by Ben Silverman

It's the single worst thing that can happen to a gamer.

After months of eagerly awaiting the arrival of a brand new PC game, you finally get your hands on a copy. You cancel your dinner plans and tell your girl (real or imaginary) that you just came down with a sudden case of the Bubonic Plague, therefore forcing you to quarantine yourself in your computer room for fear of spreading the infection. You run to the store for a bottle of wine/case of beer/tube of glue. You rush home, wildly unwrap the game and impatiently stamp your foot as you wait for the computer to boot up. After a successful installation, you dim the lights, crank up the surround sound, and giddily prepare to smoke a little bit of game crack.

Crash!

Spit back out to the desktop, you figure this was a fleeting problem likely due to the finicky nature of the PC, so you restart. You play for ten minutes, then whammo! Crash!

Irritated, you restart once again and play for 30 minutes. All seems fine…though there's an annoying flicker when you press the spacebar…and the items keep disappearing from your inventory…and the announcers are screwing up the lines…and level 3 refuses to load…and….

Crash! Curses, foiled again! Crash! Crash! Crash!

When all else fails...

Welcome to the wonderful world of PC gaming, where shoddy products and half-tested code somehow makes it out the door, onto the shelves and into your life. Well, some of us - namely, me - are sick to death of seeing great games ruined by bad bugs. And I'm here to put an end to this nonsense once and for all.

First off, a quick disclaimer. This rant has nothing to do with the myriad of incompatibility issues surrounding most PC games. Considering the literally millions of potential PC setups, it's pretty much impossibile for a PC game to be shipped that will comply with every imaginable configuration. I don't have a problem with game updates. I think it's great that a company can release a few files that optimizes a game for users running a 4 year-old Matrox clone bought in Bolivia. That rules.

What I do have a problem with are bugs. I define a bug as "an unintentional error in the coding of the game that can have adverse affects on the experience, regardless of configuration issues." Sounds nice and fancy. In other words, a bug is the crap that was supposed to be fixed before they sold you the game and ruined your day.

For some reason or another, the gaming industry has grown used to the idea that a game can ship with some bugs and that this is somehow an excusable side effect of dealing with computer software. Besides, game companies figure, we can always patch the game later.

Then they go out and steal some more kittens to sacrifice to their evil gods.

I find it repulsive and retarded. In most other forms of media, a tremendous amount of energy is put into ensuring that an unfinished product isn't released until it's finished. Finishing a product is a REALLY IMPORTANT STEP in the process of making a product. In many ways, it's the only important step.

Imagine going to the record store and buying a brand new CD, only to find out later that they didn't finish Tracks 3-9. Track 4 is missing a bass line, while Track 6 keeps skipping. Track 5 was accidentally recorded backwards. You can't even get Track 7 to play at all.

Or how about buying a book and finding out that it's missing chapters 7, 12 and 14, and chapter 15 is written in Swahili. Oh, and they didn't edit it at all, so evrythinge iss speld rong.

In either case, you'd have the World's Biggest Tantrum, followed closely by the World's Biggest Conniption and wrapped up with the World's Quickest Return. Yet somehow, the video game industry doesn't see it that way. Works-in-progress routinely find their way to your wallet, and the only one who truly suffers is you (and whoever got beaned by the CD you hucked out the window).

Think about it. These games cost an average of about 40 bucks apiece; compared to other entertainment media (CD's, DVD's, etc.), that's a helluva lot of money. Yet you don't buy a DVD movie that's missing the last twenty minutes or fails to work past the fifth scene. I don't care if it's Lawrence of Arabia - if it doesn't work right, it's broken and should be condemned as a faulty product rather than lauded as a brilliant concept.

Part of the problem is the very concept of a game patch. Originally, patches were designed to fix compatibility problems and tighten up niggling flaws in game code or to add enhancements that couldn't make it into the game by the time of release. They were meant to supplement a finished product.

That'll do it.

Nowadays, they're meant to fix horrible, Godzilla-sized bugs and are sometimes not released for a good month after the game comes out. They are no longer supplemental - some games require patches to be even considered playable. Half the time, the patches only solve a few problems, like slapping a band-aid on a broken leg. Patches have become the developer's crutch.

In fairness, much of the blame can be handed to publishers, who often cut short funding for projects in order to get the games out in time for big events, like the annual Christmas crunch of crap. They think that shipping an unfinished game in time for Xmas is better than shipping a completed product a few weeks later. It's exactly this kind of perverse thinking that is driving the gaming business into the ground.

