Why must games crash?
Monday, November 10th, 2008It has been a long time since the days of Windows 98. While the famous “Blue Screen of Death” was a common occurrence for users of that operating system, most of our readers have probably only seen a handful of full-blown computer crashes in say, the past year.
Unfortunately, while Microsoft operating system stability has improved by leaps and bounds since the 90’s, the same can not really be said for the games that run on Microsoft operating systems. At least these days when a game crashes, you generally only need to restart the game, not the whole computer. But many PC games, even the very high profile big budget titles, still crash with distressing regularity.
For a recent example, look at Fallout 3, a game that has sold a lot of copies and received a huge amount of press. The latest patch supposedly fixed several crashes related to alt-tabbing behavior and updating the game. I did not experience these crashes. I have however had a steam specific problem: unless I disable the steam “in-game” client, Fallout 3 crashes immediately at startup, every time. This is obviously not an issue that affects every player, or it would have been fixed by now. Still, it is an issue that affects me, and it is quite annoying - when I play TF2, I really want to have the Steam in game options, so I have to enable / disable this feature every time I want to switch between games.
