07.27
A while back, I quit the PC gaming scene altogether because of a total lack of quality assurance was driving me mad. Most PC games are released month’s before they are actually ready to go. When you buy a new PC game in the stores, it’s quite likely it simply won’t work without at least first downloading a 100MB patch.
A few days back, I ordered the Command & Conquer: The First Decade. Which is great value. The kit has all Westwood games since the original Command & Conquer, up until Generals: Zero Hour. All the games have very recent patches already applied on disc. EA also got rid of the ennoying and slow original installers and unified all the games into a single proper windows installer with no fuss. However, EA even botched this job. Without the 1.02 patch, the original C&C and Red Alert are missing some videos and sounds. Now comes the cool part. After applying the patch, your installation directory is polluted with more than half a gigabyte of crap. So they basically bork the original games, and then bork the patch that’s supposed to unbork the games.
Such issues aren’t confined to EA (EA is just the worst of the pack), almost all PC gaming company don’t do enough QA on their games. Why? Just because they can. The Internet has enabled the gaming companies to put crap on the store shelves and fix it later, whenever it’s convenient.