I often wonder how in the hell some of these problems get missed. Rune, one of our multi-player favorites, featured a bug in the single-player that made it impossible to get past a certain level on the Easy difficulty setting because a door wouldn't open. Obviously, no one bothered to play through the game one last time on this setting before shipping it. I thought the game was about Vikings, not made by them. Doh!

Given, Human Head managed to release a patch before the game went full retail, so they were on the ball. But still, this shouldn't be considered a good thing. The problem just shouldn't have been there in the first place.

Then there was the Case of the Disappearing Saved Games in Crimson Skies, another kick ass title marred by bugs. If you attempted to start multi-player after playing for a while in single-player, you'd lose all saved progress. Again, a patch was released pretty quickly to solve the problem, but that doesn't cut it. Crash and burn!

I can think of only one recent case when a publisher/developer handled a bug appropriately. A few years back, Bungie's brilliant Myth II shipped with a particularly nasty bug that would pretty much kick the crap out of your computer if you tried to uninstall the game. That's a nice way to make sure people play it, eh? But rather than simply offer a patch, Bungie sent out a massive recall of the product, losing a ton of money in the process. We were shocked…then, we stood on our chairs and raised our glasses of mead in salute. They understood that it shouldn't be the consumer's responsibility to fix someone else's broken game.

A classic piece of crap, maybe.

Sometimes the bugs are so bad that they totally kill a game. Anyone remember UltimaIX:Ascension? Probably not, because none of you were ever able to get the damn thing to work. There was a game that could have redefined PC role-playing, but instead marked a sad ending to one of the brightest series in the history of gaming due to being raped by bugs. It also felt like a kick in the balls to most of the press, particularly those of us who were…ahem…"lucky" enough to get a quote on the damn box. Whoops!

Speaking of the press, we aren't helping matters. The recent Giants: Citizen Kabuto was infested with more bugs than a termite mound, a fact that was noted in just about every single review out there. But despite the painfully obvious technical shortcomings, the content was apparently good enough to warrant some incredibly inflated scores. Over and over again, reviewers washed over lines like "annoying crash bugs," "rather unstable," "suffers from some nasty bugs," and my personal favorite, "more bugs in it than a festering corpse dipped in maggot eggs" with review scores of 9/10, 9/10, 87/100 and 85/100, respectively.

Isn't it a part of our job to judge these games based on their technical merit? We shouldn't applaud a game that shipped too early and is plagued by bugs just because it rocks when it's playable. We have the luxury of getting these games for free and sit in our offices on T3 connections downloading files in seconds, while many consumers have to spend dough on this stuff and wait for hours on their 56K modems. There is absolutely nothing worse for a gamer than buying a game that doesn't work right, despite how cool it is when it does work right.

The End Of Endor As We Know It.

It all comes down to being thorough. I mean, just take a gander at what this guy has done with a copy of Return of the Jedi and a hefty dose of methamphetamines. Now that's covering your bases, even when they're on Endor. By the way, he's the biggest nerd ever.

For the most part, only PC users have had to deal with buggy games, with a few notable console exceptions (I've heard from some gamers that WWF: No Mercy has a bug that erases saved games). Why fewer bugs on the consoles? Because console game developers can't fix their games after shipping - which, I should add, is the way it should be.

But things are sure to change…and soon.

The great appeal of console gaming revolves around the ease-of-use. You don't ever have hardware conflicts, you don't ever have to download new drivers, and you don't ever have to worry about IRQ conflicts or why your sound card refuses to do its job. You buy a game, you pop it in and you play it.

But as the new home consoles come out with hard drives and broadband Internet connections, they begin to resemble computers. What's to stop developers from patching console games? Not a damn thing.

So how do you solve the problem? For starters, how about actually making the game testers do their damn job? I bet just about every one of you reading this rant would rather work as a game tester for a major company than mixing lattes at Starbucks all day. I bet every single one of you has played enough games to know when something is wrong, when something is broken, when you can't open a goddamn door that's supposed to open. So what are the people getting paid doing? Playing Counter-strike all day, most likely.

In truth, testing isn't a very glorious job. You might spend a whole week walking towards a wall to ensure that your character doesn't pass right through it. It can be incredibly boring work and the pay isn't the best, but it needs to be done. And there are four billion people willing to do it.

Uh, yuck.

In fact, I've been hard at work designing a crack squad of enormous uber-women designed to squash bugs before they terrorize again. Don't believe me?

It's time for game publishers to get with the program. We all know how difficult it is getting a product out the door on time, but please stop flooding the market with unfinished work. The money you spend on a few extra weeks of troubleshooting can save consumers months of frustration, in turn saving you just as much money on tech support.

Note: We'll be updating this rant to v.1.1718b shortly! Numerous fixes include...

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