When did they start selling incomplete games?

[Razzie.P]

On 2/12/2020 at 9:24 AM, jcalder8 said:

Just did a quick google search and found these:

 

Impossible Mission for the 7800 had a game breaking bug

Faxanadu had a game breaking bug

Quest for Glory 3 and 4 both did

King's Quest 4 did

Leisure Suit Larry 2 did

Jet Set Willy had the attic bug

Paper Mario on the SNES

Action 52 had so many

 

 

Impossible Mission drove me crazy as a kid.  I could easily find "all" the pieces, and make it to the end, but couldn't complete the puzzle.  Didn't know about the bug until I was an adult.

 

Surprised about Faxanadu, though.  I finished that game a couple of times as a kid.  

 

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time on Gamecube had a nasty gamebreaking bug that would randomly happen at a certain point in the game where the girl (NPC) would go through a hole to unlock a door or something, and just disappear.  I had to restart a couple of times to finish it.  It was frustrating, but I loved the game so much, I kept giving it "just one more try" to see if the bug would happen.

 

 

[Tanooki]

If we're talking broken games, N64 has a whopper but it wasn't really a retail release anyway, just mostly blockbuster with a limited amount direct sold by the maker - Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine.  The game basically was co-developed along with Battle for Naboo.  Lucas was calling the shots on the games and decided that with the SW movies being big then, to get it out by a certain hard date, he had the development team pulled off Indy except for literally one guy, and this poor man had to work day and night to finish it the best he could by its date.  He had a very beta game with all the assets more or less done, but he had to finish various things, then try and nail all the bugs and quirks.  Ultimately he was forced to compile the game unfinished with bugs and it was sent to press on the chips.  As it stands the game has a memory leak so it will (not if) crash after so long, no set time, no set stage does it, but it will rapidly chug to a stop and spew these rainbow colored speckles of digital barf all over the screen.  The crash is so hard, the reset button doesn't work so it has to be flipped OFF entirely.  Second to that, there is a 100% repeatable crash bug in the stage with this single man tram cart over a ravine right at the end of the level.  You need to move a crate 3 crate spaces out of the way to board it.  If you dare PUSH it all 3 times, game locks, but if you push, PULL, push then you're golden.

 

Sadly the game is the definitive and better version of the game.  It had more stages to it, cleaner (strange) visuals (both ran at 640x480 with the RAM pack on N64), clear and clean audio including a fully spoken dialog by all faces in the game as well and amazing music/sfx.  The game was known to kind of suck due to a wonky camera and poor control, so they aped Zelda Ocarina of Times camera and lock on system and the game flows so smoothly.  It's really a shame.

 

I know this as I was at E3 in 2000, met the guy as he had a TV in the back of the Nintendo booth and I ended up chatting the guy for awhile playing the floor copy.

[Magmavision2000]

One of the earliest incomplete games I could think of is that Return of The Jedi game for the 2600. The worst part is they never released the second half.

[DragonGrafx-16]

On 2/12/2020 at 3:08 PM, roots.genoa said:

This one was so riddled with bugs it was never released!

I think he meant N64 lol... anyway there's this guy on youtube where is channel is pretty much dedicated to crashing Paper Mario...

[Tanooki]

12 hours ago, Magmavision2000 said:

One of the earliest incomplete games I could think of is that Return of The Jedi game for the 2600. The worst part is they never released the second half.

Good one, how about Castlevania 64?

 

To anyone in general, did you get EGM back in the 90s?  They had this fantastic story about the game and ultimately what happened too.  CV64 is only 40% of the intended title, and Konami of Japan had been facing a poor stock report on their exchange, so they forced the development team to ship the buggy mess as is with the majority of the game unfinished/pulled to slap that disaster together.  Less than a year later, the complete game was put out a Legacy of Darkness which is fantastic.

[Razzie.P]

2 hours ago, Tanooki said:

Good one, how about Castlevania 64?

 

 

I must gotten lucky with this one and Indiana Jones (that you mentioned earlier)   I finished them both multiple times when they were kinda/sorta the hot new thing, and never had any issues that broke the game.   They seemed and rough, janky, and hard to play, but so did pretty much everything else on the N64, in my opinion, so they fit right in.

[Tanooki]

22 minutes ago, malrak said:

 

I must gotten lucky with this one and Indiana Jones (that you mentioned earlier)   I finished them both multiple times when they were kinda/sorta the hot new thing, and never had any issues that broke the game.   They seemed and rough, janky, and hard to play, but so did pretty much everything else on the N64, in my opinion, so they fit right in.

