There's a whole separate post just waiting to happen about how games by their very nature can never achieve perfection but further discussion of that topic isn't really appropriate in this context.
I mention it here because the pursuit of perfection despite its practical impossibility is something worthy of note.
"Orion: Dino Beatdown" (ODB) :) is a game that's far from perfect. It started its public life earlier this year with an initial shipping version that contained a slew of game-crippiling bugs that plagued almost every system in it from multiplayer server browsing to audio to AI to the fact that the game wouldn't even run on computers using 32-bit versions of "Windows."
In short, it was a mess and the reviews and reactions of media outlets and consumers alike reflected that. For a lot of games, the story would end there but then something happened. Representatives from the development team (Spiral Game Studios) including its president took to the game's "Steam" forum and tried to make things right.
Of course, the internet being the internet, this was met with all-too-typical levels of skepticism and angst but after a patch and a few hotfixes that addressed some of the issues, things settled down as everyone still interested in the game waited for the remaining bugs to be squashed.
During this time, I was actually able to play the game quite extensively with several friends and frankly had a blast with it. It was buggy and not particularly deep from a gameplay perspective, but running around killing dinosaurs while using jetpacks and automatic weapons was (and still is) fun.
Weeks turned into months as the developer kept setting and breaking release dates for additional patches and over those months the game's "Steam" forum turned into a bit of a cat fight between those holding out hope that the developer would eventually deliver what they were promising (bug fixes and new free content) and those convinced that the devs were in fact dark minions sent straight from the bowels of Hades to take their money and leave them crying in their beer (or more-likely cereal given the level of discourse I observed from many of the participants).
The latest round of drama climaxed earlier this week when the "Title Update 001" patch for ODB finally hit "Steam" and basically delivered on most of what the developers had been promising.
Is it perfect? No. Did it revolutionize the game and make it orders of magnitude better than it was? Not really. Did it add some new content? Yes. Did it address the key problems that were preventing some folks from even playing the game? Apparently, yes. Having never had much trouble getting ODB running myself, I can only comment based on feedback I've seen in the forums, which would seem to indicate that it is now working for those with 32-bit "Windows."
So, what we now have is a decent game that basically works for anyone who's interested in playing it and is closer to living up to the potential of its premise than ever before but we're not quite done yet.
You see, as you might have asserted from the name of the recently-released patch, more patching and content updates are planned for ODB and the developers are insistent that said updates will come much faster than "Title Update 001" did.
So, the questions you might be asking yourself could well be: Is this game worth buying if I don't already own it? Or, if I do already own it, is it worthy of another look based on the most-recent patch? Fortunately for you, I made a video commentary on it that will hopefully give you some idea of whether or not ODB is right for you.
To sum things up. ODB is not a perfect game. It's not even close to being perfect; however, in my opinion it is a fun game that is only getting better with age due to some pretty serious post-release support. Who knows? After another patch or two, it might even be worthy of a "Shout Out." :)
Orion: Dino Beatdown (via Steam)
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