Bugs

What with sufferring a lot of gaming disappointments lately and still needing to "decompress" (har har) from BioShock, I've mostly just been watching Buffy on DVD. I forgot that the first season was almost entirely scored with music recycled from 80s suspense shows. I could swear certain tunes were ones I'd heard on Hunter, back in the day. :P

I still read some news and listened to some podcasts. According to what I've been reading, the new Rainbow Six is pretty buggy. The 360 bugs aren't game breakers mostly (gotta love being the lead SKU), but the PS3 version's multiplayer is alleged to be unusable. Maybe I just missed the reports of the original's major buggage and shouldn't have been so surprised.

Also, Bully for the 360 has a lot of crash bugs, and the patch they just released is purported to make it worse. People talk about how consoles are fixed platforms and make development so much simpler because there's only one hardware platform to code to. But sometimes that just means schedules get shorter and more corners are cut. Of course, it could be argued that the 360 is actually many platforms. I don't keep track of chipsets or motherboard revisions, but I understand there's been a few. And of course there's the optional hard drive.

But while a press release at one point said only early 360s were affected, I've yet to hear anyone say Bully ran well for them. And it's not like they didn't have time or that they made so many improvements to the game that these bugs are easily explained.

I have to wonder how much multi core processors have to do with it. I've had to manually set certain games to only use one CPU (which I have to do every time I launch the game) because they spaz out. I'm talking specifically about Painkiller and King Kong. Painkiller I understand. It's a budget title. But King Kong has a configuration program with a dual core checkbox and is unplayable. Then again, King Kong's from Ubisoft. I'm beginning to think they couldn't do a decent PC port to save their lives.

It bears repeating at this point that I am a soreheaded old crank, and nobody likes me. My standards always have been and always will be way too high.