Ha, great stories about bugs in Blitzkrieg. You can follow the link, or read here:
“…If you believe one widely circulated story, the F-16 fighter jets’ autopilot of the Israeli Air Force would malfunction when flying over the Dead Sea. The altitude of the aircraft at some point crossed the “sea level” mark, causing a division by zero and thus paralyzing the autopilot’s brain.
What to say, if Lockheed Martin can slip up like that, what about us, mere developers of toys?
From my experience, Blitzkrieg 2 from Nival Interactive was particularly fruitful with comedic bugs. For those unaware, it’s a strategy game themed around World War II. Quite funny even without the bugs. We had a strict German publisher, and Germans are particularly skittish about anything related to their Nazi past. Mentioning the Führer’s name was forbidden, as were words like “Nazi”, “fascist”, even our swastika was not real but stylized. And this was while having cutscenes between missions explaining historical events related to the gameplay. The result was a glamorous sort of warfare styled in the genteel era but with tanks and bombers, with no particular claims to historical accuracy. By the way, seeing the mess we were making, our military consultant asked to have his name removed from the credits 🙂
The V-2 rocket was a sort of German mega-firecracker. Germany harassed Great Britain with these at the end of the war, but without much success. This wonder weapon suffered from a slew of childhood diseases and was lucky if it could take off at all. Often it exploded right on the launch table, and if it did get off and flew towards England, that was a real success. The fuel, by the way, 3.5 tons of ethyl alcohol 🙂
Well, we also made this very rocket in Blitzkrieg. Like the Germans, we made it towards the end of the project and based it on an “airplane” object. But the programmers slacked a bit and didn’t remove some of the suspicious functionality for a ballistic missile. It turned out that if it started to rain or snow during its flight to the target, first, the rocket would say in a human voice “Fliege zuruck” (Ger. fly back), and secondly, it would turn around and fly back to the base. After all, the weather was not fit for flying.
And we also had a wonderful unit – a special forces squad. Our troops could gain experience during the mission, and with experience, they acquired interesting abilities. So, overly trained special forces could disguise themselves as enemy infantry. It was enough just to click on a squad of enemy soldiers, and our fighters would change into their uniforms. You could walk around the enemy base with impunity. Well, until the first shot, of course.
But, the trouble was that in Blitzkrieg, besides the actual infantry, there were various set dressing units, like cows, pigs, and dogs. It turned out that the special forces didn’t mind dressing up as Bobik dogs and pigs. Considering that the mechanism of this disguise glitched a bit and part of the squad could be dressed in one uniform, part in another, it was possible to create utterly insane units. For example, a squad made of dogs, pigs, and Panzergrenadiers. Given that the squad could be given various commands like “march,” “crawl,” etc., the player was given a unique opportunity to admire marching pigs. It actually looked terrible, as the skeleton of a pig does not match that of an infantryman and looks like a squad of pigs scooting on their butts. And this circus show could be stuffed into a trench. So there they sit, pigs and dogs in a trench, occasionally peeking out.
Speaking of pigs, by the way, there was another bug related to them that caused the game to crash. At one point, programmers tweaked something, and pigs no longer remained neutral but could belong to a player. You couldn’t control them, but formally they could be “ours” or “theirs.” So, seeing an enemy, the patriotic pig would seek to fight back and would search for a weapon, which of course it didn’t have. If I remember correctly, programmers fixed the bug by just providing the pig with a Luger pistol without bullets. Visually it was not apparent, but formally, now seeing an enemy, it reaches for the weapon, sees there are no bullets, and calms down.
Interestingly, unlike the pig, a dog can bite. And the number of bites it has, if I’m not mistaken, is limited to ten thousand. After that, Barbose runs out of “ammo,” and it becomes harmless. By the way, an interesting question, I haven’t checked, but would the supply truck, which delivers ammunition, bring bullets to the dog?”
