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Can I have my money back please?
By Steve MacGregorDo you enjoy being a Beta Tester?
OK, so it’s not good when you buy a game and it won’t run at a reasonable frame rate, but it’s even worse when it just isn’t finished. It alarms me that some recent reviews mention that certain games are free of major bugs as if that were a commendable thing. It isn’t. It is the basic minimum we should expect from any piece of software. We have a right to demand that our games are complete and quality checked before we buy them.
I think we all accept that simulation software is very complex, and I don’t believe that anyone expects every game to be perfect and totally bug-free, but surely we have a right to more than we get from some current games? I believe I can detect a growing cynicism amongst some developers, where financial considerations lead them to sell deeply flawed products simply in order to recoup high development costs. We can all understand the need for software developers to make a profit, but if they continue to take advantage of an open and receptive market, they will eventually kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
I’ll take two examples of games that seem to me to fall into this category. These aren’t necessarily the worst examples; they are just two that I stumped-up my own hard-earned cash for.
First of all, Gunship! from Microprose. Gunship! has minimum specification of a Pentium 266, 32MB RAM, with a 2MB Direct X compatible video card. Soon after buying this alleged “game”, my son and I were playing it. My wife asked what we were playing. She mis-heard my reply, and asked incredulously what manner of game “Dungship” was. Since then, this particular Microprose product has been referred to as Dungship in our house. I believe that this name succinctly sums up my feelings about this product. Gunship! has all the symptoms of a rushed and botched release.
Developed out of a highly regarded predecessor (M1 Tank Platoon 2), eagerly awaited, and seeming to spend an inordinately long time in development, Gunship! should have been a fine product. In the event, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that someone in Microprose or Hasbro pulled the plug on the project before development was complete. Rather than simply abandoning the game, and losing all the development funds invested in it, a decision was made to market the half-complete game in an attempt to recoup some of the losses.
From a purely financial point of view, this makes good sense. From the point of view of one of the poor suckers who paid £30 for the dubious privilege of taking part in some late Beta testing, this feels like a confidence trick. I bought this game (despite generally bad reviews) because I enjoyed M1TP2, and because I had a high regard for Microprose as a developer. Bad mistake!
Gunship! Should be a good game when it’s finished.
So what’s wrong with Gunship! Lot of things, from game controls that just don’t work (try getting the pilot to follow your commands as the gunner), to elements of gameplay that are bizarre (switch to the map screen from the pilot’s cockpit, go back to the cockpit and find you have crashed) to faults that should not have got through even the most cursory quality control check (try the second training mission, after the first few lines, the speech telling you what to do reverts to lines from the first training mission, so you can’t complete the mission). Either there wasn’t any quality control done on this product, or the results of QC were ignored before the game was released. Either way, this wasn’t a product that was ready for release.
There have of course been other games that have had initial problems, but which have been greatly improved by subsequent patches (Falcon 4 springs to mind). Which made Hasbro’s prompt announcement that they would not be releasing any patches for Gunship! very surprising (OK, I know, they relented and eventually did release a small patch. But it was a pretty half-hearted attempt, and does not excuse their initial attitude).
