Blockbuster Games Have a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day


unity steam retro apocalypse

Ubisoft/Screengrab via Steam Community user Retro_Apocalypse



Big-budget, blockbuster games had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day on Tuesday. Was it an unfortunate fluke? Or the beginning of the end?


Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Unity shipped Tuesday, and it wasn’t long before players started finding all kinds of bugs and glitches—so many that Ubisoft created a “live updates” blog specifically to keep players abreast of fixes to game-breaking issues.


And then there was Halo: The Master Chief Collection on Xbox One. It won early praise for its single-player collection of four Halo titles, but the ambitious multiplayer mode—more than 100 maps, spanning the entire series—shipped out totally busted. “I was unable to access a single match of any kind, encountering various error messages or endless queues, and even one full game crash to the Xbox One dashboard,” Arthur Gies wrote at Polygon, downgrading his review from a 9.5 to an 8.0.


But wait. There’s more. Sega’s Sonic Boom, the latest in its long-running Sonic the Hedgehog series, shipped with bugs that dwarfed Creed and Halo in terms of impact on the game. One huge gaffe in particular: You can jump infinitely into the air by pausing and unpausing the game. Sonic speedrunners discovered this almost immediately and used it to complete the game in under an hour.


There was also this touching scene, which makes one think that Sonic Boom may simply be a misunderstood work of postmodern genius:



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