XEON,

I fully respect your opinion, ofcourse, but I think it's the whole "patching is a way of life" mindset that's going to kill off the PC industry before too much longer.

Once again, bugs due to weird hardware combinations, bad drivers, or whatever, no problem. The developers can't test everything, so I can live with those.

But GAME bugs are a big fat no no in my book. If your Q&A department didn't pick those up, then fire the morons and hire some DECENT testers. But because there is a prevalent attitude of "oh well, we can always patch it anyways", why would publishers and developers BOTHER to even playtest anything anymore anyways? (that's a lot of any's..)
Heck, put it on the shelves, listen to gamers flame your ass off for two weeks, rush together a few patches that fix most of the grievious errors and tadaah, you've saved yourself the cost of an actually effective Q&A department.

Call me nuts, but it wouldn't surprise me if this is how it's actually starting to work with some of these developers / publishers.

Oh, and patching for the Xbox? Ofcourse there's going to be patches for it, you didn't think that Microsoft could actually make like a TOOTHPICK without it having bugs, right?

But that is a scary thought, yes. Now with consoles having access to the 'Net, beware of patches for the consoles too. After all "nothing can be programmed without bugs!"
(Funny how not so long ago most console games COULD be, but apparently soon not anymore).

Creston