A little while ago, Cary wrote a post about some glitches in a damaged copy of “The Last of Us” that ruined the game for her, which got me thinking about how much fun I have talking about glitches, no matter how bothersome they can be.  Because not all glitches are purely upsetting.  Some can be rather funny, too.  And so I decided to start a little mini-series talking about the glitches found in various games I’ve played.  Today’s topic, unpredictable sound.

Skipping is fun, but not when it comes to gaming: I first had skipping issues when I moved and two consoles didn’t fare quite as well as they had in the past.  These two unlucky consoles were my poor dear GameCube and my not as dear, but still poor, XBox (who was just a year old at the time, too).  That’s when issues began that I had never had before.  Months later, I plugged the Cube in for some joy, and I was confronted with some skipping music in that pirate’s cave place in “Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door”.  Very odd, as it was the only area that decided to do that.  I suppose pirates like to skip?  They certainly like to sing (on TV, at least, which is very accurate).  Then, finding this great fun, the XBox decided to join in (I guess it was just emulating its big brother Cube, who was being a very bad influence) with “Star Wars: Battlefront II”, where I was subjected to more skipping and erratic music, especially in the Hoth level.  It really didn’t like that place at all.  (Considering the freezing experienced in “Tak 2” not long earlier, though, I really didn’t mind at that point.)

More skipping occurred in “Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction”, my glitchiest game, which I didn’t think much of at first, as it was during Clank’s dialogue.  I mean, he is a robot, after all.  Perhaps he got damaged?  (My logic sounds really dumb now that I type it.)  Until Ratchet started doing it, too.  I have no idea if this was a good game or not, as the skipping audio was so annoying.  In nearly every cut scene, the dialogue would skip (unlike my Cube and Box incidents, the music did fine, though) so badly, the lip synching would be off, and sometimes, the cut scene decided, screw it, and ended before the dialogue could.  The Duck was not pleased.

You think skipping’s bad, how about no sound at all: Finding it to be too much effort to present me with even skipping cut scenes at this point, one scene later decided it would be much easier to simply have no sound whatsoever.  No dialogue, no music, nothing.  Good thing I always have subtitles on.  Then, just simply playing the game, the background music decided to go on vacation, as well, likely to the same place that cut scene’s sound went.  Background noises were there.  But no music.  Well, I suppose background music is unrealistic anyway….

You don’t want skipping; you don’t want no sound; what do you want?: I want the sound to work properly, thank you very much.  But, perhaps that’s too much to ask.  Yeah, forget I said anything.  Well, “Super Mario Sunshine”, Bianco Hills, Mario knocked one of those orange things with the flowers on their heads into a wall, and it stuck there, flattened against the wall, making this strange noise over and over again.  It was the same volume no matter where you went, and it drove me so crazy, I had to just leave the level to make it stop.  Then, before the “Tools of Destruction” issue (I suppose my quarrels with Ratchet and Clank go way back, though I don’t know how I wronged them, and they won’t tell me when I ask them), early on in “Going Commando”, you’d ride these weird creatures through the swamp.  They make quite a racket when they go underwater, during which point you jump off and go harass another poor creature minding its own business.  And one time, the sound of one of these creatures wouldn’t stop.  You just heard this big whooshing noise, and it didn’t go away until I got far enough away from it.  All right, all right, I’m going!

What about you?  Have you had such atrocious audio antics?  And can you ask Ratchet and Clank why they hate me?

The Duck Who Likes to Skip, But Not to Hear It