Software bugs
Turning it off and turning it back on again is not going to solve THIS problem...
Aside from the high profile RROD there also lurks another menace ready and waiting to ruin the good gamers quality time with their favourite titles. Some bugs are relatively minor and serve to do no more than break the illusion of an otherwise carefully constructed game world such as NPCs running around in circles or continually running against a wall. Then there are the deal breakers, those issues that are more akin to the genetic super freaks of Starship Troopers than they are to mere ‘bugs’.
Knightmare, based on the 80’s kids TV show, introduced many to the horrors of broken coding. Some copies were fundamentally flawed, not allowing the player to escape from the first room of the dungeon. Bang. Game over.
A more recent example is the critically acclaimed but temperamental PC title S.T.A.L.K.E.R that tormented its players with numerous crashes to desktop and .exe errors. To further compound the frustration updating to the latest patch rendered any previous save game files useless.
“I’ll tell you what sucks. What really sucks. Spending 6 hours playing a game only for it to pull a spazz out and crash... Then the harsh realisation that, in fact, this game doesn’t autosave... That sucks. That sucks Hitler’s tache right off a Monkey’s boner” - SlyEnemy
Even consoles, universally accepted as being more accessible & stable than their PC counterparts are at risk of these pesky bugs. The PSP version of the cult hit ‘Puzzle Quest’ had a bug that rendered the abilities of any of your party members useless. Some copies of Age of Empires on the DS crashed and wiped save game data should you ever be cavalier enough to choose the ‘Save and Quit’ option from the in-game menu. Sony’s recent firmware update that added in-game XMB support, ensuring it was eagerly awaited, high profile and downloaded by many as soon as it was released, brought some PS3s to their knees. With no way to roll back to the previous version packing up your PS3 and sending it back to Sony for repair was your only option (with the added bonus that Sony could not guarantee that your hard drive would not be wiped of all data during the repair process). <sigh> Sometimes the videogame industry can break your heart. Which leads us on to...
