And The Final Count Is……
$1169. Yep, that’s the total amount of money I got from my birthday and Christmas combined. This makes the 4th year in a row that I’ve received over $1000 between my birthday and Christmas. I figure this will either get invested or just be deposited with my mom and be used to fund large purchases I want to make later on in the year (iPod with video, anyone?).
I want to like Advent Rising as a game, especially now that I’ve become so engrossed in the Ender series. I finished Ender’s Shadow on the way up to Hot Springs on Christmas Day, and while I was there I got Shadow of the Hegemon and Shadow Puppets. So far I’ve loved everything about the books, so since Card (the author) is the one responsible for the story of AR, I think I would enjoy it also if the game just wasn’t so bad.
This leads into a thought I have about the way the game industry works now: who is it within the company that’s responsible for allowing games to be released that obviously aren’t at the highest possible quality? Movie games I can understand (although not tolerate) because of the desire to release the two simultaneously, but wouldn’t companies rather delay the game by one or two months to clean up the most obvious bugs and glitches in order to increase the overall quality of the game (and therefore potentially sales)? Games that didn’t do too well like Psychonauts that were awesome and just suffered at the hands of not being marketed well unfortunately can’t be changed this way, but I think that someone should focus on creating a studio that takes the potentially great games marred by a few bugs (but serious, as in the case of AR) and finishes that last amount of work to release a better product. Yeah, there are probably infinite legal issues with this not to mention that it probably wouldn’t financially be worth it, but when all a game needs is a little more time to clean it up, you can’t help but wonder “what if”.