I've been playing RoboCop: Rogue City and while I've mostly been enjoying this game (though I probably should have waited for more than a 40% discount before pulling the trigger, pun intended) it's kind of a glitchy mess, even long after release. I've seen everything from "intended" glitches (or rather glitches that they probably just accept) like the way the cut scenes all have these jarring transitions where it seems like it takes a frame or two between camera cuts for everything to populate in the right positions and all the textures to load in, to the less acceptable but still not too unusual (like the inconsistent way that enemies and items respawn when you exit and re-enter an area in a game that's based on semi-open hubs and buildings you are constantly moving between) to the straight up unacceptable (I once entered a building out of sequence and was unable to exit, which forced me to reload my game to a prior save.) The level of glitchiness and straight up jank is pretty extreme for a 2023 game, even one from Europe (for example there are environmental triggers that can cause introductory sequences for new enemies, and can be triggered multiple times if you return to the area and go over them again) but this morning I encountered a glitch I haven't seen in any game before.

I was fighting some dudes in yet another crumbling concrete building when suddenly Robocop did a 180 faster than the game normally allows, faced the wall, and my right analog stick became deactivated on the horizontal direction. I could still move and strafe with the left stick and aim up and down with the right but I couldn't turn. Changing the control configuration did nothing. Neither did suspending and reactivating the game. Eventually I had to quit the game and load my save, only about 4 minutes earlier, and then it worked fine.

This is just a glitch I've never encountered before, and while it was annoying in that I had to reload I have to admit that the novelty made me smile. You see the same glitches over and over and over I didn't really think there was something truly new. I've certainly had control malfunctions before, of course, but never one axis of an analog stick. I've never even had an analog stick fail to work like that, it's usually an action button of some kind.

I...kind of enjoyed it? Just because it was so weird.

This is, however, a good reminder that games, especially problematic games, need manual saves. Robocop has a very weird system where it saves when you enter a building for the first time and autosaves kind of randomly as you hit certain progressions, but it can be like 10-20 minutes between saves and in a glitchy game that's unacceptable. I understand why they did it this way, to avoid someone doing something like getting trapped in an unleavable building and overwriting all their saves, but you can have autosaves AND manual saves. Many games do. If your game is broken you should fix it, but barring that you should make it as easy as possible for the player to make their way through it.

I think games should have manual saves in general unless it's really baked into the design that they don't, but especially something like this.

I was not nearly as amused by the no exit thing as the analog stick thing.