Yessir, another perspective on BF2 glitches in all their glory. Been playing Battlefront II for nigh on a year now. That's plenty of time for me, and others, to find almost every little nook, cranny, and funny little apparition the game has to offer.

I've seen a friendly Rebel ship chase down and dispatch its own Y-Wing.

I've seen Sep Bombers that get stuck in some sort of "space glue"...just hanging their motionless as a space battle rages on around them, firing all the while so as not to look totally lame and awkward.

I've seen AI players get killed, and just sort of...stand there. Dead.

I've had a little trouble getting my lightsaber back after I threw it into Palpy's midsection.

I've had the sound go funky, which had the cool side-effect of giving my hand-blaster a silencer.

I've even just exploded or died for no apparent reason. Dunno - thay might just be my fault. Maybe I need to take better care of myself.

I've seen glitches, bugs, ghosts, ghouls, flutters, hiccups, and noids. I've been through the desert on a horse with no name, I've seen fire and I've seen rain, vini vidi vici, yada yada yada...

Anyway, the way I look at it...


Glitches Make the Game More Fun...


(1) Go Trojan

Did you know you can fly your starfighter inside the superstructure of a Republic Cruiser? And I don't mean into the hangar.

Yep. Space Felucia is the only one I've found where this works. Fly the ship of your choice (I like the troop transport because it's slow, so you can sightsee a little) out of the Hangar Bay (either side, Reps or Seps), and over to the starboard side of the Republic Cruiser. Just forward of the engines, at the base of the bridge tower, you'll see a spot where one of the large guns would be. On this level, there's only one large gun on the starboard side, set forward, so the one aft is empty.

(By the way, to you land-locked dirt-lovers, starboard is the right side, port is the left, from the perspective of being on board and facing the bow. No, the other bow.)

Just fly right on into that spot. You'll emerge, unscathed, inside the ship. To your left will be the engines, and to the right will be some curious sights. Basically you find yourself inside a wireframe outline of the ship, and the hull is completely transparent. But if you look forward, you'll see the cluster of rooms usually visible only from the inside - a miniature shield room, engine room, hangar bay, life support room, and central auto-turret room, all just hanging there in apparently empty space. As you fly around inside the ship, you can pass by these and look in from the other side. Be careful, though - they have just as solid walls from the outside as they do on the inside, even if you can look right through as if they weren't there. So no, you can't fly into the hangar from the backside. You can, however, actually disable the shields by crashing into or firing on the shield room. Usually in one or two hits. Great if your a Sep, not a great idea if you're a wayward clone.

By the way, you can likewise fly in from the other side, same approximate spot mirrored on the port side of the ship. You can literally fly through the ship, and emerge from any point, given that you can see through it. If you can't see through it, chances are you can't fly through it. But it's an interesting ambush trick to emerge suddenly out of the bow of the ship on some hapless passerby. You can even shoot through the ship - they can't see you or touch you, but you can get them.

Last night I flew a Sep bomber into the Rep Cruiser, took out the turrets, big guns, shields, engines, life support and auto-turret control all safely from inside the confines of their own hull, all in about 90 seconds. One hit for the shields, two for the life support, one for the engines, one for the auto-turret, and then just taking out each gun emplacement, one by one, from underneath.

It was evil, I tell you. I was some sort of funky Trojan Moose.


(2) Go "EVA"

That's right, you've heard correctly, you can in fact space walk. Not just space walk, you can space jump, space run and pretty much space die in any fashion you see fit. Cuz...what else are you gonna do?

You may have heard that on one of the levels, I think Space Mygeeto, this scenario works best. Fly your ship to the port-side edge of the Sep hangar and land. Then take off.

Then land again. Then take off. Then land. Then take off, land, take off, land, take off, land, take off, land, take off, land....you get the picture. Each take-off brings you closer to the hangar bay shields, until finally you find yourself taking off and landing outside of the hangar. Each take-off now moves you forward in minute fractions, probably the in-game equivalent of about 6 feet or so. Each landing cycle puts you in a brief freefall. If you do this, by the way, from the port side of the ship, you find yourself inching ever closer to the Sep Frigate (the smaller oval-shaped Banking Clan "comms" ship) holding station just in front of and below the Sep Cruiser Hangar bay. (Best to set options for assault levels to give you lots of time, gives you a little cushion to achieve this before the level ends).

You can soon (I say "soon"...you've got 15 minutes to spare..er..waste, right?) find yourself over one of the wing-like extensions from the side of the Sep Frigate. All you have to do is let your ship gently free-fall next time you are in "land" mode, and it will land on the Frigate.

Get out. Walk around. The place is amazingly large, much larger that you can tell from your cockpit. Notice you have not undergone the painful decompressive explosion most species encounter in the vacuum of outer space. Well-done. Take a walk down the "wing" to the central hull area of the ship. You might notice that you are knee-deep in wingness. It's a graphics thang. Apparently the Sep Frigate is a bit..."soft" in spots.

Once you reach the primary fusilage, you can hop down a level to the lower hull and walk for a bit. Then, as if making things solid costs development dollars, you suddenly run out of solid ship, fall straight through to your icy, solitary doom. Or perhaps your fiery re-entry doom. Whichever you prefer.

Now really, you can do this outside of any capital ship - Imp SD's, Rebel Cruisers, whathaveyou. Mygeeto, if I remember correctly, is the only one with a Frigate conveniently placed outside the front door, though. That doesn't mean you have to land on something else, mind you.

