Quality Control in Videogames

[ysabetwordsmith]

supermario128 has posted a great piece about videogame quality, patches, and crunch culture.  This is part of a much wider cultural conflict over the right to own, right to repair, and quality products vs. planned obsolescence.

Remember, you're not a captive audience.  If a product -- especially entertainment -- is shoddy then you are free to buy something better, buy nothing, make something better yourself, pay someone else to make something better, or go do something entirely different.  Shop mindfully. 

Comments

Re: Thoughts

[see_also_friend]

>>And even books are flimsy compared with cuneiform on ceramic.<<

I've read physical books that are from the 1800's. If we add in copies, we can go back to sometime in the 1600s, (with the translation of the King James Bible). Translations take us back to the Epic of Gilgamesh.

And even if every book in the world disappeared overnight, it would be possible to rewrite a lot of the stories from memory, with access to ink-and-paper-and utensils... or clay-stylus-and-kiln as the case may be.

>>Exactly.<<

I'd actually figured that part out as a kid. I wanted to play with things that were familiar, and keep them for a good long while. Even today, there's some old games I'd play again for nostalgia, despite the fact that they are simple and have old-timey pixelated graphics.

>>There's one old game that I knew as Worm, also called Snake, that just consists of a line and a dot.<<

First phone game I played (one of my parents had it on their cell phone). I think they have it as an app, for some modern smartphones. (They also have a Tamagotchi app, I think.)

I remember these old Sim games:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimLife
https://archive.org/details/msdos_SimEarth_-_The_Living_Planet_1990

And for a few later ones:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanosaur
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odell_Down_Under
https://oldgamesdownload.com/zoo-tycoon-2001-gg2/

Here's a modern one with nostalgic-y graphics (though it is a postapocalyptic survival game):
https://dayr.fandom.com/wiki/DayRWiki