My Favorite TFC Glitches
Recently I talked about the infinite hand grenade exploit in Team Fortress Classic. Well I thought I could take some time to go over some other awesome bugs that you can toy around with. Some are useful, some are fun, and some are simply bizarre.
And no, bunnyhopping is not eligible for this list. Not opening that can of worms.
1) Caltrop-jumping. Thanks to the physics engine, you can jump with a significant supply of caltrops in the same place, as this video shows:
This particular mobility tool is unusable any more, due to changes in the programming nature of the game when it was ported multiple times through various iterations of Steam, but it was fun while it lasted. Didn’t serve any particular use in combat anyway due to the number of caltrops you’d need.
2) Bouncing hallucination grenades!
Stand on a ledge, prime and hold a hallucination pill, then jump as it explodes. It’ll bounce around endlessly, spraying hallucinogens everywhere! Also works if you’re falling with forward momentum when it goes off. This was always fun to watch, and let a gas grenade cordon off a much larger swathe of battlefield than normally. But the very specific requirements to make it work usually negated any combat use.
3) Shooting people with your crowbar. You could fire one weapon in your inventory while holding the viewmodel for another weapon! This was usually used with the crowbar, because it was the most funny.
Swap to your “Off-weapon”, such as a crowbar, then back to the “Main Weapon” you wish to fire such as a Rocket Launcher. Hold fire until all of your ammo has been spent for your Main Weapon, then while still holding fire, press your “Use last weapon” bind twice, then collect some ammo. This will then allow you to shoot ammo from your main weapon while displaying your off weapon, even to other players on the server.
Now, normally this might be considered an exploit, because you were able to fool players from knowing what weapon you were actually holding, but I rarely saw it practically affect a shootout with an enemy. Most TFC players have a fond memory of this bug.
4) Upside-down world. The good old cl_pitchup bug is a very fun one. Messing with the values of cl_pitchup and cl_pitchdown, which controls how far up and down your character can turn their head, can allow you to view the map completely upside down. It makes your world model look pretty funny too.
Unfortunately, this can also be considered an exploit, because while in upside-down mode sentries cannot shoot you; they accidentally aim just above where your hitboxes now are. So this glitch is less harmless than it appears on the surface.
5) Getting telefragged by spectator. If one is occupying the space also shared by the info_player_start within a map, if a spectator should join the server at that exact moment, then one becomes a victim of a spectator telefrag. That is, it is possible to be killed by a non-existent player! I can’t get mad when this happens because it’s really quite funny. Less funny is the unrelated-but-similar glitch where if a player changed teams rapidly and ended on spectator, they might be able to select a class. they’d move like a spectator, but fire like a player, and obviously be invincible. Thankfully that one was patched years ago.
First place on this list was going to be the ‘nailgun door’ glitch, where my TFC friends showed me that if you drew a door on the wall with the nailgun then walked into it, you’d teleport back to spawn. But it turns out they were trolling me by binding an instant double-teamswitch to a key ;_;