Being able to patch console games seems to have produced a climate of "meet the deadline and ship the features later".

Maybe giving consoles a hard drive and an Internet connection wasn't such a great idea after all. :-)

I know what you mean. Just like Madden NFL 09 when I had to wait ages for them to patch it (twice). It is infuriating when they ship a game without features and then patch them later, but at least Fable 2 is getting patched straight away rather than waiting what seems like an eternity.

Couldn't agree more.

I play console and PC and I always rated consoles for the knwing that the game will work without loads of patches etc. Now though HD's are allowing games companies the ability to hoist their unfinished products on us.

To any game developers reading this 'DON'T RELEASE UNFINISHED PRODUCTS'

I know what you mean, but it shouldn't get as bad as PC gaming where my limited (and short) experience showed me that to play a game, you need to work out how to fix a game. Looking up patches and amending directories or whatever it was, might be part of the fun for some PC gamers but a console crashing game would be suicidally stupid for a publisher to put out.

Hopefully most will only use the opportunity properly, to expand and refine over an extended lifetime, games that were released un-delayed, with the core elements working properly, because time could be pulled form things that could be added later to sort the fundamentals of the game.

However, it’s more likely the magic X-mas deadline will prevent this being the case. So which game, this X-mas do you think will be the biggest crasher, or need the most patches?

I understand the fustration but have you ever noticed how small and quick the updates actually are? They don't take ages and forever they are very quick, much quicker than PC patches and updates.