I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, because it just tickles me pink. If you were paying attention to PC gaming in 2005 then you’ll probably remember Deep Shadows’ spectacularly open-ended FPS,
Boiling Point. It remains one of my favourite games of all time, partly because it was an astonishingly ambitious game of the kind I can’t seem to get enough of, and partly because it it was an accidental surrealist masterpiece of outlandish bugs and terrible production. Few games were as weirdly broken as Boiling Point, and there were plenty of commentators who came away with
wry smiles and
unhappy brains as a result.
It’s worth remembering, before we continue, that Boiling Point’s first patch had one of the most interesting bug lists of all time:
- fixed: the snake wasn’t able to bite you while you were crawling;
- fixed: size of the moon;
- fixed: posters in bar vanish as you turn away from them;
- fixed: dog does not cast shadows;
- fixed: a metal clanking sound plays, if the user’s character stabs the curtains;
- fixed: jaguar floats across screen at treetop level;
- fixed: npc die on contact with grenades, and not from the actual explosion
