SharkJumping

I have been working my way through Games' Age of Kings DS over the past couple of months.  It's a turn-based DS version of the successful Age of Empires series on the PC, and it's a pretty good game, except for the fact that Majesco apparently forgot to do any QA on the product, making it impossible for me to finish since the game has frozen up 3 times in the last campaign scenario.  It's bad enough that it has bugs in the middle of the game, but at least I could generally get around them enough to finish each battle, but I've now given up in absolute frustration.   Do NOT buy this game unless you feel the need to throw your DS against the wall.  Hopefully, our Tringo GBA game (published by Crave Entertainment) will be a better experience next week when it hits stores on April 24th.

So why is this a problem?  Companies release beta products all the time, including Google News and our own Meez, as they work through bugs and performance issues.  The key problem here is that Age of Kings is not free and isn't labeled BETA, as other Internet products are.  In addition, unlike the other services, there is no way to update a non-WiFi enabled DS game, except by having it replaced, which is clearly not going to happen even though this is a well known problem on Majesco's .  Finally, Majesco (COOL ticker)has been an absolute catastrophe since going public in a back-door reverse merger, going from a split-adjusted $35 two years ago to today's $1.40, and it's now trying to refocus back on portable console games, but this is only going to work if they actually do some QA on them before releasing them...