By Kevin Lenaghan | Follow on Twitter
Well here we are, in our new shiny enclosure with all it’s bells and whistles and pretty new layout, all updated and advanced, better than ever. That’s the Internet for you. Someone builds something, it goes up, then they say “Oh s&@t! That doesn’t work! We really should have, I don’t know, maybe tried using the thing for five minutes to see if it operated as the electric potato peeler that we designed it to be rather than what it turned out to be, which as it happens was a thermonuclear rabbit raping machine!”
Thank Christ for that!
This is fairly typical of modern technology. It seems as though a mix of pressure to make deadlines and a sort of laxidasical attitude towards bugs has led us to a reliance on being connected to the Internet all the time to make sure we can play games the way the were apparently intended. A glitch in my Internet recently has brought this into sharp focus.
As I have pointed out before, I am aware that games have gotten larger and more complicated and I think this is definitely a good thing. With this growing complexity it naturally follows that the more elaborate the software the more can go wrong with it. Nearly every game you buy these days, as soon as you pop it in the drive (Many times even on the day of release) has a little prompt coming up telling you that there is an ‘Update’ available.
Because this is what you want to see when you put your brand new game into your X-Box.
The perfect example of how something can go terribly wrong and still be somewhat excusable is, of course, the most open-worldy of open world games The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. This game was patched and patched and patched again. At one point the PS3 version couldn’t be played for more than about 25 minutes without slowing down to a crawl. But they fixed it. This was all down to patches being made available on PSN, Xbox Live and via Bethesda’s website for PC users.
Although why anyone would think having a horse that floats 100 feet above the ground is a glitch is beyond me.
It’s not a good thing that these were necessary but with a game as huge and sprawling as Skyrim it is somewhat understandable that maybe there would be a few things that didn’t work and would need to be patched in later. But this is not always the case and one happenstance in particular which kind of make me want to grab someone by the throat and physically educate them about the effects of a sandwich toaster on human digits.
The Vic Mackay approach to conflict resolution.
I am of course referring to the unbelievably broken and unplayable mess that was the Silent Hill: HD Collection.
I was rapturously excited when I heard about this. For those not in the know, the title is a bit of a mislead as it only contains Silent Hill’s 2 and 3. But that is fine. Realistically they are the only ones worth playing retrospectively (excluding Shattered Memories on the Wii) so I was damn happy about this. Then, a few days before the release of this wonderful thing I saw a video much like this one.
There turned out to be a hell of a lot more glitches but they are all fairly similar in nature to the ones shown here, the framerate issues being the ones that most effect the gameplay to a point where it is pretty much unplayable.
My musing is this:
They have playtesters at Konami/ Hijinx Studios. They have a lot of them. How did a game this broken and unplayable make it to the shop floor? It’s not like these problems don’t occour until a long way into the game. Especially in Silent Hill 3 (the more broken of the two) within the first twenty minutes there are sections running at half speed or less. Sounds cut out right from the beginning. It’s hard to miss.
And herein lies the rub. There was a patch released… for the PS3 Version… last week… four whole months after the game came out… and it didn’t fix it.
No date has been given for an Xbox 360 patch.
I have not bought this game. I may not ever. I really, really wanted to.
Now, many people on the internet do bitch and cry and moan about things like this. Most of the time they are just spoiled brats who will moan about anything. Often they play the victim. It gaves them this sort of false veneer of righteous indignation, as if they were somehow owed something by game developers.
You owe me whatever I want!
They aren’t.
Game developers don’t owe you anything, legally or otherwise and it’s good that they expend the effort to touch things up after the fact and add new content, but when something like this hits the shelves it’s like the a skinless dog from Silent Hill: It looks kind of cool but it just isn’t finished and you don’t really want to touch it. Perhaps the convenience of the internet has doomed us all.
Oh well, the new drop-down menu’s at the top of the page look real nice…
