No seriously.  I highly doubt there has ever been a game of Gears of War 2 that was longer than this one I played tonight.  2 hours and 35 minutes.  That’s a single match of Submission…2 hours!  This incredibly long online game was the result of a weird and unfortunate glitch.

It all began with a simple game of Submission on Blood Drive.  The game was playing fine and everyone was trying to grab the meatflag in the usual way.  Then Chaps got stuck in a place where no one could reach him.  This has happened once before, while playing on Day One.  Chaps got himself stuck in mid air where no one could get him.  This meant that for twenty minutes, that is until he got himself back to the floor, the game was basically a free for all.

Anyway Chaps eventually freed himself from the place he was stuck (near the stair well on some rubbish) and once again everyone tried to capture him.  Then like magic he disappeared.  We could still hear his voice occasionally but he couldn’t be seen and couldn’t shoot us.  The marker still pointed to the position he had been in before vanishing but he just wasn’t there.

We kept playing.  I assumed there would be some sort of time limit on the gametype.  Boy was I wrong.  I also assumed that the game would be designed so that if no one touched or shot at the meatflag for a set amount of time, he would respawn in the middle of the map.  This assmuption was also very wrong.

But we kept playing thniking the game would sort itself out soon.  it got to 30 minutes and a few people left.   A friend and I decided to stay to see what would happen (and to be honest just to piss the guys on the other team off).  After about an hour we realised this game wasn’t going to end unless one side’s team quit completely.  We didn’t really want to quit because we had ammassed a huge amount of points (and because the other team wanted us to quit).

Eventually we won though, the other team all quit.  What was funny was that the other team was sending us messages accusing us of cheating, trying to bribe us with Microsoft Points, begging us to quit and one guy even sounded as if he was about to cry.

I know people won’t believe this feat, so heres three videos that show the amount of points/kills and the time mid-game.  Sorry for the crap quality, I didn’t have time to get anything better.

My conclusion is that Epic need to introduce some sort of system to stop this from happening. Perhaps a time limit on the rounds. Or maybe as I assumed above, a respawn timer on the meatflag. Because I can see this becoming a major problem if it happens more than once.