Those Xbox One first-day glitches: GREEN screens of DEATH, disc crunching As inevitably happens when a new piece of tech gear goes on sale, some machines suffer malfunctions – and Microsoft's Xbox One games console is no different. Its support forums are littered with users reporting that their systems are failing to boot up past the initialization screen. Dubbed the "green screen of death", this …
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Have an upvote for 'Uglysoft', Mr Bones. Small anecdote: Bought Assassin's Creed II for PC a little while back as it was on offer. It refused to install without creating an Oooplay account. Created one through gritted teeth. Bastard still failed to let me play due to some fucking Oooplay error that I can't be bothered to remember.
I actually had to torrent a bloody crack for my legal game to play it. Seriously. And I don't really care who knows it, I'm still that steamed up.
I remember the old days before Internet-enabled consoles. Games just worked straight out of the box, they didn't need patching nor was there any mechanism to do so, so the stakes were higher and there was greater emphasis on getting things right first time. I can't remember any showstopping bugs preventing decent progression or completion, nor do I remember too many games (if any) needing recalled as a result.
Nowadays with commercial pressures (i.e. £££ get the stuff out the door on time no matter what) and the availability of network connectivity, games can be shat out half-baked and fixed later. Even before this generation I've seen console games which, on the day of release, have a massive patch waiting for you at launch as soon as you boot it up for the first time. Now the consoles themselves require this?
I want to say that technology has influenced management, and vice versa. Because they now CAN fix it later, there is significantly higher pressure to do so, weighted towards hitting ship schedule even if it's not anywhere near prime time.
My urge to call for there to be shaming and such over this sort of thing is balanced against the fact that games these days are at least two orders of magnitude bigger, codewise, than they used to be. There is more ground to cover, and all that. This is probably one to file under "Dammit, Escalation!"
Unreal (1998? 1999?) came out with a very clear disclaimer that the game might have bugs, it might not even work, and a smiley face. Sure, old console generations would be pickier with bugs as ROM cartridges couldn't be patched even if you could do so due to the game living in ROM. But even then old games had bugs; some of them horrible. There's a particular one in Megaman 1 where getting hit right when you beat Dr. Wily would crash the game and deprive you of the ending. Oh, and that game is the hardest Megaman ever, and it lacks password/continue capabilities. Ouch!
All those MS shilltards trashing the PS4 "blue light of death" finding out that the XB1 has similar defects. It would be even hilarious if the Xbone ends up having a worse failure rate; however I think they'll end up being pretty much the same this time 'round.
It does seem that the quality of most stuff these days is going down the gutter. Maybe a side effect of outsourcing everything to China?
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