I recently picked up a copy of Mass Effect for the PC, and I have to say that it’s one of the most schizophrenic games I’ve ever played. While the game itself is fantastic in many ways, I’ve had a constant stream of logic-defying glitches that have actually made me stop playing out of frustration a few times.

I’ve come to notice that many PC games shipped these days – not just Mass Effect – tend to require one or more patches after its retail release to get it to a respectfully stable point. But because the option of updating a game after it’s released is available to developers, it seems like they often use this as an excuse to put sloppy code out to retail. “It’s playable, yeah, but we can always perfect it later!”

Not to discredit game developers, I know how much effort it takes to develop a high-end video game, especially one as large as Mass Effect. The game literally spans dozens of individual worlds, has amazing graphics, built-in physics, advanced AI, and more. So, does that mean I should expect to run into a few bugs?

I believe the answer for most gamers is “yes” – as long as they are not game-breaking bugs. But this particular game seems to be another case entirely. On more than one occasion I suddenly found my character waist-deep in the floor unable to move, attempting to shoot at an enemy who had wound up inside a giant crate, witnessing another character lazily floating across the floor, or just experiencing some completely arbitrary bug that forced me to go out of my way to figure out a way to bypass it.

Patches, then, are the solutions to these bugs – but in many cases, they’re not just small tweaks to the game. I regularly see game patches that are hundreds of megabytes in size, or even larger. This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a minor change! Shouldn’t such major problems be sorted out before a game gets published?

PC games seem to have a lot more of these problems than consoles do. Wii is currently the only game console that cannot apply a patch to a disc-based game after it is released. (Channels, Virtual Console, and WiiWare all have this capability, however.) Regular firmware updates have improved some of the core functionality of the console, but none of the actual disc game code gets changed. Yet, games released on Wii seem to have a much lower “problem rate” than PC games. In fact, I have never seen a game-breaking bug on the console.

So, why is this the case? Developers must get code correct before it’s released on Wii, there is no going back. But PC and the other two major consoles all have the capability to update their games – so this leads me to believe that developers simply aren’t as strict about the code that gets pushed to retail as they used to be, and I think that it’s an unfortunate mindset for game developers to be in.