Dear Future Gamer

Sam Liddle wrote, in issue 17, about Chris Higgins complaining about crap games. A lot of games are completely overpriced rubbish these days. What makes the situation worse, is that the games are put on the market in an unfinished state, hence the need for patches and upgrades or bug fixes.

The reason? Money and the general public being gullible enough to put up with the situation. If we didn't buy these games in their unfinished state, then the software houses would have to get their act together. We've got rubbish games because we buy them!!!

Regarding the issue of gameplay versus graphics, Sam mentions Half-Life, Doom, Final Fantasy VII & Final Fantasy 1 (simple sprites marching around a mono-colour background)? I remember spending hours playing a game called QUEST - simple sprites marching around a mono-colour background, but this was a fantastic game! No patches, upgrades or bug fixes needed for games then, they were the full finished product.

Like the magazine, keep up the good work.

Anon

FG: It’s true. To a certain extent. There are enormous pressures on a development house to get a game finished and because of the amount of disparity between PC manufacturers it’s nigh on impossible to get a game to run on all systems all of the time. The best a developer can hope for is getting the game to run on the majority of machines and then spend time tweaking the code to work on more non-standard systems.