If a terrible game stopped working at level 30, thereby stranding players in a level limbo, barring them from reaching the remaining 70 levels no matter what they tried, would anybody care?
You tell me. In what is surely one of the biggest gaming gaffs ever by a developer, the boss from level 30 of Taito’s Bubble Bobble Revolution calls it in instead of showing up to do battle with the player, leaving the hapless hero stuck. This defect is present in every cartridge Taito shipped to North America
Said Taito: “We have already started the process whereby a corrected version is to be manufactured and will ensure that all customers have their copies replaced. Unfortunately this will take 8-10 weeks (simply because of the time required to manufacture new carts). We will update you with what you will need to do to get a replacement game, as soon as this has been determined.”
Hmm, I think that in 8-10 weeks I’ll be too busy with something else to care (to care even less than I do right now).
Sorry to post in such a wierd place, but what happened to the design a new layout competition?
That's too bad… I loved BB for the NES.
So, I take it that their testing didn't even involve playing the game through once?
This isn't the only case of a buggy game making it out the door that was impossible to win.* Wasn't it the first Gran Turismo that had a bug that made it impossible to unlock everything? Of course, the game had so much content that it COULD be considered understandable….* The first release of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past had a bug that could potentially make it impossible to solve the fourth dungeon — the player could potentially use all his keys and be unable to acquire another. The bug, if I understood it correctly, involved players being able to reach an unlocked door by using boots and the feather to do a long-jump over water that was just possible to make. (I ran into this one myself, but level 4 isn't *that* far into the game, and if one knew about the bug it was easy to avoid.)* My favorite (read, least favorite, because I was personally bitten by it) example was in DMA Design's (later known as Rockstar) Space Station Silicon Valley, which was an awfully cool little game that, unfortunately, it was impossible to get the best ending in because one of the levels had a trophy that was impossible to obtain. That's very bad because NO ONE could win the game, yet the game was short enough that testers should have been able to go the whole way through.Bubble Bubble Revolution's the worst shipping bug in memory, though.
(In the Zelda description, I meant to say: to reach a LOCKED door. Argh.)
This bug could be bypassed by an AR DS.