When you buy a new  video game for your console, be it a Wii U, X-Box One, PS4, or PC, you expect to indulge in hours of fun game play, some cool graphics, and sometimes a really great story to boot.

However, sometimes you’ll come across those few titles, especially on PC, that don’t seem quite finished.  They are often all around unpolished, buggy, and sometimes simply unplayable.

A game will skip around during cut-scenes, character models will distort, your or NPCs will fall through the map, or even make the game unable to be finished.

Some of these are a little extreme, but they do happen.  As stated before, this happens quite a bit on PC because there a lot of indie games available through Steam (a PC game distribution software) and other such formats.

While some of these indie games are undoubtedly good, others are just plain bad.  A recent example is a game called The Slaughtering Grounds, which is available through Steam for $9.99, but is hardly close to a finished product.

While this is a regular occurrence for computer gamers, console gamers usually don’t experience this kind of thing.  For a game to get a console release, it usually has to be approved and tested to almost perfection, especially if it’s coming from a major developer, like Ubisoft or Sega.

Unfortunately, Sega and Ubisoft both released a game at around the same time with a surprising amount of problems.

Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed: Unity was released with a few graphical issues and weird NPC problems.  Many people couldn’t play on the highest settings, even if their systems or computers could handle it, and many of the NPC’s in the game would disappear and reappear at random, and sometimes have distorted faces.

Ubisoft quickly apologized, and sent out a downloadable patch to fix the problems, while also giving away the first DLC for the game for free.  Just to be sure, Ubisoft is also giving away one of their older games for free as well to anyone who bought Unity before the patch, with the list including Far Cry 4, Watch Dogs, and many more.

While Ubisoft may have messed up, they owned up to it and fixed the problem as fast as they could while trying to please their customers at the same time with free DLC and games.

Sega, on the other hand, was not so generous. With their game, Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric, they seem to have completely dropped the ball.  The game is filled with weird graphical issues (especially during cut-scenes), buggy movements, sound problems, and glitch NPC’s.  This doesn’t even include the horrible combat flow, puzzles, and overall bad story.

The Sonic franchise has been taking some bad hits over the years, but this seems to be the lowest of the low.  Even the infamous Sonic the Hedgehog released 2006 (AKA Sonic ’06), which is known for its horrid gameplay, glitches, and for being an overall bad game, is seen as a better product than Rise of Lyric.

Sega has failed to say anything about its game, and they probably never will.

These two recent examples of unfinished games show what a company should and shouldn’t do when they release an unfinished product.  In all honesty, both games should have been handled better and tested more before they were released, but it’s good for a company to own up for their mistakes and try to correct it, instead of ignore it and just move on.

Like any purchase, make sure to always research and research again.  You don’t want to be stuck with a horrible, unpolished product that you wasted sixty dollars on.