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

February 20, 2012 – 12:39 pm | 3 Comments

Tiny Diggers has just been released on the iPad and soon the Mac computer. Here’s the details on this fun, educational game from TouchTilt Games.
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Home » Aeropaused, Articles, Industry, Nintendo Wii, Online, PS3, XBOX 360

Console game patching needs to end.

Submitted by on April 8, 2007 – 10:00 pm7 Comments

pirate-lady.pngNintendo recently agreed to replace my broken Twilight Princess disc, and responses to this have been generally in two categories.

1. Yay, Nintendo! Legendary customer service!
2. Why not just issue a patch over the Internet instead?

While I disagree with the idea that replacing a broken game should be considered “above and beyond” I don’t think patching console games is acceptable either. They need to work properly out of the box or be replaced. Consoles are supposed to be easy to use, these are not PCs. Not everyone has an Internet connection and the skill set to patch software. This goes back to the reaction back in 2003 when Unreal Championship for Xbox was set to receive a patch, something possible because of the first Xbox’s 8GB HDD. The first thing we all said was, “great, now this can become a standard so software can be released unfinished and patched later.”


What games need is to spend more time in testing so that these things don’t happen. Big games with lots of possible problems need to spend even more. Twilight Princess in particular spent a lot of time in development and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that a portion of the wait was due to bug fixes being issued. Major bugs like this one warrant a replacement of the software disc, something that is minor in cost to the manufacturer.

Now don’t get me wrong here, of course hard drives in consoles are a good thing. More storage is always better and I think Nintendo should have at least had an external storage option available at launch. But I wouldn’t want them to use that for patching their games. Hard drives in consoles should be for game saves and downloadable content. With a mere 512MB of flash memory built into every Wii, we Wii owners are likely to miss out on a lot of stuff this generation if we don’t pick up a competing console as well, even if Nintendo does start selling more storage separately.

The other problem with issuing patches is, at some point, that patch will no longer be available, and if you want to play that game, maybe a generation down the line, you no longer have that patch. Of course, all of this will be moot the day games are distributed solely online, cutting off a whole section of the gaming market from console gaming and destroying it forever.

See also:

Nintendo replacing buggy Zelda discs.
Epic to Patch their Gears of War Patch
Xbox: Unreal Championship to be PATCHED, rant at Farbot.

  • Joe Haygood

    Welcome to the world of the PC Gamer. We have asked for games to come out working, but now it is common place on the PC to see a 200MB patch waiting for you to download on launch day. That just tells me that marketing set a release date and the development team cut corners to meet the date. The patching process helps them create the game that was suppose to release on launch day. Console gamers are now getting to see what it is like to play incomplete games or even games that are missing features that are mentioned in the manual. I do feel bad that console gamers are having to share in this kind of pain however.

  • http://www.consolecolors.com Kat

    What Joe said. If I was planning on buying a game for the PC, the first thing I’d do was download the patch so it would be waiting for me when I got home with the game. Also, I often waited a few weeks after a PC game was released, just so the patch would already be out.

    Consoles probably don’t let you download a game patch unless you already own the game, so I won’t be able to jump right into a game when I get it home… I’ll have to add the download time of the patch along with the patch installation time.

  • http://foshi.wordpress.com Foshi

    Console patches have never bugged me. As long as they are fixing problems that they didn’t know about and players found through gameplay then I don’t see anything to worry about. Obviously, if the developers knew about the problems and are releasing unfinished games I think a bit more criticism is welcome. I just don’t see that happening with console games though. Any patch that adds free extra content though is fine with me.

  • http://www.farbot.com/ Paul

    Hm my rant on Farbot four years ago was pretty good I have to say. I think the “hopes” section is worth a post of its own here on Aeropause.

  • Dag

    What a ridiculous notion. Patches are a great way for developers to fix bugs or add content. There’s absolutely nothing complicated about patching on the 360; you simply start up the game and the patch is automatically downloaded and applied once you approve it. I assume the PS3 is the same. Patching games on the PC is not complicated either; anyone who is not mentally retarded should be able to download and run an executable file. I’m betting Nintendo simply doesn’t want to start doing patches on the Wii because of its limited memory capacity.

    The “slippery slope” type argument is BS too. Very few high-profile games have shipped in the past few years with game-breaking bugs. Besides Zelda, the only one I can think of is Oblivion and that game is absolutely huge. Every Elder Scrolls game has been buggy simply due to their sheer size; if patches were not available things would be much worse for the series.

    Saying that developers should “just spend more time testing” and “get it right the first time” shows a serious lack of understanding about the development process, and if you really think that publishers should spend tons of extra cash replacing buggy discs rather than simply issuing patches over the internet, you must be totally insane.

  • http://www.eklipse.net Mike

    To say that spending more time in ‘debugging’ is ‘lack of understanding’ is ridiculous. If you want to talk dollar and cents about the cost of doing the debugging, then yes it will cost more and the company won’t be reaping as large of a profit. But, all it takes to enhance the debuggin of something is to use more real-world situations:
    You hire more beta testers that aren’t great gamers, different age groups, etc. to handle the process.
    As a real-world software developer, I do know that no matter how hard we test something in-house, as soon as it goes to someone else’s hands they’re bound to find a bug with it.

    And yes, there are some bugs that are so insidious that they could be around for quite a while before they’re ever caught. (See PC Gamer Sept 1996, when I was rewarded for my Tip of the Month on an exploit in Duke Nukem 3D).

    I personally do not what console patching, because it becomes an excuse for the publishers to release something with ‘known’ problems and patch it later. The publishers have to make sure their stockholders are getting the ROI that they’re projecting and that means meeting deadlines. It can be nice for things like very insidious bugs that impact cheating with online play, but fixes for single-play glitches is just not acceptable.

  • James

    Bugs, glitches and exploits have been around since the Atari. In the past, we just sucked it up and restarted or stopped playing altogether. There wasn’t an avenue like the internet to make our case heard to the masses and downloadable patches also wasn’t an option.

    Seeing Nintendo’s golden child Zelda ship with a game-breaking bug is a sign to everyone that as video games get amazingly complex, even for untouchable Nintendo, it’s borderline impossible to ship a bug-free product. I’d rather them test to the industry standard and roll out the product with the ability to patch than delay games any longer than they already do.

    You simply cannot realistically emulate the playtesting of millions of gamers. We should really complain when they don’t offer prompt patches or, with the available technology today, the ability to patch at all.