Crappy programming

Bee

So I picked up Puzzler World 2 on Steam when it was on a ridiculous 80% off sale.  Granted I've gotten my $2 out of it just from cooling off with random crosswords, sudoku, what have you, and looking up the rather frequent Britishisms because I'm a culture geek and these guys are more stereotypically British than most of the actual Brits I've met.  Still, there's not really any excuse for this stuff...

 

- At least two of the puzzles have multiple solutions, but it checks the solution against a solution data map instead of algorithmically (which would take a damned microsecond), so only one will register.

- Extremely poor optimization in the Fitword puzzle causes the game to lock up for half a second every time you place a 3-11 letter word into a grid.

- Even worse optimization in Link-a-Pix bogs the game down just from scrolling across the puzzle field, and half the time the arrow keys don't work.

- Fuckawful interface design on the whole.  Display layering and obstruction issues.  Too many examples to list.

- One of the Steam achievements doesn't register.  At all.

- The Master-level puzzle list rubberbands upward too high to display the last two rows of puzzles, making it impossible to select them (and consequently, impossible to complete the game).

- In Sudoku, accidentally hitting the 0 key (which, mind, is right next to an oft-referenced 9) in an open square causes the entire game to shit its pants.  A 0 square cannot be erased, clicking on any other square automatically fills it with a 0 as well, and all other digit input is blocked.  This problem persists until you exit the game all the way back out to Steam and restart the program.

 

I mean...look, the developer I worked at was kind of small and had really fast development cycles too, and I've seen, fixed, and created my share of idiotic brain fart bugs.  I have sympathy for the occasional leftover ghost in the system, especially with the way recent generations have ballooned complexity to look shinier.  But these are just downright lazy, and they're the kind of thing that don't typically even make it to beta -- much less release.  The sudoku bug in particular would take all of five fucking minutes to fix; it would take longer to compile the fix than to locate and type it in.  Hell, Steam is about as patch-friendly as it gets.

Any other examples of outright bad you guys have seen in recent days?

Bastion

Sounds like they need to get with the program.

Bee

MillerCross

I say that pun deserves a C+

All Nines

Yes, yes, let's get the puns out of our systems now.

MadassAlex

^^ That was pretty sharp.

MillerCross

I'd say that one fell flat, though. Shame that you missed that beat, really.

Glowsquid

Any other examples of outright bad you guys have seen in recent days?

It's not quite as bad as the things you've listed in the OP, but there's a pretty amusing bit of derp in HAWX 2:

 

Before each missions, there's a screen showing what plane you have and its loadout, and the game tells you to press the X button to skip it and start the mission. In normal gameplay, the X button is used to fire missiles. For some reason, the developers didn't think to/care about separating the Start Mission/Fire missile functions, so each time you start a mission, the plane *always* waste a missile. It's genius.

Bastion

Oh man...along those lines, Mass Effect 3 maps so much to space bar. So whenever I try to revive someone, I end up ducking to cover or jumping over their corpse instead. ._.



As far as I can tell there's no way to change this, either.

ClockworkUniverse

I think there was some game for the NES or something that had to do with flying a plane and dodging enemy fire and stuff, where there weren't any attacks that could hit you if you were in the upper-left quadrant. So if you just weighed down the up and left buttons on the D-Pad, you would automatically win even if you just went and made a sandwich or something.

CountryPumpkin

I say that pun deserves a C+

Nah, more like a C++

Ironweaver

A simple C is good enough, IMO.

Bee

Before each missions, there's a screen showing what plane you have and its loadout, and the game tells you to press the X button to skip it and start the mission. In normal gameplay, the X button is used to fire missiles. For some reason, the developers didn't think to/care about separating the Start Mission/Fire missile functions, so each time you start a mission, the plane *always* waste a missile. It's genius.

Man, that's not even an issue of repeated mapping because you should never call onController() for more than one screen.  That sounds like they used a case statement to intercept the controller input depending on which screen is in focus, and forgot to put in a break.