Eh, I’m not so sure about that. First, I’d put PC in about 95% now a days. and console at near, but not quite 100%. Just look at PS3 and Skyrim, or the issues with the walkind dead on consoles. And that’s completely ignoring performance issues which tend to plague almost all console games now a days.
Also console games have always been buggy. It’s just that the “game crashes your console” bugs tend to be minimal - and yet, they still happen. Just listening to my giant bomb podcast this morning, someone complained that two of their Wii U’s hard crashed running some particular game. Other types of bugs have been common place since I can remember. Look up Ocarina of time bugs in youtube for a sampling.
The bug aspects IMHO are one of the best reasons to embrace, pay for premium access to and support the Free to play model (World of Tanks, Mechwarrior online, PLanetside 2, etc) If the game is buggier than a Tijuana hooker. Nobody will play, no money will be made, game will fail. There is massive motivation to make a good solid game before the revenues rather than having a buggy POS hit the store shelves and still take your money.
It wasnt so much buggy as just a horribly disappointing pile of crapware was Master of Orion 3. After MOO2 being one of the most awesome games ever…MOO3 was basically, “Lets take a big steaming crap on everyone who loves this game”
I was going to come in here and say something like this - all of the games people cite here as “Oh, this ‘old’ game was SOOO buggy!” are from 1996 onwards.
I really don’t have recollection of games with significant bugs from prior to that. (And I played both Ancient Art of War and Karateka heavily and never had a crash experience with either. Maybe Agent Foxtrot had a cranky PC?)
Games WERE a lot simpler back then, however.
I always get a good chuckle when someone says something like this, because MOO3 was basically created as a result of listening to people who loved MOO2 and wanted more and more and more of THAT AND THAT AND THAT. It was a game that died a gruesome death as a RESULT of listening to fans, instead of the designers making what they would hopefully have recognized as good game design decisions.
Honestly, I view MOO2 as already having taken way too many steps down that road compared to the original MOO - they added tons of stupid micromanagement by basically making the game into “Civ in space” with “Planets=Cities.” If I wanted to micromanage 25 individual collections of buildings and workers, I’d be playing Civ, and I’m not. Original MOO’s abstracted planet management was so much nicer.
When I think of non-buggy games, I’m usually also thinking of the “before 1990s” ones. I still remember trying to play Daggerfall, even all patchy-patched to the latest version (I got the game about 2 years after it came out, and still remember using about 6 floppy disks to do the version update), and wow was it buggy. Had to make sure to save save save constantly. Bethesda remains notorious for this problem to this day (reference: Fallout 3 and Skyrim). The games themselves back in the day were much simpler, but they also had a team of only a few people working on them. Nowadays, the teams that work on these games together are HUGE.
All in all, with the complexity of the games that exist nowadays, there are bound to be some bugs. But when the bugs are so dang constant and problematic that they cause lack of enjoyment in the game (I always think Fallout: New Vegas when I think of this, because I still haven’t completed the game due to it’s slowdown and freeze issues. I think the concept and the gameplay is awesome, but I have to set it aside for months at a time due to frustration with the bugs), then it’s just unacceptable.
The original Mac version of Wizardry had a serious exploit that you could use to infinitely duplicate items, including the quest item that let you “win” the game (and get the big xp bonus from winning). That would be back in 1985 or so.
Doesn’t really make sense to compare console and PC games. Console games have to be submitted through the console manufacturer (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo), and they have the final say on releasing the game. In general, console games will be way less buggy than PC games. Console manufacturers and known to let things slide a bit for big titles that are expected to generate a lot of money (they get a cut on every unit), but anyone claiming that a game like Assassin’s Creed is unplayable is most likely exaggerating. A lot.
Fallout 2 on release had a bunch of unavoidable crashes on main path quests. When they finally released a stable patch a month later, it wasn’t backward compatible with saved games, so the game was literally unplayable on release. You’ll pretty much never see that on a console game barring some catastrophic QA failure from both the publisher and the console manufacturer.
7th Guest was also a pain to get running properly. That is 1993.
I have to admit, though, that most games from Sierra and so forth worked well if your computer could handle them. I had a terrible time with Laura Bow: Dagger of Amon Ra, though.
Before Sierra and LucasArts games came along, I wasn’t playing games on the PC.
I tend to differentiate “games that are difficult to get to run” from “games that are buggy” because, frankly, the former was usually just the fact that memory management back then was a nightmare.
So not before 1984, huh? 
My copy of Saints Row the Third is literally unplayable - one of the very early game quests, unskippable, will not start for me.
That raises a bit of an interesting point, however. A “bug” that’s actually an exploit requiring you to do something specific in order to get stuff to help you out is ignorable and not game-breaking, since you have the option not to do it.
But the same type of bug in today’s games where everything is internet connected and you’re competing with other players (either directly like in a FPS, or by comparison of advancement speeds like in a MMO) becomes game-breaking.
And, of course, the internet makes knowledge of these type of bugs more widespread. Perhaps there is some way in, say, Ultima 3, to dupe XP or gold or whatever–my chances of knowing about it would be much less because there was no youtube, or online gamefaqs or whatever for me to see what other people have done. Just me, my friends, and possibly a gaming magazine.
There were tons of ways to “dupe gold” in Ultima 3 - because towns were completely repopulated every time you entered them, so you could enter a town that contained chests of loot, steal them all, leave, enter the town again, and all the chests would be back.
Not a bug so much as a consequence of a design decision.
Couple that with the “Rot” spell, reducing every opponent’s (especially guards) HP to 1, and you had quite the money-maker in Ultima 3. 
My game strategy was:
- Get my wizard/cleric (can’t recall which) the Rot spell.
- Get a boat.
- Enter the city on the SE part of Brittania (on an island separate from the mainland.)
- Loot the ever-loving hell out of the city.
- Kill all guards.
- Leave
- Repeat steps 3-6
I remember that games would sometimes have overflow/underflow errors, so you could sometimes skip from level 1 to level 255 (or whatever) if you played your cards right.
Unless I’m remembering wrong, this is actually quite a late game strategy, because Rot required more MP to cast than you could hope to have without visiting the shrines, which required you to have a boat, a good chunk of change, and a fairly tough party.
S’better to learn just how to run like hell and get out of town without fighting.
Earlier on, you need the Mark of Force and 400 gold. The mark can be obtained by a quick reconnaissance mission into the right dungeon (and some luck). 400 gold bribes four sets of guards to leave, and the area with about 40 chests is all yours. Leave the town peacefully, a couple thousand richer, and repeat as necessary. After a few trips to the shrines, you can save your gold and take on the guards.
:smack:
That never occurred to me.
Airk is probably right about my strategy being mid-to-late game: it’s been almost 20 years since I played.
Yep. I still have a folder storing tons of old patches and drivers and tweaked config files to get difficult games running. I will never again incremental-patch Falcon 4.0 up to running on an oddball obsolete ISA-slotted video card again, but I sleep well knowing that I could do so if the fate of the world depended on it 