Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

The most frustrating thing that can happen in a game is not repeated defeat at the hands of a worthy (or cheap) adversary, but rather finally defeating that adversary after fifty tries and having the game freeze when you’re inches from the save point. While this is not a specific example, I’m sure it’s familiar enough to everyone here.

Naturally, as games get bigger and more complex, making them bug-free is harder and harder, particularly when playing on a million configurations of Windows and a hundred configurations of Macintosh. But when a game is designed to be played on a specific console, do we have a right to expect it not to ever crash when you’re doing something that’s integral to gameplay?

It all boils down to tolerances. Well, both kinds. The programming needs to have some tolerance for unexpected events or actions by the player, and the player needs to have some amount of tolerance to accept that nothing is going to be perfect.

The first run of Metroid Prime discs for Gamecube had a serious bug that anyone who got good at the game encountered pretty often, but at least it could be circumvented. The bug was in the system Retro Studios put in place to eliminate (or rather, hide) load times in the game while still having significantly large areas in the 3D world. They would make kind of close-quarter tunnels that ran between large areas, that weren’t particularly long, but were curvy and filled with tiny, pesky buglike enemies that would slow you down a bit. While you were spraying the swarm with bullets so as not to take tiny amounts of damage by treading on them, the game was loading the next area. Then, when you got to the door at the other end of the room and opened it, the game was usually finished loading.

The problem came in when you got really good at the game and didn’t care about the little bugs. You would roll into a morph ball and zip right through them, careening around the corners and smacking against the door. You’d go to open the door and if the game wasn’t done loading, often the game would just freeze. Similarly, riding an elevator in the game would give the game time to load the next area, but if you got in the elevator too fast because you were really pushing it, The game would freeze just as you came into the next area. And as I said, you can work around these problems by just not beating the game too hard, but all the same, when you’re limping to a save point after a hard boss battle and you need to ride an elevator, you get very nervous. Later pressings of Prime had a new loader and didn’t have this bug, but that didn’t help us early adopters.

My main fear is that with all three new consoles having internal storage and internet functionality out of the box, developers might skimp on the bug testing time, figuring major issues can be patched as they’re found. This was my first thought when the Xbox launched with a hard drive, in fact. What do you think?