Well you don't remember them because you have decent taste in games. You and your friends knew enough to avoid them. But somewhere, some kid got Shaq-Fu or Superman 64 for Christmas.
I see what you are saying, I was thinking the PC world (as that's where the patch thing started and that's what I was talking about when I said I had argued the direction it would go in).
I would however argue that those games were not necessarily unfinished, they were just 🤬 games... notice something about all the ones you listed (including ET)? They are all tie in games... they have always been notoriously crappy not because they couldn't be patched (we have had crappy tie ins in the current era of patching) but becuase they are tie ins... the games are low budget crap usually because they know the name on the game will sell it a lot.
Yeah these broken crappy games had bad sales and were panned. That's what I meant in the Backbreaker example. It had mixed reviews and fans saw problems. They patched it and essentially fixed the game, making the best of things and making enough people take notice of them that now they may be successful enough to try again in a sequel. Without patches, these things don't happen, and Shaq-Fu stays Shaq-Fu.
I didn't play backbreaker, but I will take your word they fixed it.
Shaq fu... I don't think they would have fixed Shaw fu... I think it was a horrible game from the ground up.
Please don't make me compile a list of essentially flawed games that were basically betas that I played through on virtually every home console since Atari was making them.
I won't, but I will say I was thinking about PC games (not that that in some way invalidates console games) but I honestly don't htink a lot of the bad console games would have been fixed by patching.
Oh yeah, that reminds me, E.T. for the Atari was a massively hyped, unfinished, buggy, garbage-y mess that almost killed the entire video game industry in the early 80s. Too bad they couldn't patch it.
That could have been resolved by not giving them a ridiculously short dev time to tie into an unreleased movie (that's happened recently as well) and it's another game I doubt could/would have been patched to any kind of success... I think it was doomed to tie in death from the start.
Take a look at the back of the GT5 box and look at all the online stuff advertised. Multiplayer, Leaderboards, Lobbies/Matchmaking, Add On Content... As a consumer, I'm not all that surprised that without an internet connection I'm not getting the full experience. Hard to get that Add On Content that they tell you about right on the box without a net connection, but I don't think that should be a surprise to any reasonable consumer.
It's fair enough to say that without internet you aren't missing those things anyway (As they are mostly online play related) however it doesn't change that they weren't there from the get go.
Then you have things like the cars slowing down when you touch their rear bumpers screwing up a lot of the single player recing... perhaps not written as a feature on the box, but it shouldn't be an issue and without internet you aren't getting even the first patch which addressed it.
You don't get the full experience with today's generation of games unless you have an HDTV (3DTV now) but does that mean people with a standard TV should be surprised or upset that they're missing out? I see the internet thing the same way - it's not up to Sony what you don't have access to.
I see what you are saying, but I do think it's a little different. To go back to my car AC/trailer analogy, that would be more like being surprised that because you don't have a garage, you can't park your car in your garage.
Interestingly I have gone to a lot of peoples houses who were unhappy with their HDTVs... they said it looks just like standard def TV... turns out they were not using cables capable of carrying an HD picture.
The difference as I see it is that one is a case of not being educated about your product to not know what you will be missing and the other is making it impossible to get things after the fact no matter how educated you were. No one, no matter how much they know about and understand technology can know before purchase what would be available only via an internet connect after purchase, however they COULD know about what their TV can display (whether they do or not is a different matter).
There's a few games with near unreadable text on SDTVs, all because they were made for HD not SD. People complain, of course, but their complaints go pretty unnoticed because they're the minority.
So, welcome to the age of console gaming with hard drives and always on internet connections. This was inevitable and we all saw it coming, it's not just Gran Turismo most games out there are being released in various states. Some are missing features, some are broken, some don't work at all online.... as soon as we accepted hard drives and internet connections for consoles, this was only ever going to be the result.
Actually I believe MS (and Sony?) require a game be playable and readable on a 480p screen. This includes minimum font size.
Sometimes a game will break this rule which is unfortunate, but there are actually rules in place to try and prevent exactly this kind of shortcoming from happening.
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cuz they probably live in a cave.
