39. "I am truly heartily sick and tired of endless patches to the engine being the norm in the gaming industry."

Yes, that's another thing. Who the hell oversees beta-testing? What are they doing, buying a bunch of the same computers & simply testing game play? I think every developer compnay should have a beta-testing room which is updated occasionally to reflect the systems that are out there in the real world (different mainboards, processors, video cards, harddrives, everything). Then don't ask their beta-testers to play it, they can play it when its done like everyone else. Tell them to break it. Ask them to jump into corners, hit ALT-Space-B-z-p, drive a vehicle into spawn point, change video modes while in the game, alt-tab, play with a joystick, no mouse, a tracball. Break that fucking game in as many ways as you can & discover bugs before it hits the streets.

Sometimes a game will come out & you'll play it & wonder what the fuck the beta-testers were thinking. Jedi Knight Outcast had the lamest fucking puzzles ever. You'd end up running around for an hour wondering what the fuck the developer wanted you to do. For a whole 1/4 of the game you didn't even have force powers. Now Academy is out & the fun is back in. But how come those sissy little bitch beta testers didn't do their jobs and speak up? I wrote Raven & they told me to do a review of the levels, tell me what I liked & didn't. Why didn't the beta testers tell them what was wrong?

I tell you, the gaming industry is getting sloppy. How would you like to go to get a computer chair and it wasn't there? Then when it does show up, it doesn't have one of the arms. I think the gaming industry needs a wakeup call & I believe that the gamers are going to revolt with a boycott against a big title & damage a company financially to send out a message. Something's going to happen sometime, and I'm not talking about hacker idiots either, but that's part of it too. People are getting fed up with shotty, sloppy work. It's starting to show from the players themselves.