The Glorious Glitches of Skyrim

Skyrim, in a nutshell, is a game set in the fantasy realm of Tamriel. On the day of your execution, you discover that you are the Dragonborn, a type of hero that arises in the land from time to time that will grow in power and speak the language of dragons (known in-game as "shouts"), thereby wielding the same power that dragons do. You roam the land, completing quests that range from picking useful plants for aspiring alchemists to choosing sides in Skyrim's current civil war and leading that side to victory.

The glitches in this game are so funny it kills me, and I have to make a list of the best ones I've encountered.

• The Skeleton Dragon. Relevant factors: USUALLY when you fight a dragon and kill it, its body will rapidly decompose into a skeleton as you absorb the dragon's soul to power  your "shouts". So, one time I was fighting a dragon, and I "shouted" something at it, and it instantly turned into a skeleton. Except it was still alive. It still blew frost breath at me and was damaging my health. In the meantime, even though I was firing crossbow bolts at it (my strongest weapon at the time) I was doing zero damage to this thing. Dragons don't just let you walk away from a fight, so at that point, staring down an immortal skeleton dragon, I did what any self-respecting gamer would do: I reloaded from my last save and tried again. This time the fight was normal.
• Dual Dragon Helpers. Relevant factors: Dragons will sometimes appear and attack you when you load/reload the game as part of a game calculation called "random encounters". Also, different kinds of enemies will fight EACH OTHER if they are in the same area. At one point, I summoned what seems to be one of the most powerful bosses in the game (called Karstaag) without realizing just how strong it was. I tried to beat it several times, and each time it would one-hit kill me. So on one of my multiple reloads, as I'm trying to beat this unbeatable Karstaag, not one, but two dragons drop into the arena. They proceed to fight Karstaag, and to top it off one of them became the aforementioned glitched Skeleton Dragon that was still fighting after death. AND I STILL COULDN'T KILL THIS STUPID BOSS. Eventually I left, vowing to return when I was stronger and had a better strategy. (I did eventually slay Karstaag once I had multiple summons/helpers, a really good shout, and a friggin' crossbow)
• Dragging Dragon. Relevant factors: In a dragon fight, sometimes the dragon will land. Sometimes the dragon will fall to the ground when they're badly wounded, which looks less controlled than a landing. I have seen falling dragons freeze mid-air in a I've-already-hit-the-ground stiff-as-a-board posture and plow across the ground like a crashed jet. Good for a laugh.
• It's Raining Bones. Relevant factors: Once you have traveled to a city or other known location on the map, you can return to the map and click on it to "fast travel" without spending time walking across the terrain. At one point I was being attacked by dragons so frequently in one spot that if I fast-traveled away from that island and back to it, the skeletons of dragons (or a regular dead dragon) I'd recently killed would fall on me when I re-appeared where I'd recently killed one. Sometimes there would be two or three skeletons waiting to fall on me in town.
• I Believe I Can Fly. Relevant factors: When you fall from any height in the game, you look like you're frozen in a jump position with your arms stretched out to the side and waving up and down a little bit. Also, in the game, you can have a companion who follows you everywhere and helps in combat, but they often get in the way if you're in a tight hallway or they'll stand right in the doorway you need to get through. I was running around a castle, trying to talk to people, when my companion blocked a doorway I needed to get through for the umpteenth time. I can mostly bypass this issue by "jumping" at or around them until I slide past, but this time I got stuck in the "falling" animation. The result was that, for the next thirty or so seconds, I ran through the castle looking like I was gently gliding an inch above the ground, flapping my arms like a bird.
• The Dead Companion. Relevant factors: Your companion never really dies. If they take too many injuries, they just crouch down and surrender until their health regenerates a little. You can also give your companion better weapons and armor. My first companion was a stalwart warrior named Lydia. I wanted Lydia to have better armor, so I handed over what I thought was better equipment. I didn't see her wearing it, so I went into her inventory and took away the old armor she came with. She died in the very next bandit fight we got in. I was told that's not possible, companions don't die, but clearly that's not true because she was laying there on the ground with all the dead bandits. Either she died because I removed her original armor (I later learned that you're supposed to let the companion choose what they wield, not remove their original stuff from them) OR I accidentally shot her myself in the confusion of the situation. Either way, RIP Lydia, you were one stepping stone in the process of learning how to play Skyrim.
