Friday, August 9, 2013

Injustice is relatively broken

at 3:13 PM
This seems like a lame thing to say, but Injustice: Gods Among Us has some really fucking terrible bugs. Every time I think I've seen the game crash for the last time, something else goes wrong. For a game with otherwise such high production quality, in three weeks it has crashed more times than any other 360 game I have ever owned.

Here's the thing. Random crashes, freezes, framerate drops, and glitches are pretty annoying. Some games have more than others (Western RPGs, PC games, and ports, I'm staring +5 ice daggers at you), but they happen, then they go away. For instance, I don't hold it particularly against XCOM: Enemy Unknown that at least a half dozen times over the course of the game, enemies spawned on top of one of my units, or something randomly exploded on the battlefield. I quickly learned to save often - when I reloaded, the glitchy behavior wouldn't repeat. It was an annoyance, and maybe it took me out of the game a tiny bit, but whatever. Injustice has this kind of bug - sometimes it takes for-fucking-ever to load the character select screen, or a special effect won't show up. Oh well. That's not what makes me call it broken.

It's that Injustice has widely reported errors that 100% prevent the game from running. From loading beyond even the title screen. It sat on my shelf untouched for three days; each day, I would get home from work, boot it up, wait until it froze at some point before the title screen, restart the Xbox, give it like three more tries, then give up. This is a brand new disc (though I keep all of my discs in sparkling condition, and how dare you insinuate otherwise), so there's no questioning that it's a software issue. Eventually some research online revealed that clearing the game's local cache could fix this problem, and so far it has. Still, it really burns me that I spent $60 on something that completely ceased all functionality after just a few days. No other game I have ever bought, used or new, 1986 or 2013, has done that.

And that was just the FIRST problem. The game has crashed three other times, not reproduceably, but simply while trying to start an offline story, arcade, or versus match. What the hell is this? How often am I to expect these crashes, if I've experienced so many (and a repeating problem) in three weeks? What happened here? Netherrealm or Warner Bros. really dropped the ball on testing. And this is without even mentioning that the game slows to a crawl (essentially hangs) every time the Xbox OS tries to pop up a message during a fight (e.g. for an Achievement or a Notification). I hardly even want to know what it must be to play like online, or if you're one of those people that have friend notifications popping up all the time.

This isn't exactly a "spreading the word" post or even a caution against Injustice. More just bitching. But seriously, what the fuck?

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