that this game-breaking bug would be fixed in the game’s next downloadable patch, not many game developers in the past had that option. Kotor II on the Switch is the latest in a long line of games that were literally impossible to complete (or have a full 100 percent completion rate) upon launch.

Here, we are not talking about games like Sims or tetris which are designed not to have a win condition and/or always end in failure for the player (although some games seem to fall into this category Amazingly defeated). We’re also not talking about games where a player is forced to reset after accidentally getting stuck in an in-game predicament where they can no longer make progress (TV Tropes contains Huge list A game that fits this description.

No, we’re talking instead about games that are supposed to be beatable, but for one reason or another, they can’t be fully completed no matter what the player does (except for using external cheats). While the short history of gaming has seen a lot of these games, here are some notable examples that should make Aspyr feel a little better about the latest games. Couture Problems.

skewered! (ZX Spectrum, 1987)

Beyond that, the Spectrum port of this awesome game was Commodore 64 Not playable at all Due to a programming glitch that made the game fail to respond to any keyboard input. But it may not have been an oversight.

Eurogamer has the story For programmer Jason Creighton, who was tasked with making a Spectrum version of the game despite not being provided with a copy of the original Commodore. When publisher The Power House insisted that Creighton do its best based on the game’s original map, he turned around a last-minute project written in Laser BASIC, rather than machine code.

While Creighton says he didn’t intentionally break the game’s controls, the unplayable chaos still bypassed the publisher’s quality control and hit British store shelves at a bargain vault price of £2. It still seems like a lot of money for a game where you can’t move, but what do we know?

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (MS-DOS, 1989)

For the most part, this PC version is a very loyal port of the first in terms of difficulty TMNT The NES game, which was also released in 1989. For some inexplicable reason, though, one block is missing from the sewer section at level 3, Making it impossible to remove a trivial gap. Supervision was Fixed in time for the game’s release in Europe in 1990but American players were stuck unless they knew how to cheat.

Chip Challenge (Windows, 1992)

Fourth Edition of Microsoft Entertainment Pack for Windows It’s well remembered for the tile-based puzzle game, which itself is a port of the 1989 Atari Lynx original. But that port changed a single tile at level 88, removing a wall and changing a former dead end into an open corner. This, in turn, makes enemies of the level’s infantry fly from that angle in a straight line, Permanently impede the player’s progress.

Oversight on later Windows versions of the game has been fixed, and while early players could technically skip level 88, they’ll do so knowing there’s at least one level they’ll never beat.

X-Men (Genesis, 1993)

Those who played this early action game in the ’90s might remember a witty puzzle/frustrating puzzle in later levels, where the game required the player to “reset the computer”. After searching the empty room for the reset button, it is hoped that clever players will discover that they have to Press the reset button on the Genesis console itself (29-year-old game guesses.) This little trick worked because the Genesis reset button Few areas of RAM left untouched-Allows the game to “remember” the player’s progress upon restart.

However, this innovative design trick became a problem when players tried to play the game on Sega Nomad. This is because the mobile version of Genesis does not have a dedicated reset button, which means that players are stuck when they reach the puzzle of the late game. While some fans have Make great efforts to fix this hardware issueMaybe it’s easier to look up the classic Genesis and reach for that reset button.