OMAHA, Neb. — A local gamer is begrudgingly tolerating a frustrating bug because he does not want to lose the progress he has made since his last save, sources confirm.
“See? About half the time I press the ‘A’ button in dialog or menus, it doesn’t register,” said Phillip Mack, who was playing “Knights of the Manderline,” a new action-RPG. “And sometimes, it’s just delayed, so I’ll press it again and accidentally skip through important dialog or use an item when I just wanted to read its description. It’s so annoying. Unfortunately, I haven’t saved in, like, three hours, and I put in some work, man.”
“I am not going to re-do all of that just because of some tedious little issue like—fuck!” continued Mack. “I just insulted an NPC because I selected a dialog option when I thought I was just clicking through his line. He was important, too. Now that whole faction is going to be hostile to me.”
Mack’s wife, Christine, noted that this kind of behavior is typical of him.
“Oh, you mean the guy who didn’t transfer to his dream college on a full scholarship because they were going to make him retake a single core course?” said Christine. “You say that he won’t replay part of a game? Wow, I never would have expected that of the man who baked me a birthday cake with no eggs because he didn’t want to go back to the grocery store. If you think I’m making this up, just ask Katie, the woman he really loves. Too bad he met her after he started dating me, and couldn’t be bothered to start over.”
Singular Refraction, the developer of “Knights of the Manderline,” said they were familiar with the bug that was plaguing Mack.
“Oh, yeah, the ‘A’-button thing,” said Ron Lambert, a lead developer at Singular Refraction. “That goes way back. It’s ancient. QA pointed it out during the beta. People are always asking us to fix it. Thing is, it’s trickier than they think. The code that the bug comes from touches just about everything in the game. We’d have to rewrite so much of the game if we really wanted to sort that out, and frankly, we’d rather not. It would be a whole thing, you know?”
At press time, Mack had decided to revert to his previous save, only to accidentally overwrite it by pressing the “A”-button too many times while trying to load it.
