I’m sure we’ve all asked ourselves what warrants full purchase price of a AAA title on launch day? Perhaps it is a much anticipated sequel? Maybe, it’s the allure of playing online with our friends and getting as much bang for our buck while the servers are full? Maybe we’re just simply tired of the same old, same old, and buy into something new?

I don’t know about you folks, but I am dangerously close to ending the practice of buying any game upon immediate release.

All industries have pressure to deliver within the expectations of drawing sales. I get that. And with certain products like video games, this pressure tends towards getting the game “under the tree” for Christmas. Sure, I could bitch about stereotypes of video games being rushed out to capitalize on the stereotypically believed demographic of kids… even though demographics tend to show that the average gamers are currently in their 30’s. But that’s not my beef here.

I am well aware of these issues being prevalent among PC titles. With all of the variables on custom built machines and OS setups, that is no surprise. But on a standardized console? Come on. This is greed, pure greed pushing these games out the gate.

I want to talk about three titles over the last year or so that screwed me over… games that I was happy to want to play and put over as AAA titles.

Time to get serious...

Fallout: New Vegas. Oh my dear lord were there problems with this one. After experiencing a corrupted save file (and losing almost all of 4 hours of play), I hopped online to the Fallout Wiki and discovered hundreds of bugs and glitches that caused such problems, even as far as numerous reports of fried hard drives/motherboards. I suppose the affiliated companies have a history of such problems. So when Skyrim comes out, I am certainly not running out to the store to buy that game. Not at full price. Hell, maybe I’ll try to find it used just to take money away from them. I had to put New Vegas on the shelf for four months awaiting a patch that fixed these problems, and would have saved me $30 for a new purchase.

Take me to task in the comments... cut my microphone off...

Homefront. I bought this curious to try out a new and fresh FPS title. The premise sounded excellent, and I figured I would give it a shot. Whoops. What I got was a half decent single player mode (not worth full price) and a completely broken online experience. You couldn’t play with friends. Wait… what? No, this problem lasted for over a month before it became trade fodder. If I am buying a 10 hour offline experience, I want that to compare to a new movie at the theater. If the experience lasts as long as three movies (i.e. 10 hours), then it is worth $30. No more, perhaps less. If it costs more than $30… well fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, fuck you.

Dead Island. Until yesterday, I was loving this game. Sure, it isn’t perfect. It has lots of things that could have been tweaked, but nothing that was game breaking. Then the game found it’s glitch. With truth be told, my save file is NOT corrupt. What I got was the level-load freeze issue. This is caused by an NPC named “Jin” who can force the game to hard freeze upon loading between the Jungle and Prison areas of the game. By the time you get to these late stages of the title, you’ve likely invested 20 hours or more into the game. The catch is that you can store items on this NPC like a bank. However, if she has too many items, you are fucked. Your game will not load unless it is patched. Steam users got a patch last night. Lord knows how long it will be before the PS3 and 360 get similar patches (or if at all). And much like New Vegas, lord knows how long this title sits on my shelf before I am allowed to play it again because the developers succumbed to greed and made ME be THEIR beta tester. And, accordingly, the trade in value has dropped to under $20, which means I could likely purchase this game new for $30 by the time this patch is released.

Making off with your hard earned money... what a clown.

Maybe I should just give up on paying for games on release days, and just wait for 6 months when the price is at fifty percent and all the patches come out? Just let the suckers pay to be beta testers for my own amusement later? Realistically, I can’t afford, nor do I have the time to play every game that actually comes out anyways.

So with a few titles coming out very soon, that I dearly want to play and enjoy… like the new Battlefield and Assassin’s Creed, I am very reluctant to purchase them. I just don’t want to get burnt again, and I blame no one other than the developer and monetary greed. They say that video games are taking over Hollywood… but if the projector breaks, or all the good seats are full, I am given a courtesy pass to a free film in lieu of these errors. “Turrible. (sic)”