I haven't had the pleasure personally; but I suspect that the difference(aside from whatever call-center-like workplace hell policies they have) is that productive testing means focusing most intensely on the parts that are broken or suck, while ignoring or skimming through as fast as possible the good and working stuff; while repetitive gaming (while often inscrutable to those less interested) focuses on the most pleasurable parts of the game, while speeding through or skipping the boring ones(in games with mod support this is especially evident if you look at the various mods that skip certain sections of the game or speed up crafting or leveling or the like, the distribution and popularity of these tell you a lot about what parts of the game people want to avoid on replay).

AMD theoretically has parts that target reasonably similar power envelopes (lower-powered 'Kabini' APUs, 'Temash' APUs, and 'Mullins' APUs, go here and play with the wattage filter if you want the actual model-number-soup); but design wins appear to be..sparse...at best.

Zotac put an A6-1450 into a little fanless desktop/HTPC thing; but AMD parts seem to be damn rare outside cheap desktops and the churn of big-n'-awful 15ish inch Best Buy shelfwarmer laptops.

I'm not familiar enough with the benchmarks, and definitely not familiar enough with what OEMs actually pay, to say how much of this is due to objective inferiority, and how much is due to Intel's rather 'generous' pricing of their low-end, low-TDP parts to break into the tablet game.

Compared with something like the J1900 ('Bay Trail' celeron ~10w) the A6-1450 can hold its own, and likely has a punchier GPU; but reports are that Intel is practically giving Bay Trails away, while AMD just doesn't have anything that matches Haswell parts.

Do any laptops count as 'investments'? I'm pretty sure I've had some toner cartridges last longer than some laptops.

The one nice thing about the crap that Lenovo sells is that it (only sometimes, not always, alas) provides them with space to express their bad ideas without fucking up the Thinkpad line.

They can make all the freakjobs and plastic toys they want; but if the day comes when I can't get a decent thinkpad it's going to be very, very, bad.

It doesn't help now that 'brands' aren't just a sticker on the box. They increasingly (getting to the 'alarmingly frequently' and likely heading toward the dystopian future of 'forever, across every platform!') also tell you what (terrible) online 'service' you'll have to create an account for and what god-awful launcher/store/spyware/'social' clusterfuck you'll be forced to install.

If it were just about the label on the box, I'd be cautious about EA, and really cautious about Ubisoft; but hey, if the reviews end up actually being good, or a friend recommends it, or even if it initially sucked but was patched back to health, I'd be willing to agree that they've done better than usual and give it a try.

Now that everyone wants to have their own distribution platform and monetize the social friendscape and so on, though, that's less of an option. Ubisoft game that looks interesting? Well, "U-Play" sure as hell doesn't. No sale.

I'd certainly only want the ones who appear to have grown out of illicitly releasing games into the underground(or, at very least, agreeing only to release other people's games, not the one that they are working on); but aside from that little issue, "Voluntarily grovelled through game binaries and assets stripping out DRM and poking various things in exchange for nothing more than amusement and possible recognition" sounds like a pretty promising set of qualifications.

Going by the reviews, it looks like they shot the initial release to hell; but apparently fixed it by the time I noticed and purchased it. Still looks pretty retro on my giant modern pretty-screen; but no less stable now than it was back in the day(which, admittedly, wasn't perfect).

But, but, what about the Exclusive Pre Order Bonus Content!?

The QA peons can make all the sad mouth-noises they want, to no effect; but "We released the latest iteration of one of our hot franchises and our stock dipped 12%" probably made it up to HQ...

The ghastly plague of pre-orders certainly feeds the cynical pump 'n dump of lousy, unfinished, games; but I'd be interested to know how the incentives for fixing work out:

Can you reverse the plunge of a really buggy launch by fixing it? If so, how quickly and how completely do you have to have a fix in place?

Is a bad launch effectively irreversible; but a solid patching effort can make a substantial difference in 'second-run' sales in the $20-$30 versions and 'Gold' re-release-with-DLC versions?

Is the game effectively tainted permanently; but 'they fucked up; but then they eventually fixed it' a memory more likely to get you to pre-order the sequel than 'they fucked up, then did nothing'?

Ideally, of course, they'd fix it because it's the right thing to do (and some of the humans involved in the game's production might even feel that way); but I doubt that the publisher, as a corporate colony organism, gives a damn about that, so it'd be interesting to know where the money is when it comes to fixing or not fixing a game.

I'd still be annoyed at having to re-buy it because the CD and all the patches didn't work correctly; but (as someone who lost their CD fair and square, by good old fashioned incompetence and disorganization on my part rather than theirs) I think it's fair to note that GoG thankfully has this one, and it was worth my $6.

Let's put it this way: When a game doesn't suck publishers generally don't embargo reviews until 12 hours after release...

Even games that end up releasing in pretty dubious shape often manage to score fairly positive pre-launch press through some combination of assurances that 'those little issues won't be in the final version, just see the promise!' and the degree to which the reviewer depends on the goodwill of the publisher for future access, so if reviewers aren't allowed to talk about it even after it is on the shelves, you might want to run away. Maybe pick it up for $20 a year from now, if they actually do fix it.

The difference is obviously academic if nobody actually does it; but do the various auto-updaters of today attempt to resist, by some DRMish means, archiving of updates as they are received, such that you could either do an offline 'replay' of each update against a retail copy, or preserve a final working version(depending on whether updates are delivered as replacements or as deltas)?

I assume that consoles do, if only because consoles are extremely touchy by nature about anything going in or out(aside from maybe DLNA streaming and such) without being explicitly blessed; but I don't know about the PC side. Have updaters been sucked in to the wonderful world of DRM, or are they still mostly an honest-if-sometimes-incompetent download and patch utility?

I suspect that this was not the cause of the failure to find the raging pile of bugs in the PS4 and XBox One versions, since there isn't much hardware variation among released models.

Much more plausible (if still an example of terrible testing practice) with any bugs in the PC version that can be linked to a specific GPU driver version or the like. Even there, though, PC gamers(of the type interested in new-release action games) may not have the newest hardware; but tend to be fairly good about updating GPU drivers and DirectX runtimes.

It might not work in young children (see also 'congenital insensitivity to pain' and the unpleasant self-inflicted/accidental injuries that children with it wrack up); but as a now more or less mentally competent adult I'd really be in favor of replacing pain with something more informative and less painful. Maybe SNMP.