• The Disapproving Companion. Relevant factors: You can tell your companion to wait for you somewhere. Also, sometimes if you are talking to somebody near a door and you go through the door, sometimes that person will glitch inside/outside with you. I hired a mercenary while trying out different kinds of companions. I took a quest that involved sneaking into the house of a traitorous family and stealing their incriminating documents out of a safe. Because this was a stealth mission--not one where I killed everyone--I told my companion to wait for me outside. I must have told him while standing too close to the door. When I snuck inside the house, he was inside with me. That wasn't too much of a problem since everyone was in the basement of the house, so I just left him upstairs, went down, and quietly burgled the papers out of the safe. Mission accomplished! I went back upstairs and tried to initiate the "Follow me" command on my mercenary. He promptly said to me, in a tone of intense disapproval, "You're not supposed to be in here!" And no matter how many times I left and came back, whether I waited until daytime and came in during normal hours, whether I quit and re-opened the game, he would say the same thing and he never followed me. Frustrated, I gave up on him and all the wonderful gear I'd equipped him with. I left and turned in the incriminating evidence to the authorities. For this, I was lauded as a hero and awarded the property of the traitors for my efforts. I returned to the house, which was now mine, and once again tried to tell my guy to "Follow me." At which point he cheerfully did so, because I was now in my own dang house and that's all as it should be, I guess.
• Frozen In Horror. As part of a questline where I become a member of the assassin's guild, I attempt to assassinate the emperor. I poisoned the appropriate meal and, not sticking around to see the effects, poked around the hallways and other rooms for my escape route. I could hear pandemonium happening in the dining room as all the voice-acted lines played out, but when I exited my hidey hole, the other cook (who sounded like she'd been stabbed for treason) was standing, calmly frozen by the steps with a soup bowl in hand. I went upstairs to the emperor's dining room, and the guests were all frozen in positions of fear, cowering with their hands over their heads. Nobody moved. I think I broke the royal dining room by leaving during the poisoning.
• Random Bouts of Vampirism. Relevant factors: You can become a werewolf or a vampire in-game and they are mutually exclusive states. Also, if you are a werewolf you are protected from accidentally contracting vampirism in a fight, but if you were a normal human you could be infected just by fighting vampires. There are several methods of being cured of vampirism in the game, and given that vampirism comes with more weaknesses than lycanthropy (sunlight, fire, etc), curing it ASAP seems desirable. Also, one possible companion is a vampire and you can ask her to turn you into a vampire if you want. I became a werewolf pretty early on and never used the ability, allowing it to passively protect me from disease and vampirism. Later I had a lengthy quest chain involving a vampire companion and a vampire-hunting organization and we all joined up to destroy a vampire king. At some point not too long after this, I started getting in-game warnings that I was burning in the sun. I checked my character's active effects and found out I was in the early stages of vampirism. No idea when or how this happened, and it should not have happened casually since I was already a werewolf. I tried everything to get rid of this. Nothing that was supposed to work (praying at shrines, drinking "cure disease"  potions, trying to talk to the person who cures vampires) worked for me. The game acted like I didn't have vampirism even as I suffered all the effects of it. As I raced back and forth across Skyrim and researched the problem online, trying to figure this out, I settled on this: I asked my vampire companion to turn me into a vampire (again, weird, because I was ALREADY suffering all the symptoms) and she did. Once I had officially contracted vampirism in the eyes of the game, I could then turn to my werewolf brethren and asked them to give me the gift of the beast again. They did this, thereby curing me of vampirism. I can only conclude that I glitched my way into vampirism.
• Monty Python's Black Knight Syndrome. My final task for the assassin's guild was to board a pirate ship and kill its lady pirate captain. I did not need to kill her crew, but I decided to do so anyway. I had already killed the captain, but she had two followers who were giving me trouble. I would hit these crewmen until they were down to almost no health, then they would keel over as if ready to surrender. At that point, when I would normally be able to finish them off, my hits passed through them and did no damage. Then they would stand, suddenly at full health, and fight me again. I did this about three times with each of them before deciding it was glitched. Since I'd already gotten the captain that I came to kill, I waited until the crewmen were keeled over, then quickly ran to the upper deck to get away. The next thing I know, there is a prone crewman, stiff as a corpse, laying FLAT AGAINST THE DECK, and yelling at me that it will kill me as it is dragged across the deck in my direction. Whenever I moved, it would drag jerkily in my direction, still yelling and doing no damage.

• A Rather Floppy Customer. Relevant factors: You have to be close enough to the person you want to talk to before you can engage in dialogue. Early on in the game, I entered a store hoping to buy arrows and sell my loot. At some point, the figure that represents me in the game glitched bad. I went all limp, but still partly upright as if some invisible hand held me up by the base of my neck and was dragging me haphazardly around the room. Because of this, I couldn't get close enough to the shopkeeper to engage in dialogue, at least not from the correct side of the counter. So I circled around behind the counter, and it still looked like some invisible hand was dragging my limp corpse there. I finally was able to engage in dialogue with the poor shopkeeper, who stared down at me flopping madly behind the counter with the practiced forbearance of a lifelong customer service representative. Lucky for me, all went back to normal the second I flailed my way out of the shop.

In conclusion, this game is fun, but it's also rip roaringly ridiculous in the glitch department and if you can deal with the grim tone of the story, this is one of the best games you will ever play.