Buggest game ever you played across on the PC? (before or after patches)

hamster

To start the ball rolling....

I think Morrowind (Elder Scrolls 3) has got to a hot contender for the buggest game so far. In it's defense I will say it's grounding breaking in 1) graphics 2) scale 3) Story. Worse moment - walking in the wilderness when the game crashes to the desktop (averaging every 30-50 mins).

ykt0di9url7bc3

sin
hidden & dangerous

BattlingCheese

Funny, I would rate Morrowind as one of the most stable. Has never crashed on me. Go figure.

Worst would be any NovaLogic game. Commanche 4, Delta Force etc.
They nearly always crash on the menu screen with me.

ButcherOfNog

Tribes2 wasn't exactly watertight when released

KdjaCL

MOHAA/ Spearhead
BF1942
GTA 3

KdjaC

hamster

Specs:
Windows XP Pro (Service Pack 1)
P3 900Mhz
512Mb Ram
Geforce GTS 2 (32Mb) (D 41.09 drivers)
Play res: 800x600

Morrowind is a great game.. don't get me wrong. I bought it in July. I thought the original version was stable-ish. The first euro patch was bad. It introduced a serious bug: You couldn't close the inventory after picking up objects! Happened every so often, ie collecting herbs say.
The next patch fixed that and many others but one that kept on happening was random crashes... sometimes when you would run too quickly from one area block to another and zap back to the desktop... sometimes it would be ok for 1-2 hours... reboot and a defragged drive would help and the various options in the morrowind .ini file.

Fanastic rendering Engine all the same with a good non-linear quest structure. Dangerous Time sucker.

99% of all other games I had always worked fine... maybe Return to Castle Wolfenstein would get the rare hang but that game was a right memory sucker.

A buggy golden oldie I had was "Ultima Underworld 1". You would lose your inventory if you didn't get the patch. Even worse you wouldn't know about it for several hours/levels/saves later. Groan! Again the patch fixed that.

ThenComesDudley

Even though i love the game and still play it, the buggiest game ive ever played is Hidden and Dangerous

Winters

Originally posted by KdjaC

BF1942

Battlefield is still buggy but there working on it at least. last patch fixed a good bit of bugs
GTA3 is VERY buggy. though still fun to play. Noone Lives Forever is really fecking buggy. Got a copy of it with my graphics card, installed it a while ago to see what it is like, and it dont really run well, like there multi coloured triangles and squared are all across the screen, strange that... SiN is buggy, played the demo was great, then played the full thing and was soo buggy it wouldnt play for long

astrofool

black and white probs, patch fixes feck all.

and it refuses point blank to work in windows XP, which is very sad for one of the "biggest" games released, it ain't even been out that long o_O

Samson

The buggiest game ever was the follow up to Frontier: Elite II.
I can't actually remember the name of the game, but I do recall never being able to get it running because of all the problems (along with thousands of others).

This was in the days before the internet was de rigeur, basically what happened was:
one spent hours on hold to tech. support before being told they would post a patch diskette out, which took three weeks and still did not solve the problems.
I think I ended up getting three patch diskettes through the post and I never got the game going for more than 30 seconds without a crash.

There was so much (obviously negative) coverage at the time in the likes of PC Format etc. that I reckon it caused David Braben to retire.
I have not heard of him releasing anything since anyway!

Thorbar

If your wondering what David Braben has been up to over the years take a gander here.

Also the anti-wares code on Starlancer refused to accept the second disk on my particular brand of cd-rw no matter how much patching I did. As a result it wouldn't let me play the second half which was on the 2nd disk. In the end I think I swapped my cd drive for another I had spare while I was playing the game.

Oh and what was that game by monolith where you played as an angel and took over people by flying into them? Can't remember the name but that was fairly unstable.

Funky

Daggerfall (still one of my favourite games ever but buggy all the same)

and Tribes 2

Matt Simis

In the past few days, Iron Storm reminded me how buggy games can be:


Crashes to the desktop when mission is complete.
Sound crackles
AI shoots and kills one another accidently
AI cannot walk around 50% of the objects they come up agains (inc one another)
GFX, Sound and Controls do not save on first attempt to change them.

On top of that, its a fairly crap game.

Haegemonia was a also a contender. Oddly its published by Wanadoo too and also suffers extreme sound crackles. Haegemonias biggest "bug" however is the absolutely dire English translations through out the game, both written and spoken.

