Scumbag Game Companies

Today's rant is brought to you by the letter S, for the Shit game companies knowingly release to the public unproperly tested and malfunctional.

My specific target of bitching is Empire: Total War.
CreativeAssembly released E:TW far to early. If you've bought this game and assuming you were one of the supposed many it worked for, then you already know this. This game is plagued by so many crash to desktop bugs that I have still not been able to successfully complete a Grand Campaign. The crashes are hardly the only thing wrong however, this game is also loaded with deficiencies such as limited troop varieties, piss-poor battlemap pathing,and some of the worst AI to ever grace a professionally produced strategy game. I mean really folks, you (CA) harp on how great your in house testing and Sega testing is but yet nobody noticed the AI couldn't even commit to a sea-born invasion? Same goes for the half dozen unit selection crash bugs.

Now, I'm well aware that the previous paragraph is hardly a revelation to anyone who has followed the game but had to get it outa the way!

Whats pissing me off specifically for today is this latest set of updates from the folks in charge of ETW and more directly this post.

http://shoguntotalwar.yuku.com/sreply/744381/t/The-Daily-Update.html

Oh I'm not whining about the belief some have that they're working on "extra content" rather than fixxing major issues in the game, what I'm pissed about is that these jackanapes are calling these "free units" and treating it like they're doing something nice for us, the gamers. The only thing they're doing is releasing stuff that should have been in the game from the beginning but got left out in the rush. This is a joke. I mean whats next...they going to release the Mughals as a playable faction and claim it as a bonus also? (just fyi as surely not everyone is aware, the Mughals are almost completely done already in the existing game but its locked away.)

Its frightening as a consumer that games in such a poor state of implayability can get such high reviews from game mags and web pages, but i suppose that's what the companies like CA/Sega pay them for. You can say it doesn't happen if you want to, but long ago people notice that writers who give poor reviews on high budget games find themselves offered less opportunities to write about others in the future. Always go by the public opinions on games kids!

Hopefully one day soon legislators will step in and force gaming companies and the vendors that distribute them to accept returns on opened malfunctional materials, only then will scumbag companies be broken from the concept of cashing in on unfinished/poorly tested products with the plan to just patch everything up later.