Amazon has announced its Prime Gaming October update, which sees it add a fresh batch of games that users can add to their libraries for free. The most noteworthy additions are probably Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition and Fallout: New Vegas. With the of Prime Video’s surprisingly excellent Fallout TV show arriving in December, it’s an ideal time to acquaint yourself with the games it’s based on. New Vegas is particularly relevant, as season two looks like it’ll primarily be set in that game’s world and will presumably be heavily influenced by Obsidian’s beloved 2010 RPG.
Beyond that, XCOM 2 is probably worth a look, and there’s a handful of games that are giving Halloween vibes — how can you go wrong with Tormented Souls or Hellslave as we approach spooky season?
Here’s the full list of October games that you can claim for free. Most come in the form of codes you can redeem on GOG, though some others are available on the Epic Games Store or Legacy Gaming.
Vampire: The Masquerade – Reckoning of New York
Fallout: New Vegas Ultimate Edition
True Fear: Forsaken Souls Part 1
True Fear: Forsaken Souls Part 2
Lost & Found Agency Collector’s Edition
Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition
You Will Die Here Tonight
Werewolf: The Apocalypse — Heart of the Forest
Amazon also yesterday that it’s giving its cloud gaming platform a bit of an update. As well as continuing to offer a rotating library of free games to Prime members, the company will also introduce a collection of party games designed to be played with friends on your phone. The new GameNight library will include original games developed by Amazon, such as the excellently named Courtroom Chaos: Starring Snoop Dogg, as well as classics like Angry Birds and Ticket to Ride.
The company also announced that Prime Gaming’s Twitch-related benefits will remain available after Prime Gaming is absorbed into Luna. Prime Gaming actually got its start as Twitch Prime, a benefit to Amazon Prime subscribers that eventually grew into the wider gaming offering it is now. The name is changing yet again, but it might be better in the long run for Amazon to put all of its gaming offerings under the Luna brand.
Amazon’sFallout TV series is considered a huge success by critics and fans alike, and has already been renewed for a second season! While season one was amazing, it left us with some burning questions that season two needs to answer.
1. What’s the deal with Lee Moldaver?
(Prime Video)
TMS‘ Sarah Barrett touches on many of the questions viewers have about Lee Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury). Namely, how the heck has she survived intact since before the Great War? Cooper Howard is now a ghoul. Hank MacLean was a Vault-Tec employee frozen in a cryopod, as was every Vault 33 overseer. So, where does Moldaver fit into all this? She’s clearly not a ghoul, so she must have been frozen at some point. But where, how, and by whom?
Also, what’s her connection to the New California Republic? Was she one of the founders of the NCR and Shady Sands?
And lastly, what was the nature of her relationship with Lucy’s mother, Rose? Whether romantic or platonic, their relationship seemed to be a close one. Moldaver knew Rose well enough to speak knowledgeably about the kind of person she was and to recognize the same qualities in Lucy. As Barrett asks in her piece, if they were so close, how could Moldaver then allow such violence to come to Rose’s children while planning the attack and fake marriage at Vault 33? Children she knew when they were younger. Did she believe they would be strong and smart enough to survive and count on that? Or have her feelings about them turned sour over the years she’s lived with Rose as a feral ghoul?
Moldaver is dead, but in Fallout‘s world, death may only be temporary. I hope we get more information about Lee Moldaver as the show continues.
2. Does Norm get into a pod?
(Prime Video)
When we last see Norm MacLean (Moisés Arias), he’s been trapped in Vault 31 by Brain-on-a-Roomba Bud Askins (Michael Esper) after learning the truth about the nature of the Vault 31-32-33 relationship: Vault 31 is where Vault-Tec managers are kept frozen to act as overseers for the other two vaults, and Vault 32 and 33 are breeding pools designed to breed future managers to rebuild civilization in Vault-Tec’s image.
Bud suggests that, since he won’t let Norm leave Vault 31, Norm should get into his father’s cryopod to ride out the apocalypse until vault-dwellers can return to the surface. We see Norm step toward the cryopods with a worried expression … but we don’t see him climb in it and freeze himself.
