Ages upon ages ago, I asked you to participate in a quick survey on Fallout 3's best and worst glitches. You've no doubt noticed my inability to do any of my own writing on time at this point, but I do churn out quality work on a daily basis because I love you all.

Anyway, the results are in. Since Tiger Survey doesn't have an option for your name, and I forgot to ask like the moron I sometimes am, none of the results are identified. Feel free to claim your responses in the comments.

Now, on to the funny. (Lucky, lucky, our managing editor Jason Wilson never experienced a glitch with this game. Aren't you a fancy man?)

What is your favorite experience with a glitch in Fallout 3?

1. The super-collision effect (an enemy or weapon goes flying off into the distance despite only being shot at by a normal ballistic weapon) is both the best and worst glitch that I've come across. In one fight with a super mutant, I shot a gun out of his hand and then launched it off into who-knows-where before killing him and looting the gun off his now-mutilated body (because it's still linked to his inventory).

2. Easily my favorite glitch experience was a physics bug/bizarre instance of an NPC with telescopic vision. I was walking around with Star Paladin Cross at my side -- she was wielding the shiny new missile launcher I'd just given her. Out of nowhere, she suddenly snaps to attention, yells "THERE!" and launches a rocket at...well I wasn't sure. She seemed to just fire it off into the distance. Thinking this was a little weird, I began walking in that direction when suddenly the *ding!* chime of gained experience sounded.

She had hit something? At that point I looked up and could see what appeared to be some kind of crow waaay above us, heading toward us at high speed. A little weirded out now, I continued to track it and realized it wasn't flying at us but falling. Fast. After a good 10 seconds worth of airtime, a headless, legless, armless raider torso landed with a squishy thud about 10 feet from where I was standing.

A few seconds later, her head and a single arm plopped down nearby. Apparently Star Paladin Cross had not only gained incredible accuracy and superhuman eyesight, but her missiles were now capable of launching a human body into the stratosphere and sending them several miles high with splash damage alone. It only happened once, unfortunately!

3. My Experimental MIRV didn't stop shooting, and I didn't need to reload, and my ammo was in the negatives. It was awesome, but it only lasted a few moments before I looked at the ground and blew up.

4. Raining Deathclaws had to be my favorite glitch. I was fighting a group of Deathclaws when I was very low on health, and they somehow launched a few hundred feet in the air and came crashing down to their death. I experienced this a few more times with individual enemies, but it never quite raised the bar on the hilarity from the first time.

5. The best is when I released the Super Mutant Behemoth to kill all of the slavers in Evergreen Mills and then led it to the same pothole I got stuck in. He also got stuck in it, and I was able to kill him off easily.

What is your worst experience with a glitch in Fallout 3?

1. A few times, dead bodies have taken up the whole screen, stretching out and hitting all the objects around them. This, of course, looks horrible, lags up everything, and makes it difficult to loot objects. It's also happened in the middle of firefights....

2. This is from the initial release on PS3. I don't know if this was fixed in the Game of the Year edition, but I'll relate it anyway.

Late in the game, a player can take on a quest to defend Big Town (Big Trouble in Big Town). One of the dialogue options lets the player choose to repair some robots in the junkyard. Since I was heavily invested in the science skill, I took the option. Little did I know that the game's physics engine had a glitch which caused the robots to rocket out of the junkyard to some random location outside of Big Town. The reason behind this, if I'm remembering correctly, was due to the placement of the robots in the junkyard: The 3D models for the robots were positioned in a way that put them in collision with the ground.

When the player selected the science solution, the robot models went from inactive to active, which then caused the game engine to register that collision with the ground. The physics engine was set to ridiculous in Fallout 3, so the robots went flying. Searching for them in the surrounding wasteland (which I heard was possible) was just too much of a chore. So the townsfolk would just sit around, telling me to fix the robots that were no longer in the junkyard. And the quest was non-completable.

3. NPCs accidentally committing suicide/disappearing (i.e., walking off a building or falling through the terrain), so they can't give quests and advance the story, thus stopping any progress in the main campaign. Not fun.

4. I convinced a man to attempt to reason with a crazy dude on a megaphone in downtown DC who had several nukes and explosives set to blow if anyone came close to him, and the attempt at reason ended poorly for both. As almost a curse from the grave, from that point on all conversations with NPCs resulted in the fast-talk glitch that makes it impossible to have conversatoins with anyone. The voicework gets completely skipped, and the dialogue trees get rushed through without input, making them impossible to read. It permanently ruined that save file, and I had to restart.

At least I got raining Deathclaws.

5. The worst glitch was definitely when I got stuck in a pothole near Evergreen Mills.

6. Aside from fairly constant hard crashing (this is the PS3 version which just makes matters worse), I lost both Star Paladin Cross and Dogmeat to level loads. Foolishly having gone about an hour without saving, I was surveying the wastes and noticed that neither of them were following me. This happens a fair amount, and usually they find their way back, so I wasn't worried about it and kept on going.

Upon entering an abandoned grain silo, however, I got two rapid popups right after the interior loaded saying, "Star Paladin Cross has died" followed immediately by "Dogmeat has died." A few seconds later, their corpses spawn in front of me and slump to the ground.