Got lucky with Indy as it just has the one version, perhaps various hardware internal revisions of the system may play nicer/worse with it?  I just have my launch system still all these years though HDMI modded now.

Castlevania 64 though is a dumpster fire, if you didn't notice great.  But the collision on many places are borderline game breaking such as the stage with the clock gears in the floor that'll crush you even if they don't squeeze you between teeth.  Then the jump physics are trash, you can do the same jump twice, not land in the same spot though which is great for platform hopping over death pits.  The camera likes to spin when you grip a wall, and enough you lose the direction needed so you plummet to your death.  There are other problems but those I remember being the worst.  I think the only part of that game was that was better than the finished product is the opening music score on the title screen they strangely didn't carry over.

[Steven Pendleton]

Do expansion packs count? The earliest game that I remember with an expansion pack is X-Wing, but I'm also still in my 20s (barely).

 

If not, Xbox made it okay to ship broken and incomplete games. In fact, Xbox is solely responsible for almost everything that's wrong with modern games, even if Sega and Intellivision had downloadable stuff way before Microsoft poisoned the industry.

 

I actually just got Project Diva Mega39's in the mail a few days ago on launch day. Guess what they announced just before the game shipped? That's right, a whole ton of crap that's not in the base game. I think it's like 5000 yen for all of the new songs. Have not played it yet because of this stupidity. This is one of the biggest reasons that I'm looking forward to the Amico.

 

I should clarify that broken games are not necessarily incomplete games. I'm specifically referring to games that have things cut out and sold later, etc. So while Fellowship of the Ring on GBA may be "incomplete" since you can't actually finish the game without abusing a bug, among other things, it's more or less all there... aside from all of the glitches like bows not working at all except for the ones that only do 1 damage and all of that. Truly terrible game. I guess maybe it should count, then, as it's definitely not "complete" since it is quite literally missing at least several lines of code.

Edited February 16, 2020 by Steven Pendleton
Forgot Fellowship of the Ring

[Video]

Don't remember the exact title, but the first game I remember getting that was incomplete, or broken, was an RPG for the C=64.  Theres a game called diver, or some such, on the 2600 that isn't completable due to the treasure being inaccessable.  Humorously, it's got several bootleg ripoffs, and all of them are broken in the same way

 

Don't get me wrong, broken, or incomplete games have ALWAYS existed, for all platforms, but, there is a huge difference between the occasional snafu, and what is happening now (games simply being released incomplete, or with game breaking bugs day one) because now days it's happening more often than not.  There is an assumption that if you play games you have good internet and can just download that daily update, and to be honest, this is false.  Not only that, but I'd imagine, internet has pretty much reached market saturation at this point.  People either have it, or not, but the lack is more not wanting it than lack of access.

 

The next gen system I get will be the one that can work primarily autonomously.  Streaming games will never be a thing in our area but due to shit internet options, it's likely years or decades off before I can get incomplete games and "just download the rest/patches"

 

Switch is actually one of the worst current consoles at "incomplete" games.  Things like Wolfenstein or Doom being released only partly on cart, and you have to DL the rest.  At least Doom was the online part, so it's still fully playable without it, but you have to watch it.  It's a problem when the first question on the user questions is "is this game complete?"  I wanted Spyro but I wasn't going to buy a game and download like 2/3 of it.  Sadly, If they had released each of the three games on a seperate cart for $40 each (instead of the first on cart for $40, and you download the other two) I would actually buy that, yeah, despite being more expensive.  At least switch has the excuse of 8GB limit (currently, though they would be dumbasses if they really designed it to not take bigger carts)

 

And I don't get the whole " but gmaes are more complex now" people make it out like it's the current COD games, vs MS Pac-man, and thats not the case.  COD for last gen consoles (or Elder scrolls, or whatever) were NOT sufficiently different from current games.  It's not like they went from 4k games to 40GB games or anything they went from 9GB games to 40GB games (and most of that is high resolution graphic skins, and don't affect how the game is made, or played)

 

Anyhow, unless there is a severe change in where  consoles are going, then this is likely the last generation I'll be an active part of.  I've got four decades of  complete stuff I can fall back on for a few lifetimes over that I currently own, to heck with what I could go out and buy that I've yet to discover.  The next gen system just has to work (and not require online life support to work) or I'll just stick to older stuff and emulation.