From the start of the show, Norm has been a contrary character. When others go left, he goes right. When his family tries to start a book club, he plays games on his Pip-Boy instead. And when the Vault 33 council accuses him of “lacking enthusiasm,” he doesn’t exactly try to change that impression.
Hell, he’s in Vault 31 in the first place because, like his sister, he couldn’t let his questions rest. Though others warned him to forget what he saw in Vault 32, he had to keep investigating. So, it doesn’t seem likely that Norm would willingly freeze himself just because Bud tells him. Especially since Bud isn’t necessarily a physical threat. I predict that Norm will try to outsmart Bud and reach Vault 32 to get help from Chet (Dave Register) and Woody (Zach Cherry) to overthrow the Vault-Tec leadership.
Either way, we need to find out what happened to Norm!
3. What’s the status of the New California Republic?
(Prime Video)
As I mentioned in my piece about the Fallout season one finale, just because Shady Sands was destroyed doesn’t mean that the NCR is no more. Lucy passes a billboard where Shady Sands is touted as “the first” capital of the NCR, meaning that the capital has changed. Meanwhile, Bethesda’s Todd Howard has confirmed that not only is the Fallout series canon, but that the events of “Fallout: New Vegas” happened, and that the “fall of Shady Sands” doesn’t necessarily refer to Hank and Vault-Tec bombing it.
In the Fallout games, the NCR became a bloated organization that had trouble managing its holdings. Communication is tricky when all you have are holo-tapes, a janky computer terminal system for inter-departmental mail, and word of mouth. It would stand to reason that, Shady Sands or no Shady Sands, the NCR still exists. Weaker perhaps, but still in existence. After all, Moldaver is still flying the flag and working out of NCR headquarters at the Griffith Observatory.
With season two likely taking us to New Vegas, we’ll surely learn more about the NCR in season two!
4. What happened to Mr. House after “New Vegas?”
(Prime Video/Bethesda Game Studios)
Fallout viewers learned that fan-favorite game villain Mr. House (Ravi Silver) was at the Vault-Tec apocalypse-planning meeting in the season finale. Gamers know that he survived by putting his consciousness into a robot. House then controls New Vegas (at least at the time of Fallout: New Vegas), which takes place 15 years before the TV series. Since New Vegas is still standing in the show’s timeline, many players believe that this makes the game-ending where Mr. House wins the canonical ending.
But did New Vegas’ survival require Mr. House? Will the New Vegas that Hank walks into in his stolen power armor be the same New Vegas of the game, or will 15 years have changed it significantly? Will Mr. House appear in the present-day timeline of Fallout season two? How will the show address his backstory if he does? Or, does Mr. House have an even more frightening and mysterious successor whom we’ll meet as a new character? Inquiring robo-brains want to know.
5. What happened to Cooper Howard’s family?
(Prime Video)
We know that Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins) was the spokesperson for Vault-Tec and the origin of the “Vault Boy” logo. Howard, his wife Barb (Frances Turner), and their daughter Janey (Teagan Meredith) were guaranteed a spot in a management vault. After discovering his wife’s betrayal, they were divorced and Cooper started working as an entertainer at children’s birthday parties. Cooper and Janey are working a party gig when the first bombs drop, and when we meet Cooper 200 years later he’s become The Ghoul. But what happened during those lost years?
How did he lose his spot in a vault? Did Barb and their daughter get into one? When the bombs fell, did Cooper take Janey to a vault, or somewhere else? Did he still think he had a spot in a vault only to be turned away? Did he get into a vault, but eventually leave? Did Vault-Tec make him a ghoul?
When he confronts Hank toward the end of the Fallout season finale, he asks him “Where’s my f*cking family?” He expects Hank to know, meaning there’s a good chance they’re still alive. Perhaps they’re in Vault 31. Or maybe they’ve since been thawed and located elsewhere. Regardless of their whereabouts, The Ghoul is a fan-favorite character on the show, and we want him to get answers!
Speculation is an extremely fun pastime when it comes to genre shows. That’s why they call it “speculative fiction.” And we’ll have to entertain ourselves with a lot of speculating until Fallout returns to Prime Video for its second season … whenever that will be.
