Video Games That Have Never Been QA'd

Vicki and I have been playing through a PS/2 game Tammy gave her about a year ago, called Neopets: The Darkest Faerie. It's similar enough to other games we've enjoyed, like Ratchet & Clank, and Baldur's Gate, to hold some minor appeal for me. And of course it's Neopets, which means Vicki's into it (she spends at least an hour a day playing Neopets games on her PC). But I swear this game must never have spent 5 minutes in any sort of Quality Assurance lab!

Not only did it lock up on us at one point, which is unusual for PS/2 games (at least in our experience) but it has a much more annoying problem that is omnipresent and therefore impossible for any qualified QA tester to ever miss: the point-of-view mechanics of the game. When you're swiveling the POV thumbstick, the game will often abruptly switch it to a different view, completely disorienting you as you try to get your bearings. Or it'll suddenly show you the view as it would be if you were inside the nearby wall! Worse still, if you're attempting to follow some sort of path, such as staying with the right hand wall in order to get through a maze, the same thing will happen and you end up going in the wrong direction because you didn't notice that it turned you around unexpectedly!

And then there are the scenes where you have to do some complicated sequence of actions, such as: walk along a narrow plank below which lurks certain death, and then jump onto a trampoline to bounce up onto a ledge from which you have to swing across another chasm or else plummet to your doom. In the middle of which: the damn POV takes on a life of its own and turns you this way and that, all at the worst possible moment! Since Vicki's not good at the whole jumping and swinging aspect of video games (never has been, and I'm starting think, never will be), these sorts of tests always fall to me. While Vicki sympathizes with my frustrations - and worries that I'm going to throw the controller through a window - it's generally me that feels the pain.

Last night may've spelled the end of our involvement with this video game, though. The part we got to, in Act 4, combined a series of jumping and swinging challenges, each of which was timed, and with no save point between successfully finishing one and starting the next! After more than an hour of sweating and cursing, and being in the fourth (and who knows if it was the final) such challenge, we got to a point where you have to jump off this high trampoline either onto a rope line or onto a far distant ledge... My theory was that it was the rope line I was supposed to go for, except that each time I was in the air I couldn't see the rope because the POV would switch away from it! Vicki's theory was that I should go for the ledge, but it seemed like I always came up just a few inches short of reaching it. Finally we gave up, losing all of the progress we'd made on the first three challenges because of the lack of a save point!

As I say, we may've played our last of that game!