[Steven Pendleton]

1 hour ago, Video said:

Switch is actually one of the worst current consoles at "incomplete" games.  Things like Wolfenstein or Doom being released only partly on cart, and you have to DL the rest.  At least Doom was the online part, so it's still fully playable without it, but you have to watch it.  It's a problem when the first question on the user questions is "is this game complete?"  I wanted Spyro but I wasn't going to buy a game and download like 2/3 of it.  Sadly, If they had released each of the three games on a seperate cart for $40 each (instead of the first on cart for $40, and you download the other two) I would actually buy that, yeah, despite being more expensive.  At least switch has the excuse of 8GB limit (currently, though they would be dumbasses if they really designed it to not take bigger carts)

 

And I don't get the whole " but gmaes are more complex now" people make it out like it's the current COD games, vs MS Pac-man, and thats not the case.  COD for last gen consoles (or Elder scrolls, or whatever) were NOT sufficiently different from current games.  It's not like they went from 4k games to 40GB games or anything they went from 9GB games to 40GB games (and most of that is high resolution graphic skins, and don't affect how the game is made, or played)

 

Anyhow, unless there is a severe change in where  consoles are going, then this is likely the last generation I'll be an active part of.  I've got four decades of  complete stuff I can fall back on for a few lifetimes over that I currently own, to heck with what I could go out and buy that I've yet to discover.  The next gen system just has to work (and not require online life support to work) or I'll just stick to older stuff and emulation.

Switch is the worst for incomplete games, although Digital Foundry just said the other day that Metro Redux on Switch is a 16GB cart.

 

This whole terrible post-Xbox 360 era has slowly gotten worse. I have more or less given up on modern games completely except for occasional visual novels. Even then the last one I bought still had a day 1 patch for some reason, even though it was a Switch port from PS4. I have the PS4 version as well, and that didn't have any patches at all!

 

Anyway, it's just so bad now that I gave up more or less entirely and in the past year I've bought: Mega Sg, Super Nt, Mega Drive, Mega-CD, Super 32X, PC Engine CoreGrafx, CD ROM2 + Interface Unit, a separate RGB modded CD ROM2 + IFU, OSSC, a huge Sony Trinitron, MegaSD, SD2SNES Pro, MiSTer, Amico, and Intellivision along with a handful of games for PC Engine and about a dozen or so for Mega Drive. All of this because Battlefield 5 made me super frustrated with modern games. Thankfully Amico has no DLC at all.

Edited February 16, 2020 by Steven Pendleton

[+wongojack]

I'm more bothered by the huge initial downloads and game content allegedly moved to DLC than small day 1 patches.  I think most games on XOne and PS4 will install completely from the disk (minus unessential things like multi-player or higher resolution content), but you have to disable online features for this to happen.  I'm not even sure if you have the option to stay logged out anymore.  Its been so long since I've tried to install something without being logged in. 

 

I've honestly NEVER had an experience where I tried to play a modern game, hit a bug that prevented me from continuing and then got a patch for it.  I HAVE hit a lot of unfixed bugs that were never fixed, and I have had to do lots of troubleshooting on PC to get things to work.  The only console equivalent I can think of is that one time on the PS3, I actually had to prevent a patch from installing to get past a specific point in XCOM - Enemy Within.

 

I suspect that if the servers went offline, most single-player games would work just fine.  I think that a lot of the day 1 patches have nothing to do with the game and are required by the platform.  Probably an add-on that does something like fixes achievements/trophys or patches how the game interacts with the PSN, Xbox, or Steam community feeds for things like photos and vid-sharing.  Or it could be a platform specific update for the specific game engine to run best on that platform.  It makes sense to me that whoever is developing the game would test these things LAST or even count on the platform offering a specific patch for them that they don't have to write.  And these updates are likely KB or MB in size.  I can hear the pitch to the devs:  "All you have to worry about is the game, set up your product like XYZ and you'll automatically get the latest platform patch when the user starts the software for the 1st time."  It makes perfect sense if you want to be an attractive platform for devs.

[roots.genoa]

7 hours ago, Video said:

At least switch has the excuse of 8GB limit (currently, though they would be dumbasses if they really designed it to not take bigger carts)

There is no limit actually. Publishers just choose to use 8GB cards because they're cheaper. -_- But L.A. Noire and Doom probably use 16GB cards since they take 28 and 24,5GB on the eShop, and require 12 and 8GB downloads respectively. The worst example is WWE 19K, because it uses a 8GB card and requires a ~24GB additional download that doesn't even fit in the 32GB console memory, since the OS is already using a big chunk of it. Also the game sucks a lot, which doesn't help! ^^

[Tanooki]

Video: That's kind of unfair to peg Switch as the worst for incomplete games.  Two reasons, your examples while valid they're -- one, a dramatic minority of games and two, it wasn't something Nintendo wanted or promoted just annoyingly allowed.  If you take the piece of crap out of the equation that are Rockstar, EA, and Capcom, you'll be fairly hard pressed to find a lot of games that ship incomplete as they're all on the card.  Some games even ship entirely on the card, but not with the online assets like Doom did.  This was all a choice in many cases of just being cheap skates, the others would be the 32GB memory card cap on the current media if the game legitimately is that huge.  We can easily tell from looking at the download sizes of many halfassed releases on Switch many were a choice, though a few realistically even cutting out 1080p and above assets just wouldn't fit so that's a fair criticism and probably why they allowed it.