(featured image: JoJo Whilden/Prime Video)
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Making games is hard. Not just on a technical level, but imagine getting a handful of unique personalities into a room, working towards a common goal. Even when everyone is moving in tandem, and something truly remarkable is made, there’s bound to be a few flumps. Let’s take a look at games that are—or were—super glitchy but still a lot of fun to play!
10. Dead Island
Image Source: Techland
Welcome to Dead Island, where zombies can be hulking beasts or tiny creatures of destruction no bigger than a foot. Do you like whacky physics and random collisions? Well, you’ll certainly get your fill here. Witness zombies get toppled like bowling pins by a mere gas canister or sent flying from one well-placed swing. And let’s not forget a fan favorite: limbs that contort and separate on their own!
Okay, we’re done poking fun at the game. Honestly, Dead Island’s myriad of ways to kill zombies is highly concentrated dumb fun, only heightened by the ridiculous bugs you encounter. That fun is then multiplied when you bring in a few buddies!
9. Pokemon Red & Blue
Image Source: Game Freak
There was a time in gaming history when games had to be stable and as bug-free as possible. Developers couldn’t rely on a magical day-one patch. That’s not to say Pokemon Red and Blue were an unstable mess—it certainly wasn’t—but a few bugs squeaked by.
One of the most famous examples was MISSINGNO, a glitch “Pokemon” you could battle and capture. It was really easy to find, too, and if you caught it, well, you could duplicate items in your inventory. So, hello hundreds of Rare Candies or countless Master Balls! It’s a glitch you can still find in the digital versions of Pokemon Red and Blue!
Another great example is leveling your Pokemon past 100. All you had to do was feed it Rare Candies up until it reached level 255. Or how about catching Mew? Through a combination of Fly, a trainer battle, and choosing specific locations, you can get a low-level Mew to appear!
8. Cyberpunk 2077 (On Launch)
Image Source: CD Project RED
What Cyberpunk 2077 is compared to what it was is night and day. It was an incredible mess on launch day, and many weeks after that, it was pretty astonishing to witness. The story was appealing and featured several noteworthy characters like Goro Takemura (my personal favorite), Judy, and Jackie Wells, to name a few.
The gameplay was also solid, though the skill tree had left a lot to desire. If you were lucky, like me, and only experienced graphical glitches and bugs most of the time, Cyberpunk 2077 was still a fun ride from start to finish. Well, assuming you made it to the end. You couldn’t round a corner without seeing a random T-pose, questionable pathing, NPCs who defied the laws of physics, and vehicles with minds of their own.
7. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II
Image Source: Obsidian Entertainment
Despite its numerous bugs, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 is still a great game. Unfortunately, it was rushed, which meant some quests could break, crashes often occurred, and some events and cutscenes failed to trigger. Not to mention, there was a level-up glitch that made you god-like. Finishing the game meant enduring a hellish gauntlet and a lot of saves, but I’d be lying If I said it wasn’t worth it.
Thankfully, it isn’t 2004 anymore, and the community surrounding it has grown. Modders stepped in and made TSLRCM, an unofficial patch that fixes a bunch of bugs and even restores some content that was left out. Of course, if you want a more pure playthrough, there’s also an unofficial TSLRCM Tweak Pack that leaves cut content out. Either way, KOTOR 2 won’t be such a headache to play on modern machines!
6. Bethesda Game Studios
Image Source: Bethesda
If we’re going to discuss glitchy games that are still fun to play, Bethesda gets its own entry. It’s a running gag at this point that stretches back over two decades, from Morrowind to Starfield. Anyone who enjoys Bethesda’s catalog expects it, too. You might get launched into the stratosphere, take damage from walking over a wheel of cheese, or witness NPCs take a nasty right hook to the head while you’re talking.
Luckily, the bugs and glitches are mostly harmless. You can usually work through most of them by saving a lot. It’s tedious, sure, but losing a few minutes of progress is better than an hour, which I’m positive all of us have felt at one point or another. Autosave has saved my playthroughs more times than I care to count, too.
