Friday, December 6, 2013

If it's broke, don't fix it

As I mentioned before, I'm playing through Sonic Generations for the first time, and yesterday I had a go at the most elusive achievement on the PC version: Time Attacker. For those not in the know, to get it you simply have to complete every stage once in the Ranking Attack mode - which essentially means infinite time and infinite lives. Should be a piece of cake, right? Well... for PS3 and 360 players it is. Too bad Ranking Attack is a broken mess on PC (which, remember, is a straight port of the 360 version), with random crashes that range from "every now and then" to "all the fucking time".

I experienced one such crash after completing Sky Sanctuary act 1, and after that whenever I'd enter the Ranking Attack menu the game would crash the moment I pressed any button (meaning I couldn't play any level at all). In desperation I turned to Google to see if there was a way around... and fortunately there was. You simply have to select 30-Second Trial, then mess around at the level selection screen a bit, then go back, then choose Ranking Attack, and you should be good to go. My first reaction was, HOW THE FUCK DOES THIS EVEN WORK? If anyone has any notions of programming, please explain this to me, because it makes absolutely no sense. Then I decided, screw it, I'll try it anyway, it can't hurt, and I was able to play the rest of the stages this way. Only problem: I could not so much as go over Sky Sanctuary act 1 on the menu, otherwise the game would crash. So this particular stage is apparently forever off-limits in Ranking Attack for me. Not that it matters, all I cared about was the achievement, and I got it.

As I said before, this is the rarest achievement on the PC version due to these crashing shenanigans. Even less people have it than the apparently impossible (I say apparently because I'm not that far into the game) no-hit Time Eater fight. So apparently my ability to use Google to my advantage makes me a Sonic Generations master. Funny how that works. Also funny how Sega never ever cared to fix that broken mess. It's like they just said, "let's rush a PC version, it'll keep the so-called master race happy".

2 comments:

  1. I have some experience in programming, but all I can tell you is that bugs manifest in mysterious ways. Half the time, the coders themselves won't know why something is happening, and tracing a bug back to the source is a long and tedious job. Programming is a delicate process that needs to be divided up into as many small pieces of a whole as possible, with each piece being tested thoroughly, and even then bugs are common and expected.

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  2. I'm a programmer and that's the weirdest freaking thing I ever heard (I could probably think of a bug that's weirder, but nothing comes to mind at the moment).

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