Shouldn't bugs hibernate?

"You wonder if you could've done better
You wonder if you should've surrendered
Before you learned that nobody actually wants a fucking martyr"

Amanda Palmer and the Grand Theft Orchestra - Olly Olly Oxen Free


I stocked my fridge today in preparation for having my car snowed in and/or frozen to its parking spot for the next week. The weather forecasts an overcast and partly snowy weekend, rather balmy around freezing point. Then it turns to one of those classic bright and sunny winter spells when mother Gaia sends a little thermal love back to the sky god Uranus. Just in case any of you are still unclear on how that whole "greenhouse effect" thing works.

Temperature lows are predicted around -25 to -30C with nut-gropingly brisk 20-30 km/h winds. So, cogitates I, what form of entertainment might best suit such days? None better than Frostpunk, the dashingly gritty game of post-apocalyptic steampunk sub-zero city survival. With robots. So I fire it up, struggle through re-learning its few ins and many outs, only to lose my city because my food counter starts decreasing continually for no apparent reason.

Frostpunk is bugged.

No matter, no matter at-all, I can go for the next best thing. Mars is a cold enough place. So I fire up Surviving Mars, the dashingly rusty game of post-punk pre-apocalyptic sub-zero city survival. With robots. Only to discover that after the first disaster, the "long winter" scenario, all my buildings turn untargetable when in need of repairs. Therefore irreparable.

Surviving Mars is bugged.

Harumph. Well now. I must confess I'm waxing ever so marginally peeved. But never mind, there are still other options to be had. Such as No Man's Sky, the dashingly glossy game of non-apocalyptic non-punk occasionally sub-zero space base building survival. With robots. Which is how I got chased around by inexplicably invisible robots.

No Man's Sky is bugged.

(Okay, yes, given NMS' history, this last surprised no-one.)

I try to stand by good old games, indie games and any developers willing to take some chance at unpopularity, the creative fringe of the game industry. I have no use for the latest "grunt with boomstick" tripe. But my playthrough of Children of the Nile was almost ended by a single dysfunctional citizen out of hundreds. In The Guild my rather long campaign ended with all my trade carts gluing themselves to a shop. War for the Overworld nearly memory leaked my computer to death. M.A.X. is unplayable past the 150-200th turn after twenty years. What good is Troika-level immersion if it comes with game-ending Troika-level unplayability? If I might game devils' advocate, every so often you start wondering whether everyone buys Blizzard, Sony and EA's crap because they're the only ones capable of delivering functional crap.

I don't mean to tell you your business (<- this is a lie) but bug testing is not optional!