5. Marvel vs. Capcom 2
Image Source: Capcom
If there are any fighting games on the planet that are more broken than Marvel vs. Capcom 2, I’d love to see it. Not some sole developer working on a passion project, but from developers as well-established as Capcom. It’s incredible the community embraced it like they did because underneath all those travesties is still a top-notch fighting game.
For example, there are player-activated game freezes (Ruby Heart, Gambit), infinite juggles (Cable’s Air Hyper Viper Beam), and the ability to spam unblockable attacks (Sentinel). That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Naturally, players exploited them so frequently that it was fair game, even in tournaments. Only a few lines were drawn in the sand, like freezing the game and infinite dead body loops, though the latter is allowed to a finite degree.
4. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
Image Source: Bethesda
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind deserves its own entry, just because many of its bugs and glitches are incredibly beneficial. They can be exploited to such a degree that, with a few simple tricks, you can make yourself an all-powerful god, even stronger than Vivec. Honestly, I wouldn’t have it any other way; it’s what makes Morrowind unique compared to later entries.
Take Alchemy, for example. The strength of your potions is partly determined by your Intelligence. So, you brew an Intelligence potion, chug it, and then brew another even stronger version. After a while, your Intelligence (and other stats) are in the thousands. It’s handy for enchanting gear with ridiculous effects, too.
Then there’s spellcrafting. By adding a secondary target effect, in addition to the buff you want, you’ve created a permanent buff. This trick often gets referred to as the “Soultrap Effect Glitch,” but it’s not Soultrap that’s causing the bug; it’s the Target effect.
3. Mass Effect 3
Image Source: BioWare
To be honest, Mass Effect 3 merely continues the tradition of bugs that started long ago in the franchise’s history. It being the last in a trilogy and having the bugs and glitches it had was icing on the cake. No hate from me, though; I still love them just as much as everyone else.
The kinds of bugs you’ll find in Mass Effect 3 are actually incredibly entertaining. You’ve got NPCs breakdancing after being hit by biotics, allies T-posing, and getting stuck in the air after performing a biotic charge. It’s mostly harmless unless you’re the poor soul who can’t deal damage after migrating your ME2 save file over to ME3.
2. Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing
Image Source: Stellar Stone
Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing is the kind of game—and I use that term loosely—that’s so laughably bad, it’s entertaining. The type of bad that makes movies like The Room a treat to watch. Playing it just makes you ask so many questions, like, Who thought this was okay? How did this get released? Is this some elaborate joke? You won’t get answers to those questions, by the way. Big Rigs remains an enigma throughout.
First off, the opponent you race doesn’t actually move unless you download the only patch ever released, in which case they’ll move but stop just before passing the finish line. That means you can never lose. Lastly, your truck can accelerate at ludicrous speeds… in reverse. Then there are buildings you can pass right through and terrain that clips in and out of existence. If you can get your hands on a copy of Big Rigs, it’s worth experiencing at least once.
1. Goat Simulator
Image Source: Coffee Stain Studios
It’s not every day you see game developers intentionally keep bugs in their game and be entirely open about it, but that’s precisely what Coffee Stain Studios did with Goat Simulator. Why? Well, honestly, because it makes the game a heck of a lot more fun. It was already entertaining, but the glitches just make the experience that much more better. Promise!
Coffee Stain Studios follows one simple rule: if a bug or glitch doesn’t break the game or cause instability, it’s kept in. So, welcome all manner of whacky physics, bring on the stretched-out limbs, the clipping, and bizarre NPC behavior. You’ll be giggling like a madman the entire time!
No doubt there are dozens more examples of fun, glitchy games, but these stuck out to us the most. Several were even high-profile games, like Mass Effect 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and Bethesda’s lineup. Let us know some of your favorites; we all can use a good laugh! It wouldn’t hurt to check out our other lists, like the best game sequels of the past 10 years.
About the author
Brady Klinger-Meyers
Brady is a Freelance Writer at Twinfinite. Though he’s been at the site for only a year, Brady has been covering video games, and the industry itself, for the past three years. He focuses on new releases, Diablo 4, Roblox, and every RPG he can get his hands on. When Brady isn’t focused on gaming, he’s toiling away on another short story.
