I've always liked the phrase, "You get what you pay for."  With just a few words, you are able to administer damage control over that classic situation where things just refuse to work properly.  It's rationalization, but not an unfounded one; still, every apparent truth has a few exceptions taking pot shots at its validity.

To be fair, unless you're going for promotional bundles or special editions, video games cost less now.  Anyone remember how much Donkey Kong Country cost when it first came out?  Over $80, which puts it past the $100 mark today.  Super Nintendo games had lows of $40 and highs of $80 with pre-order and promotional offers.  Years earlier, Atari games would've been between $45 to $50 by today's standards; looking at the trend in video game prices between those decades makes us glad Nintendo finally got sued for price gouging.

Consoles, on the other hand, used to cost less on average, with the Atari 2600 going for about $199 at launch, putting it somewhere between the Wii and PlayStation 3.  The NES sits below the Xbox 360 Arcade while its successor, the SNES, exceeds the Nintendo Wii by a small amount.  Intellivision would've cost around $390 today, and before you point fingers at how low Xbox 360 and PS3 prices have plummeted, try to remember that both consoles were rather pricey when first introduced to the market.

Then we can argue that video games have come a long way from the 1970s and 80s.  The Xbox 360 Pro, which most consider the standard model, was $399.99 when still named "Premium."  The PlayStation 3 started out with a retail price of $599.99, but both the 360 and PS3 have infinitely more options than any of the retro platforms.  Even the Nintendo Wii can do more. 

As games and consoles become more expensive and complex, we see more room for error, and bugs can feel like massive scars against an otherwise pristine surface.  Just look at all the fuss people are making over the 360's infamous RRoD defect and the less publicised failure rate of Sony's PlayStation 3.  And while the consoles themselves may be time bombs, even more gamers find that the actual video games cause even more grief and on a more frequent basis.  Bugs aren't exactly limited to low budget games no one has ever heard of either, and are commonly found in top tier titles like Halo 3, Gears of War, Fable II, Grand Theft Auto IV, and so on.

Halo 3 cost $30 million to produce and generated a lot of media attention at the time because of its budget.  In a developer diary entry, Peter Molyneux mentioned Fable II costing tens of millions, and let's not forget Grand Theft Auto IV's jaw-dropping $100 million estimated production budget.  Gears of War is considered low-budget with its $10 million cost, which is less than some of the Xbox 360 launch titles.  So with PC and console games going for an average retail price of $60, are we getting what we pay for?  We hope as much when going into a store to pick up a copy of such and such or pressing that "Add to Cart" button on a website.  What, exactly, do we expect when a purchase is made?  Hours of quality entertainment, the blood and sweat of talented artists, writers and programmers.  I won't pretend I understand how tough it must be to produce a game within a certain time frame and budget, as my knowledge is better suited for the first two previously mentioned teams.  Programmers have my deepest admiration for all that they can do, which is why I have never been one to complain when a glitch forces me to reload.  And I've never run into any debilitating bug until these recent years, at which point I take to Google in hopes of finding some solution.  Solutions are elusive, and I found instead a myriad of problems reported by hundreds if gamers across the United States -- nevermind the rest of the world.

Some games, like in Halo and Gears of War, give us humorous fan-made videos of glitches being put to good use.  We saw Warthogs flying across maps, bouncing around like a man on the moon, and Emergence Holes became portals into another world -- a blue void, to be exact.  Knights of the Old Republic II and Oblivion exploits allowed gamers to make easy money by means of "duping."  Then we have annoying bugs, when quest progression is halted or a game becomes virtually unplayable because some NPC or mob refuses to even appear.  Even worse is when developers decide manual in-game saves are no longer necessary and utilize automatic checkpoints, so when a problem does arise, there's no way to backtrack. 

Two examples currently stand out in the forefront -- Mass Effect and Fable II.

PC gamers who played BioWare's sci-fi RPG will argue the PC version is mostly bug-free, but how does that excuse the various issues still present in the 360 version?  NPCs or enemies sometimes required to complete quests have been known to vanish, and allies often get themselves stuck in a corner or behind a support beam, unable to rejoin you until you rezone or reload.  Enemy snipers can sometimes shoot through your cover, but your allies need to be positioned more precisly to hit them.  In Fable II, NPC behavior can be so erratic that you need to find some roundabout way of dealing with them.  Merchants will sometimes stop selling items despite a flourishing economy, enemies may register as friendly targets, your dog can get stuck in bodies of water when he suddenly forgets how to climb stairs, and locked doors won't open even after you've completed the most annoyingly complex puzzle to access them (thank goodness for that reload option).  There's minor bugs too, like glitched quests that stay in your quest log forever.

Services like Xbox LIVE presents some hope that these bugs will be fixed over time, but we see developers less diligent about patches as they're contracted to work on the next big thing so that older titles are put on the back burner.  So are gamers supposed to just deal with it?  Buying games then becomes a cycle of pay and pray, which seems terribly unfortunate and wrong to me.  And if nothing else, I love Valve for removing that apprehension with regular fixes.  Ideally, we'll begin seeing other companies following their example, even for the games without an expansive multiplayer aspect.