Basically, a publisher released a awaited flightsim to some “chain” stores while the product is still deep in development! For christ sakes, the game is till in the hands of Beta testers! However, they’re not calling it a “beta” product, no. Its called a “special edition”. :rolleyes:
Yeah, a special edition that starts with your fucking plane pointed nose down in the runway you assfucking monkey fucks!
They say they are starting a CD exchange program for customers to get future copies that are, uh, finished.
If thats the case, why in the name of fuck did you release it in the first place??? GAAAHHH!!!
FUCK!! Flight Sims are a dying breed. We don’t need fucking pencil neck bean counters deciding when shit goes out for sale even if its not ready. If they did that at Boeing, planes would be sold without any fucking engines!
The fucking stupidity of Corporate America still amazes me.
Git 'er out!!! I don’t give a shit if its ready or not!!!
The Falcon 4 community is still alive and strong, and the software is stable…
But another example to your OP would be WWIIOL. What a fucking pile of crap. Ah well, maybe in a year or two, after another 50-100 meg of patches, it will be playable.
My favorite “they should have tested this more” story is an HP CD-RW drive my friend bought.
Long story short, it wouldn’t work without a firmware upgrade.
You know how firmware upgrades generally fix specific problems?
Well, this one fixed the fact that this particular model didn’t know when there was a blank CD in the drive. Furthermore, it would often hang the system when there was.
How this thing ever saw the light of day in the state it was is beyond me.
My favorite was the Ensemble Studios Age of Empires: Age of Kings. It was completely unplayable as released, because the AI opponents would resign five minutes after the game started. According to a friend of mine who worked at Ensemble at the time (and who may or may not be full of shit), this was a “feature” put in to allow the programmers to test the game to conclusion in a short amount of time that they then forgot to remove. I don’t understand how companies don’t put ANY product they develop through a last heavy test before they release it to catch any “show-stopper” bugs. It’s just common sense that they would freeze the product in the form it’s planned to be released in at some point and just fix bugs until release.
I think there’s a lucrative position in most companies for a “common sense” consultant to evaluate new products and tell them “You idiots, that’s a piece of crap. Fix it.”
How’s about this for an example of untested software being released: The company I work for provides software to pharmacists to allow them to order from us. When they place an order, they download the details any new products and/or changes to existing products etc.
This package has been out in the field for 5+ years (working on a replacement now). Recently we made some changes to the way update files were created at our end, and were disturbed when we discovered that the Barcode data wasn’t being properly received by customers. Major panic, what have we done wrong, etc, etc… Roll back to the previous method… guess what… it had never worked! For 5 years, we’ve been wasting bandwidth transmitting barcodes to 2000 customers whose systems immediately bin them. No-one noticed until we tested something else…
Typical Iomega. I remember troubleshooting a broken drive and their solution was something along the lines of “our online store can be accessed at blah blah blah, where you can buy a replacement drive…”
Personally, I wouldn’t willingly put another one of their products in one of my computers. The only reason we have 'em at work is because some of our customers still, for some insane reason, use Zip disks. I can’t wait until they go out of business so I can travel to their headquarters and piss on their front door.
I’m reminded of Wizards & Warriors which was in development for about three years. Though Activision released a finished copy, I was appalled that it was in development for so long and nobody found a better user interface during all that time. I’m glad I bought it at a store that refunded my money because I didn’t like the game!