 

Steve there though is really correct on the matter, console wise, not computer.  X-Wing is a good call, but others did it too such as Wing Commander a year or two earlier with 2 expansion campaign packs (and WC2 did the same + a speech module) and it's not the earliest.  Technically gray area shareware may actually count in giving up part of a game, but at least that was a sales pitch where you'd get like 1 or 2 chapters out of 3-6 or more to bait a buy.  Consoles though, MS is to blame as much as the industry and sheep buyers who went along with using the HDD to release and peddle broken incomplete stuff.  15 years ago people could have largely protested with their wallets or shame campaigns against it, but no one bothered, and here we are.  Had people pushed back against paying for incomplete crap around 2003 or so, who knows where things would have gone.  The complexity argument is crap because the lack of space Nintendo begrudgingly sticks to in every system since has kept anything from missed bugfixes from being pushed.

[Steven Pendleton]

1 hour ago, Tanooki said:

Steve there though is really correct on the matter, console wise, not computer.  X-Wing is a good call, but others did it too such as Wing Commander a year or two earlier with 2 expansion campaign packs (and WC2 did the same + a speech module) and it's not the earliest.  Technically gray area shareware may actually count in giving up part of a game, but at least that was a sales pitch where you'd get like 1 or 2 chapters out of 3-6 or more to bait a buy.  Consoles though, MS is to blame as much as the industry and sheep buyers who went along with using the HDD to release and peddle broken incomplete stuff.  15 years ago people could have largely protested with their wallets or shame campaigns against it, but no one bothered, and here we are.  Had people pushed back against paying for incomplete crap around 2003 or so, who knows where things would have gone.  The complexity argument is crap because the lack of space Nintendo begrudgingly sticks to in every system since has kept anything from missed bugfixes from being pushed.

Yeah, X-Wing is my example because I was 5 months old when Wing Commander launched (and I was in a Mac family, not PC, so I have no idea about pre-Mac OS 10 Windows/DOS games except the games that got Mac ports). I do miss shareware, by the way. Those were good times, never to return.

 

The thing is that Microsoft made it popular, even if others did it first. If MS didn't do it, someone else would have. That doesn't matter, though, since it's MS's fault. The average consumer is ignorant and doesn't know better. MS targeted the original Xbox at the very same people who used to beat up kids who played video games at school and successfully sold them the Xbox. Naturally, the current market is the result.

 

Edit: Also paying to play online is bad and if you do it, you are a bad person and should feel bad because you are. Now I can never trade Pokemon online in future Pokemon games EVER because of YOU! Thanks!

Edited February 17, 2020 by Steven Pendleton

[Keatah]

The excuses that companies are doing ultra-complex $100 million dollar projects that take time and revisions are no free passes in my opinion. A couple of more weeks can be spent to make something right. Yes.

 

Does the switch download and save to the cartridge? Or is this half-assed thing where part of the game is in ROM and the other half in FLASH on the handset itself?

 

[Steven Pendleton]

13 minutes ago, Keatah said:

The excuses that companies are doing ultra-complex $100 million dollar projects that take time and revisions are no free passes in my opinion. A couple of more weeks can be spent to make something right. Yes.

 

Does the switch download and save to the cartridge? Or is this half-assed thing where part of the game is in ROM and the other half in FLASH on the handset itself?

 

I think with the half-complete Switch games what happens is you put the cart in and then you have to download whatever is missing and that goes on either the system memory or the SD card. I don't have any of those games because none of them are the type that I care about, so I don't know. I think there is some basketball game that is like this. If it was NBA Jam, I'd know more, but it isn't since they don't make NBA Jam anymore, so I don't.

 

 

Yep, it seems no internet = no game even for physical.

Edited February 17, 2020 by Steven Pendleton

[Keatah]

Half the shit's in the cloud. Which can and does get blown around. Other half on FLASH or a HardDisk or SDcard. Who the hell knows where you stuff is. I don't work that way and I don't want my consoles to work that way either.

