0verflow has posted a letter of apology on its website for the buggy release of Summer Days. I am one of those who bought the game. Gao. Here’s the full translation:
We would like to express our gratitude for your support of our company’s products.
Our company released the PC Windows game “Summer Days” on 23rd June 2006 (Heisei 18). We have determined that the game contains files that were not meant to be in the final product.
A portion of the data needed to play “Summer Days” in the production disc is of an older version number. We have determined that this causes various errors during gameplay, such as problems with voice overs and scene display and inability to proceed through certain game routes. This is due to a mix up between the master data and some old data, which we failed to notice when we shipped the product. As such, a huge portion of the master data has been overwritten by older data and it is taking us some time to get everything back and to release the correction patches. There was a huge confusion in the company between the time we detected this mistake and when we finally determined the amount of data overwritten, and this slowed down our response. We sincerely apologize to everyone who has purchased the game.
Currently, we are mailing out DVD containing the patch to everyone who has contacted us through e-mail and phone and also to those who have mailed us the feedback card included in the game box. At the same time, we are distrubuting the patch through our BitTorrent server and various mirror sites. Patch DVDs will also be prepared for stores to distribute and will be ready sometime between the 29th of June and the 2nd of July.
We plan to send the complete and fixed master disc, as soon as it’s ready, to everyone who has registered through the feedback card.
We sincerely apologize for all the troubles we have caused for our customers and distributors. We strive to improve our company’s management structure to ensure that such an incident will never happen again. We seek your kind understanding.
28th June Heisei 18
0verflow
I’m not sure if I buy the reason given here. Even if it were true, the damage has already been done. Well but I guess we can be certain that they won’t repeat this again.
so like ur gonna get the fixed master disc or you’re just leaving the way it is and get the patch?
Well, the official website has the patch, and it is….dum, dum, dum…1.5 gigs!!!
But there are several patches there (Ver.1.03 I think is the latest one, am I right)?…Which one We should get?
I guess using a notepad for ur production control system isn’t a good idea after all.
On another note, many game companies are much less apologetic over buggy software.
On another another note, H-Games lack innovation to the Nth degree and shouldn’t have these kind of bugs.
well moetics, this eroge uses a system that plays the game like a fully animeted movie up to a point where people believe your watching an anime, where it stops at critical junctures for you to choose your path.
I know exactly how it plays, that’s not really all that complex in the programming realm of things. The artists are great, the the mechanism powering it is just a video player with some overlays. This is nowhere near the scope of other PC games. This game’s codebase is far more trivial than say Utawarerumono or any of Illusion’s games.
The bugs they describe don’t deal with amazing technical hurdles of complex 3D engines, AI, scripting logic, but rather version control. Hence it’s less acceptable.
moetics >> Don’t play it then. Play Rapelay.
Well, they fixed it. They’ll send the patch disc to those who required it. They apologized.
With that said, let’s play!
I never said it couldn’t be fun (I don’t like any of Illusion’s games either). Just that it’s simple to code and it’s silly to have these kind of issues. :p
Things like this make me feel as if I can pass off as an ero-game programmer in Japan. Awesome!
hmph.
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They already made the 1.05 version and it’s functioning perfectly, i got it here (downloaded) an it’s working.
And for the ones who plan to have it, unfortunatly there isn’t and probably won’t be any subtitle so start learning japanese.
Hajimemashite, Sayounara.^^
I wonder why it contains files that are not meant to be there? Is that a joke? This is serious. Surely they would have checked the final product before releasing them in bulk. So do the patches work fine for you?