Why the Future isn't Ready for Us.

There are a lot of things with today’s technology industry that really get on my nerves. The natural evolution of a business, specifically videogames, means that eventually the mainstream audience gets involved, and that’s where we see something such as the Wii, or Microsoft’s pushes out of it’s hardcore market (Xbox 360 Arcade Bundle). Those kind of things don’t bother me quite that much, as long as they don’t really affect me that much, which they haven’t. However, there is one issue that is present all over the technology industry, and is something that really bothers me about today’s videogames.

While I know, that as a developer, it is really hard to get something to be utterly bug free, there are limits. Today’s software, be it on a computer, a phone, or even a TV, is just riddled with bugs and glitches. I’ll even admit that my beloved MacBook does some rather odd, and frustrating, things sometimes. My phone decides to restart at certain points, and I’m pretty tired of game killing errors in $60 video games. That isn’t what I paid for.

I have a great example of that, too. I had invested quite a bit of time into Far Cry 2. Honestly, it is one of the best games I’ve played in a while. But, one day, for a reason I still cannot figure out, the game decided that the save file was corrupted. Anyone who has ever been there knows how frustrating that is, and what it’s like to try to figure out if you should even replay. Luckily for me, however, there was another save file from earlier still there. That’s lucky, but sometimes I haven’t been quite that forunate.

Fable II, also one of the best games I have ever played, has one glitch that really annoys me. Sometimes, during a specific quest, the game will not load a region of the map. And once this little glitch happens, it stays, so no matter what you’re doing, you cannot load that region. So, your progress within that game is essentially stopped in its tracks.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of games out there that are really solid, and that I haven’t had problems with, and the same goes with other software. It just seems where we’ve gotten to the point where this is something that is going to be regular. The old Palm OS was behind, certainly, but it was really solid, and days with things like that won’t work. And that’s just because as consumers, we demand the cutting edge. we want to see cool looking stuff. And unfortunately, that means we’re basically asking for something that isn’t here. We want the future, and it hasn’t had time to work out its kinks yet.