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"who thinks this is a little bit stupid?"

my friends bought an xbox pack, which included halo, for 220 quid, primarily so he could play HALO, which comes out in PC soon, of which he has a good one (mine's better :D).
he's 17 or 18, can't remember, but he's older than me, but he also says it's good to have a console anyway, because of split screen stuff.

the boy has more money than sense, no?

Belldandy wrote:
> If you think about it, old games did push the PC to the limit at the
> time, give it four years and kid's will be laughing at the 'pathetic'
> machines we're going to use to run Half Life 2.

That's true. I find my old Lemmings games pathetic nowadays, yet 8 or so years ago I was enthralled by them.

and unreal 2 is quite stable itself, but im not sure about HL2 (obviously)

maybe so, but would you prefer an incrashable DOS game to Half-life 2 or unreal 2? of course.....not.

Garin wrote:
> Well actually, if you really wanted to point figures then I'd guess
> the testers are maybe the best target. After all, its primarily
> their job to ensure games stand up to consumer use. And given the
> scope and complexity of programming these games, its quite
> unrealistic to expect developers to catch all bugs especially when
> they've probably spent 18 months staring at it.


Actually the testing department is usually part of the developer. Most of the blame for buggy games can be heaped on the pressures of publication - games are rushed out to meet deadlines imposed by publishers etc. Whether that's the fault of the publisher putting too much pressure on the developer, or the developer not responding well enough to said pressure is a difficult question to answer.

Belldandy wrote:
> Anyone here into PC Gaming before the internet took off ? If so would
> you agree games were less buggy than they are now because it was
> difficult for developers to fix problems after release ?

Difficult to say yes or no really.

I can think of a number of games I bought that were totally unplayable without patches. In those days it was wait until next month's magazines came out and hope they had the patch/fix on the CD. Thats another point, most magazines were carrying pretty large patch sections on their CDs. I can remember PC Zone devoting whole CDs to patches on more than 1 occasion.
Certainly suggests that buggy software isn't exactly a recent problem. :)

However games weren't quite so complicated in programming terms, so less to go wrong.

If you think about it, old games did push the PC to the limit at the time, give it four years and kid's will be laughing at the 'pathetic' machines we're going to use to run Half Life 2.

I can see what you mean; all my old games run very smoothly. But that's also because there's less to go wrong: Low content and basic graphics only take up a few meg, and the less there, the less problems.

And GTA 3 is also better on PC because of the MP3 radio: I find Rob Zombie is great driving music!

Oops my bad, still GTA 3 looks better on PC though.

Anyone here into PC Gaming before the internet took off ? If so would you agree games were less buggy than they are now because it was difficult for developers to fix problems after release ?

Belldandy wrote:
> Bang on about Vice City though

wasn't on about vice city, but hey, you just fortified my correctness :)

Also, Sega games come out on Xplosiv a couple of years after they come out on consoles: Loads of old Dreamcast games for £4.99 or £9.99, it'll be Sony Games on PS2 etc soon. You have console quality on your PC! (But seeing it's Sega, we don't often come into contact with the word
quality...)