A Bong is a waterpipe used for smoking marijuana or hash. Living in a Bong means that someone is/was stoned the whole day through!

Very funny. Before anyone says, "We're not suprised." the strongest thing I do these days is Tylenol.

Now back to the thread and again, I totally agree with BK's reply. I will go even a step further, and I may be way off on this, I think back in the infancy of PC gaming we were much more apt to overlook problems. I for one was so amazed sitting there playing Aztec on my Apple// that I really wouldn't have noticed or cared how rushed and or broken the game was. Now a days gamers are much less apt to accept flaws. You give a kid a new CoD title and he's likely to have a conniption that the trigger on his rifle doesn't look EXACTLY like the real trigger on that real rifle in real life. When I was a kid: "Cool, I shot that guy!" Now: "BULLSHIT! A body would never fall like that!"

Oh. I actually thought it would be a remote, disconnected place, a word like "dump" or "shithole" or whatever more specific thing it could be. :-/

Well, good thing I asked. Thanks.

Yes that's something completely new...no wait it isn't.

I once bought a game called Descent to Undermountain. The box made a lot of promises, one of them being 4 player multiplayer.
That feature wasn't in the game though. You could see it was trying to initialize netcode when starting, but as it turned out Interplay decided to release the game without that feature though it featured on the back of the box. Also a statement from them read something along the lines of "Yeah, we're not really going to do that anyway, we were planning to, but...naah"

This was an old DOS game. The single player mode worked I guess. Just really buggy.

Oh look, it's this type of thread again.

Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: Fucking yes!

You spin me round round!

Get down!

Seriously creepy... :P

New Vegas Head Spin

It isn't any different to back in the day. Games back then where also released unfinished or broken (Here's another famous example: Battlecruiser 3000AD. It never got properly fixed, instead they just released a sequel (2.0) followed by another sequel (Millenium) and they all were unfinished, broken and were never fixed)

Tons of old games have bugs and back then especially in the arcade market it was the general rule to just release a sequel instead of fixing your game (like all the Street Fighter II versions) and the same was true for the home market. Console games weren't patchable back in the day, so you were stuck with bugs and glitches and everything from the 8 to the 64 bit era was bugged. Most famously was WWF No Mercy were THQ actually was forced to re-call all the cartridges and even older famous games have bugs like Sonic the Hedgehog on the Mega Drive, be it bugs that cause no harm like the missing "Press Start Button" text on the title screen or the time counter not flashing after 9 minutes to really bad problems like the crash in Labyrinth Zone or the one in Marble Zone, they were never fixed at all or the famous bug that let's you finish Zelda - A Link to the Past in about 5 minutes, that also never got fixed because of course fixing it would've meant recalling a couple million cartridges from around the world or Impossible Mission on the Atari 7800 which had a programming mistake that actually makes the game unfinishable.

And on the PC, back in the day a lot of games weren't fixed either (like most of the horrible mess Bethesday released with Arena and Daggerfall being the best examples) or if they were fixed you had a hard time getting the patches (unless you register with each and every Publisher/Developer which nobody ever did), so you had to constantly hope those Patches would show up on the cover floppy/cd-rom of your monthly magazines and before those cover mounts became standard? Well, you hopefully had a friend who had access to some BBS to slowly download the patch for you.

Games today have bug problems and get released too early (Trust me, as a Payday 2 gamer i know that, by now the game got about 70 Patches and there still a ton of bugs still existing) but most developers at least try to fix their games nowadays. Whenever i boot up Steam i usually have 3 to (my record so far) 19 games with "Update Pending" in my library.

So, yes, compared to how it was in the 90's, it's a whole lot better today, especially also since games are a lot cheaper today, so even if a developer/publisher abandons a game it doesn't hurt as much as back in the 90's when games were a lot more expensive (and didn't get a huge discount after 2-3 months)
And unlike those games from the past i mentioned, like Impossible Mission, i don't know any game today that is not finishable because of a bug that never got fixed.

Ok ok, I see your point.
Still, we're comparing modern days with times where compatibility \ technology \ standards \ internet were quite poor.
Even Atari had a lot of LJN s**t back then, but their "sins" almost pale compared to some of the new ludicrous Greenlight junk, various shameful expensive Early access releases, many Microtransaction-DLC-DRM ridden mobile games.

Game companies have been pushing games out the door with bugs probably since the first PC came out.

And as someone who has been playing computer games since I got my first PC in 1994,today is no worse then it eas back then. IF you want to hunt some reviews from back then, there were just as many complaints about buggy games being released as there is now.

From the console perspective you hear less about bugs and glitches and poor launches in AAA Games of the Xbox/PS2/Gamecube era.

Everything that can will be abused by people, that's just how it is. I agree that Greenlight has a lot of trash and Early Access has been abused in quite bad ways (Spacebase df-9, Windborne), on the other hand it gives starting developers an easy platform and that's a good thing. Early Access can also save companies as shown with Introversion who were nearly bankrupt before they released Prison Architect in Alpha and made millions after it went EA on Steam.
So overall i see more good than bad in Greenlight and Early Access but sure, it has it's negative points.

Microtransactions would've entered the world of gaming a lot earlier if it were possible. Double Dragon III, released in 1990 for the Arcades, was probably the first game with microtransactions and Pay 2 Win: Every Level featured a shop where you bought upgrades, every upgrade costed one credit and the game was unbeatable without upgrades, so you had to pay quite some real money.
Same with DLC. I mean some of the Add-ons and how companies handled them back in the day where just as questionable. Do you know the golf simulation Links? Came out in 1991 with ONE golf course. Between 1991 and 1995 Access released about 20 single golf courses for half the price of the full game (Here in Germany the game costed 120DM (which if you take inflation into account would be 100€ today) with the single golf courses costing ~55DM (about 47€ today!)

And is there really that much difference between a game today that might get 2 10€ DLC's and Ultima VII? That game was split up in two, with each sold for full price and then each part also got an add-on for half the price of the full game.
Companies back then also tried to make money with everything possible:
- Origin liked to make extra money with those useless "Speech Pack" Add-Ons, those add just a couple voice overs to the game (like Wing Commander II) and were overpriced as hell
- Today we take it for granted that sports managing games come with a built-in editor. Back in the day companies sold those for extra money (I remember Bundesliga Manager Hattrick having an advert for the Editor which costed 20 bucks)
- Companies even made money from Demos. I distinctively remember adverts in magazines for games which had a little coupon "Want the demo of the game? Send in this coupon and 5 bucks and we sent you the disk"
- Heck, even shareware games were monetized. Sharewere games were "free" but then some greedy companies came around before the internet was everywhere and sold those games for 5 to 10 bucks. I remember once being tricked into thinking i just bought the awesome One Must Fall 2097 for 9,95, only to discover later that it's just the Shareware version.

Of course all this wasn't possible on consoles but there the companies tried to rip customers off with insane peripherals that usually didn't even work.

The only thing that changed is the form of distribution which opened up more posibilities but is there really a difference between spending 40€ on 8 DLC's or spending 40€ on an Add-On that possibly gives you the same exact stuff, just in one pack?

That's some interesting game history info. +1