I remember one CG sequence, where a Technician is looking at a monitor, the voice over says something like, "we didnt have enough information to understand", which was bad enough, but the (blinking) large text on top of the monitor the Technican is looking at reads "FEW INFORMATION!". ?? :rolleyes:

Similar things happened throughout the game, which really made it seem like a farce and not the epic Space Sim it should have been.



matt

Bard

Buggiest games I've played?

Ah, they'd be:...

Escape From Monkey Island (Monkey Island 4)
and Black or White

Praetorian

Mafia is very very buggy...very very unreliable on my AMD machine...Not too bad on my P4...

Mafia's creators dont give any support / arent releasing a patch.

Game went back to the shop, thanks but no thanks

Lorax

anarchy online was extremly buggy in the first few updates
(11.0 and before), some of the missions didnt work at ALL
items swapped in the inventory
you couldnt move or chat in certian areas
you couldnt play at 1024 x 768
there was graphics glitches all ove r the place
to name a few :eek:

vac

Deffiently have to be Dark age of camelot, Euro version is 8 patches up a year later after release and its still running a direct 3d engine that can't handle 15+ people when the game is set is large zones. Aswell theres been hundreds of different bugs since release, some that are extreme but are only getting attention now in the american version, which is 12 odd patches up.

Just last night on the PVP server some ones char got corrupted and he went from level 24 to 103 (highest in game is level 50), aswell as peoples chars getting other peoples spells. He died to around 30 people fighting him dropped an insane amount of cash and exp and they're rolling back the server this morning to try fix it all.

Tbh nothing has gone smoothly for this game, nothing at all

spooky donkey

That bug in morrow wind where you walk up to a lamp post or stalagmite and get stuck to it was a pain in the ass.

But then the patch did fix that.

Buggest game i have ever played though had to be centapied, great game but full of bugs for you to shoot!

Thorbar

I think the buggiest genre would have to be MMORPGs. You can ben certain that they wont run smoothly for at least the first month or two and most likely it will be 6 months to a year before everything is sorted out. But in fairness to the developers its a lot harder to create and maintain an online world then a single player game.

BKtje

i got an amd and mafia runs pretty good. Nps really.
The odd time it will stop but a quick alt+tab to desktop and back fixes it.

Think something in your amd pc has a conflict with it. Dont think its the cpu

Snowball

If you are useing Win XP it does not count. Useing sh!t Op systems its ur fault not the fault of the game

Originally posted by hamster
To start the ball rolling....

I think Morrowind (Elder Scrolls 3) has got to a hot contender for the buggest game so far. In it's defense I will say it's grounding breaking in 1) graphics 2) scale 3) Story. Worse moment - walking in the wilderness when the game crashes to the desktop (averaging every 30-50 mins).

I have played morrowind on 4 differant machines and all diferent specs. The oly probs I had were caused by myself and Tomas by cracking the game and copying the CD. Anyways if u patch the very few glitches that are there go.


I have to say that one of the best jet buggiest games I have ever played has to be "Hidden and Dangerous".

Mr E

I believe Ultima IX was one of the buggiest games ever released (and patches didn't improve it). Not even sure if it got widespread release (the reviews were so damning)

- Dave.

DapperGent

Civilisation 3. That really was a poor beta on release.

Really idiotic stuff like every AI unit on your border would shuffle through all it's moves for no particular reason doubling the length of turns watching a horsey go back and forth 9 times over the same patch of dirt to no end was really irritating and time consuming.

WhiteWashMan

sin

Quigs Snr

Thorbar, I think the Angel game you are talking about is Messiah by Shiny.

I finished Undying last night, it was pretty bugged. Once, I saved after I went into a new area and it crashed the game. I had to rename a few old save games to get it to resume from a reasonable point. A few hours later, it crashed during a cut sequence, when I returned, the cut sequence, was playable sort of, ie: I was able to walk around my character and shoot him dead, but I couldn't get out.

Then at the very last door before the last boss. It would not open. Despite not being locked. Thank god for Level Skip cheats or I would never have finished it. Great game though. Similar thing happened to me on Rune.

BF1942 is desperate. A real rushed release it seems. Multiplayer is very unreliable.

astrofool

Win XP is probably the best microsoft OS out there atm (far better than the 9x series).

