In Defense of [the] Game Patch

Tales of the Rampant Coyote has published a new article that looks at the pros and cons of game patches, and why they seem to be so much more prominent in modern times.

But you can’t compare Pong to Oblivion and say, “Oh, look, they are so sloppy these days… look at how many bugs Oblivion has compared to Pong.”

I mean – it’s Pong. You can test the whole game in about five minutes. And you STILL had bugs in some games in that era with scores that would wrap around from 255 to 0. Or that bug in the arcade game “Sinistar” (yes, in the arcade) where a player could – on demand – get himself shot simultaneously with getting himself eaten by Sinistar when down to only one ship… which resulted in 2 kills at the same time, taking his number of lives UP to 255. I don’t know if they ever patched that one. It still has that bug in an emulated version of the game (complete with a video where one of the developers talks about the bug).

In the past, they simply tried to keep the issues secret to keep their happy customers from knowing that there were problems. Nowadays, there’s more open communication, so the happy customers discover that all might not be well in their games. Personally, I’m for better communication, even if it might alarm customers.

Hey, I’ve been on the disaffected customer side of things, too. It happened to me with no less than Ultima VII part 2: Serpent Isle. To this day I have never completed it. I’ll bet most of you old-timers who played Serpent Isle had no idea there was a game-killing bug that only seemed to affect players running the game on a Cyrix 386/40 CPU (according to the tech support guy who could only offer apologies to me at the time).