[Steven Pendleton]

11 minutes ago, Keatah said:

Half the shit's in the cloud. Which can and does get blown around. Other half on FLASH or a HardDisk or SDcard. Who the hell knows where you stuff is. I don't work that way and I don't want my consoles to work that way either.

Wii digital games are all gone now, so if you don't have them already on your system, you can never get them. I just started playing Castlevania in late January 2019. Guess I'm never playing Castlevania The Adventure Rebirth, since that was Wii digital only.

[+wongojack]

FYI - I think you can hack the Wii and get the WiiWare games.

[roots.genoa]

10 hours ago, Steven Pendleton said:

Wii digital games are all gone now, so if you don't have them already on your system, you can never get them. I just started playing Castlevania in late January 2019. Guess I'm never playing Castlevania The Adventure Rebirth, since that was Wii digital only.

You can't buy games anymore but I think you can download again the games you already purchased.

[Steven Pendleton]

My Wii is hacked. It's been hacked since like 2009. It's just a pain to take it out and set it up, especially since I'd either have to use the OSSC and balance the sensor bar on top of my monitor, which is thinner than the sensor bar itself, or sit on the fake wood floor to use my CRT. Besides, I prefer to do stuff legitimately if I can.

[Tanooki]

Just a general FYI so I don't get in trouble but for at least 2 years now people have been stuffing archives for every conceivable system of solid to excellent interest up on archive.org, which would include a stand alone archive of nothing but Wiishop stuff that's lost to the brainless cruel failing of digital rental distribution.  I tried out that Castlevania, Gradius and Contra rebirth games in the last month or two, only really enjoyed Castlevania though Gradius wasn't too bad, Contra felt insufferably annoying.

 

And as far as those partial games on Switch goes it's easy.  What they say you have you do, what they tell you that isn't on there, it goes either on the system or to the memory card, whichever I believe has enough space (or the most free.)  One that wasn't marked DOOM, that one will quietly download multiplayer in the background as you play, but if you had no network the game is 100% there for single player playing modes.  But turds like that awful sports game, you get the root setup for the game, then you get a nice like 20+GB download of all the assets for them to save some money and make you spend yours on a 128+GB card to fit it.

[Steven Pendleton]

35 minutes ago, Tanooki said:

Just a general FYI so I don't get in trouble but for at least 2 years now people have been stuffing archives for every conceivable system of solid to excellent interest up on archive.org, which would include a stand alone archive of nothing but Wiishop stuff that's lost to the brainless cruel failing of digital rental distribution.  I tried out that Castlevania, Gradius and Contra rebirth games in the last month or two, only really enjoyed Castlevania though Gradius wasn't too bad, Contra felt insufferably annoying.

 

And as far as those partial games on Switch goes it's easy.  What they say you have you do, what they tell you that isn't on there, it goes either on the system or to the memory card, whichever I believe has enough space (or the most free.)  One that wasn't marked DOOM, that one will quietly download multiplayer in the background as you play, but if you had no network the game is 100% there for single player playing modes.  But turds like that awful sports game, you get the root setup for the game, then you get a nice like 20+GB download of all the assets for them to save some money and make you spend yours on a 128+GB card to fit it.

Yeah, I have heard about those archives.

 

I guess the incompleteness does depend on the game, so some of them don't have the multiplayer. That basketball game, though... terrifying. It's absolutely 2K's fault, though, since they could have not been super cheap and ordered a bigger capacity cart.

 

From what I know, publishers have to go through Nintendo to place an order to have their game put on carts. I don't know if that's different from what M$ and Sony are doing since those are just Blu-rays, but Nintendo offers several cart sizes for sale and then they actually make the carts for you. I think. Default size is something that I don't know, but you can order bigger cart sizes, which obviously costs more money.

 

I honestly don't pay much attention to most not-Japanese Switch titles, though, as those either don't appeal much to me or don't have real carts. I guess half-download games are getting worse with US publishers, though. Nintendo and the Japanese do not seem to have this problem yet, although companies like Koei Tecmo and Sega end up with DLC prices exceeding the base games' prices by a decent amount.

 

Nothing that I know of is as bad as Train Simulator, though.

 

 

Edit: Fantasy Grounds is worse.

Edited February 18, 2020 by Steven Pendleton

[boxpressed]

What I'll miss most about the Coleco Chameleon is its bug-free game technology. 

[roots.genoa]

2 hours ago, boxpressed said:

What I'll miss most about the Coleco Chameleon is its bug-free game technology. 

Simple as that!