In this new generation of consoles, patches have become the norm. Our consoles get patches and updates, as do our games. The majority of times they add a lot of new features and also fix bugs and glitches.

If you’re a PlayStation 3 owner the 2.40 system update would have been the biggest of the lot. It offered a lot of things we were asking for, with an in-game XMB, in-game music and trophies to compete with the Xbox 360’s achievements. It was an exciting one that would improve the PS3’s functionality and perhaps extend the longevity of some games. However, for the unlucky among us it turned out to be one of the worst updates available. Reports began to trickle around the web that the update was ‘bricking’ consoles, rendering hard drives useless. Mine was working fine so I guessed I was one of the lucky ones… until, the next day I turn my PS3 on to be greeted with a message proclaiming that my hard drive needs to be rebuilt. With only one option available I click ‘ok’, this takes me to another screen which tells that doing so will format my hard drive; obviously I don’t want to do that so I press ‘no’. By this point I was pretty confused. My PS3 restarted up fine, until I opened up my profile to find everything gone: no more videos, music, game saves, demos, downloadable titles. Nothing.

Sony had stabbed me in the chest. A year’s worth of gameplay all down the drain, as the big update I was looking forward to ended up killing my hard drive. Luckily now it’s all been sorted out; I have a working system again and I’ve re-downloaded all the stuff I had purchased before, just means I have to start all my games over from scratch. It does beg the question: how did they let something like this happen? It’s a big update so you would imagine they would test everything and make sure it was perfect before releasing it, but that’s where patches and updates cause problems. Developers, and companies like Sony, know that they can release something that may not be up to scratch because they can just patch it later on. It might screw some people over, but in the long run it doesn’t matter too much. Team Fortress 2 is a good example of something that had some major problems at release, but a patch rectified that. If this was a couple of years ago the game would have been screwed.

It’s sad that games riddled with problems can be released and patched later on. The public want a game that works from the get-go, not a couple weeks down the line. Of course you can look on the other side and see how patches are a good thing. For example, in sports games you can get roster updates so you can always keep up to date with all the latest player movement. Then we also have new features being incorporated into games months after release, like Uncharted recently being given trophy support; that’s something that can enhance the game for some people, and it wasn’t something that needed to be fixed.

In the long run I feel that developers really need to spend more time at the testing stage, especially for something like a system update. Apparently the PS3’s latest update has also been ‘bricking’ consoles, so they obviously haven’t learned. I’m now wary of downloading them straight away, I’ll often wait a couple days to make sure there are no major problems, and that’s a shame. Hopefully Microsoft invest some more time in their big ‘Xbox 360 reinvented’ update that is supposed to hit in Autumn, since it’s a pretty big deal.