Skip and Glitch Hunting
5 years ago
North Carolina, USA

Hi everyone, could someone please help me look for skips and possible glitches in Buffy The Vampire Slayer for Original Xbox? BTW This is the Buffy game i'm talking about. This is also my most recent Any% run of it

United States

I can give some advice for bug finding even though I do not have a lot of experience in bug finding in a 3D game. Also this game is probably not my cup of tea.

Try and do things oddly and always play while recording, so you could look back at if you found something of interest. What I mean by oddly is maybe try things in the wrong order, or try to do certain actions in unusual places. I recently found an Out of Bounds glitch in some doujin game by extensively exploring and attempting to get out of bounds. At one point I found I could go fall through a ceiling on one rooftop and then abused that. Most commercial games have QA so that kind of stuff is less common, but look at the recent DOOM game. OOB galore! Or look at the fairly new XCOM 2, a game so glitchy even I could not take it ahah. Reloading a save and having your units appear inside the building instead of on top where they were before you saved and loaded surrounded by aliens was less than fantastic. Or having my ranger dude decide to glitch through a building to go a couple panels in the wrong direction, then getting killed by the enemies on overwatch was also great. So glitches can happen TO you whether you want them to or not.

Also watch videos of other people playing the game, sometimes you can find new exploits.

XBOX is hard to test because as far as I know there are no real good emulators for it due to a long history of threatened lawsuits, misguided approaches, lack of community interest due to few exclusives, and loss of interest by emulator developers. Emulators allow one to use states and test things more efficiently. This game does appear to be on PC which I would encourage you to explore.

Tenka likes this
New South Wales, Australia

You basically just want to spend a decent amount of time "messing around". For 3D games, the most common kinds of glitches are ones based on collision detection. Spend some time trying to mess with walls/doors etc, getting the character stuck in places where they normally cant go.

Often wall clipping/oob can occur when the game tries to calculate multiple collisions at the same time, in many cases this is from pushing the player character + some item with physics + a door, wall, or corner of a wall together in some way. Sometimes this can apply to enemies as well, especially when they can cause damage boost effects to "propel you" into a wall/door. In some cases, especially in poorly developed/rushed games there are just "gaps" in the collision maps of the level you can just walk through. They will not be visible though .. you will have to go around rubbing yourself along all the walls/ceilings/floors trying to find them .. and you have no idea if they even exist. Try to think of something that no one else would ... usually its because the developer was lazy and just thought "no one would notice", or they didn't even notice themselves. Obviously .. it wont be obvious ... so to speak.

The bottom line is though ... just spend some time screwing around with the game .. do things you think no one would have thought of .. do things that look like the developers didn't want you to do.

Edited by the author 5 years ago
CoolHandMike likes this
United States

@Tenka Zelda 64 seems to have a couple of those where players use various bombs to get into unintended places. Lots of odd glitches there.

Tenka likes this