Of course i'm sure people play all their games on unix/linux/BeOs

TinCool

Beyond The Forbidden Forest on the Commodore64 crashed right at the end as you completed the game. I returned said game back to QTH on Dawson Street, anyone remember this shop ? and they kindly gave me another copy. Off home I went and played it to the end, but alas, it crashed again just as you completed the game.

Another trip in to Dawson Street and told the guy that this copy was a dude too. So he said "Show me where it crashes". Not one to say no to a challenge, he loaded it up on the shop's C64 and I proceded to play (with a piece of cack joystick I might add). Anyways, I finished the game and it crashed on their computer too. So I swapped it for a copy of Cauldron II

Old Skool...

tman

Originally posted by astrofool
Win XP is probably the best microsoft OS out there atm (far better than the 9x series).

Of course i'm sure people play all their games on unix/linux/BeOs

i used to swear by 98, can't stand the damn thing since i got more ram tho
128 just isnt enough to run xp, get more than that & it's a sweet o.s.

buggiest pc game i've played would have to be soul reaver, i got a budget copy of it during the summer & it crashes to the desktop at the excact same place every time i play it:mad:
patching it didn't help at all, it just made the game refuse to run:rolleyes:

pretty much given up on it at this stage, which is a shame considering what a class game it is.

Clintons Cat

what was the game that shipped with the faulty Copy Protection Lenslok?
Was it Elite on the spec/comodore?

hamster

Xp is fine once you gorge it with memory... starting with 256Mb and above. I think at the moment it's satisfied with 512Mb and cut down on any un-necessary processes. Play/works most stuff fine barring the original Morrowind. Win 9x is getting flakier by the day for any new stuff but it swell for classic stuff and lightweight (in comparison). Xp does have a habit of doing things that I don't ask for. I slap it now and again to keep control!

Civ3? Does anyone find that slllllooow? I think Civ2 is the best of the bunch still if only it did not depend on WinG (if it still does in a newer version of civ2?)

marauder

Jedi knight - without a doubt what a heap of ****

DapperGent

Originally posted by hamster
Civ3? Does anyone find that slllllooow? I think Civ2 is the best of the bunch still if only it did not depend on WinG (if it still does in a newer version of civ2?)

It's quickened up a good bit with the patches to the point where it's actually playable. I really like it can't wait to have acrack at the multiplayer.

jaggeh

Elite II : Frontier was an incredibly stable and cool game
it was also a freak of nature, ever wonder how under 3mb of code could track an entire galaxys worth of planets and thier orbits at all times?

then again every time i tried to enter the beta Lyrae solar system the gmae locked up on every format

Frontier : First Encounters however

the release version you couldnt buy half the ships or equipment, 70% of the storyline wasnt finished and taking on some missins caused your commander to enter a fatality loop (ie no matter what you id you died)

how i laughed, after 15 patches it barely works still

Pugsley

buggiest pc game i've played would have to be soul reaver, i got a budget copy of it during the summer & it crashes to the desktop at the excact same place every time i play it

Same happened me with AvP2, never got it fixed, just gave up on it. It happened about two thirds the way through for each race, which was highly annoying considering I loved the game

logic1

Tribes2 without a doubt. Even the patches needed to be patched ffs.

.logic.

Superfurry

I believe Ultima IX was one of the buggiest games ever released (and patches didn't improve it). Not even sure if it got widespread release (the reviews were so damning)

Ultima IX was the game that finally turned me off PC gaming, and was the last PC game I bought. The game was just unplayable, and realistically was six months away from being finished. It's a terrible shame as there was a great game hidden in there among all the rubbish code. I still have it sitting at home, taunting me.

Hellrazer

MOHAA has to be the worst offender for me.I kept getting errors with the Miles sound system-so much so that I returned the game AFTER buying a new sound card.I even spent 5 hours in one sitting on to EA tech support.
Still cant get the thing running(I got it as a present for Xmas again and returned it again).

hamster

I considering getting Ultima IX but after reading the detailed reviews that came out afters and waiting for a suitable machine to come out... no way. A shame that the Ultima series comes across such a turkey. But it's a pity developers don't get a chance to finish these things before it's released.

Doesn't the Playstation suffer from this? The consequences must be serious for a console game that can't be patched after patch after patch? :rolleyes:

Are PS2 games stable in general?