You could opt simply to land on the outside of your own Cruiser. That being said, it's fun to try the same thing to walk around under immense eaves of a Star Destroyer hull. Get outside the hangar bay, you'll find a comfortably wide sidewalk of sorts on which to land your TIE fighter. It's a nice place for a picnic while you fire idly at passing ships with your blaster and grenades until your ammo runs out.

Unfortunately, its a bit boring to do this outside a Rebel Cruiser - nothing to stand on, don't you know. But on Clone Wars levels, you can walk around outside on the Republic Cruiser - nearly the entire length of the ship, as a matter of fact. Which is particularly cool because you can loiter around until a Sep ship kamikaze's into you, or you become victim to random salvo's of missiles. If you're into that sort of thing.


(3) Jump Ship. No Really.

The wierdest things I've tried with this trick is what I call "ship hopping". I believe this might also work best on a level like Space Mygeeto, or Space Kashyyk. Look for a level where the Republic Cruiser is situated over one of its own Republic Transport Frigates (the other, smaller "Acclamator" class isosceles jobbies). Grab a ship (Sep or Rep), and do your land/take-off/land trick until you're on the lip of the hull just outside the Rep Cruiser hangar bay. Walk toward the bow (no, the other bow - you know..the one without engines) until you can look down and see the Republic Frigate far below you. Do something stupid and jump off the edge.

You'll float...ok fall...down about 10 stories to land rather stiffly on the hull of the Republic Frigate. Spread out a towel, apply some sunscreen, plug in your Fi-Pod, catch some unfiltered UV.

A couple of variations on this comes from playing the Rise of the Empire game-within-a-game. On "A Desperate Rescue", the space level over Coruscant, do your freefall down to the Republic Frigate below. If you time it right, and if you have any health left (which is possible if you bend your knees just so), you can make one more leap of stupid....right down on top of one of those Trade Fed donuts you can see far below. There's one that moves back and forth about 20 stories below the Frigate. Timing is important, otherwise you'll miss it and, again, plunge to your fiery re-entry death. Or so we are left to believe.

Problem: Trade-Fed donut is moving. Something wierd about moving ships I've learned - you're falling, but not moving the same direction or speed as the ship moving laterally. So even once you land and stand up, the ship moves right on out from underneath you, like a great big durasteel rug. That'll learn yez for bein' stoopid.

What, if all the other clones jump off a ship, you have to also?

By the way, same thing can be done on the Yavin Space level (I think it's titled "Revenge of the Empire") of the Rise of the Empire series of levels. Land your TIE on the edge just outside the Imperial SD hangar bay, take a swift jog (you don't have much time) aft, to the stern (no, the other stern..the one with the engines) until you find yourself over the path of one of the escaping Rebel Transports. If you time your jump correctly, Space Olympian, you'll land on the hull of the Transport, just in time for it to slowly roll on without you and spill you off the back end. And then, young Jedi...you will die. Again. So there ya go.


(4) Harry Potter Hideaway

For your next sabotage run on the enemy ship, try this one out. Do your thing, kill kill kill, make your way back to the shield room. Someone is bound to come looking for you, you've just waltzed through the cafeteria leaving a wake of destruction.

Go down the left (port-side? ok whatever) flight of stairs. Now carefully, step off the walkway onto the circular grating that surrounds the central shield generator housing diddlybopper thang. Turn toward the staircase you just went down. Place yourself just under the topmost step, and walk forward. Ta-da - you're under the staircase. You just walked through a wall. You're a total mutant freak, and Dr. Xavier has a special school for you somewhere.

Notice that, just like flying around inside the Rep Crusier, the deck above you and the staircase are now all totally transparent from your vantage point in your Harry Potter-esque hovel. Advantage: you. See, when Joe Enemy walks through the door, he can't see you. But you can see him. He acts like he can sense you, but whadya know, he's not looking for you under the staircase. To his little AI brain, he saw a blip go in here, but lo and behold, you done distapeered.

And now you can take your evil, sweet revenge on the enemy. Fire upward into his tuckus. All of a sudden, though he may not see you specifically, he knows the carpeting is trying to kill him. So he fires wildly into the floor, but can't reach you through the barrier that separates him and you. But you, however, can harass him until he's a smoking pile of circuits and/or meat.

When you're done being a sadistic bastage, your final freaky mutant trick will be not to return to your point of entry, but to leap magically up, and land on the floor above you. Check your hair, straighten your collar, step over the body, get back to business.

Now these are just some of the funky things you can do in Battlefront II. Lots of them you may have already heard of. Surely none of these are intentional, and none of these are even major glitches - they are representative of the things left over from development that, well, would take some geek playing the game 10,000 times to find.

Being in the software development/consulting world myself, albeit not in gaming, I've learned there's another word that appropriately rhymes with "glitch". See, folks luuuuve to complain about how "buggy" some games are, but what I don't think they understand is that games, at least to my untrained eye, entail far more complex interfaces and functionality than most software you'll ever see in big enterprise business - software that billions of dollars relies upon, even. So maybe what they don't realize is that any scrap of code is in some small way buggy. Lots of times it's buggy because the user is actually, such as in my case, the "mis-user". Personally, I like to think of it as more glitches in the Moostrix.

Anyway, I like the game with all of its idiosyncrysies, which isn't really that many. I think that now, after a year's worth of trials, the folks at LucasArts can take a bow.

No, the other bow.

DM out