We all know Shigeru Miyamoto's increasingly-quoted theory about the video game development process by now ("A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever."), but some developers apparently need to hear it again.  After all, it's seemingly far too common for some development teams to cut out swaths of content just to get a game into stores by a certain date.  A Kombo reader is sounding off and citing examples about gutting games in the ongoing Your Turn series of reader-written editorials.

Take Mass Effect, for example, and let me state beforehand that I did love the game. If you go back and watch pre-release footage of that game, you'll see pause and squad features that are no longer there, and there was a 3D galaxy map. Maybe the pause and squad features were removed for good reasons, but a 3D galaxy Map seems completely aesthetic and time management related. If you need more convincing that Mass Effect was shipped too early drive, your Mako around for a while, or try to find Batarians without downloading something. Mass Effect isn't the only game like this, although I would say it's at the forefront. Army of Two was just released with what seems like at least half a mission blatantly missing. Again, I loved the game but why did a helicopter come pick up Eisenhower when I was so specifically told to escort him along a dangerous road? Even if they removed that part of the game because it wasn't fun, the FMV still wasn't changed to match it.

A few other obvious instances of content removed for the sake of hitting a deadline: the missing dungeons in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker in which some of the types of treasures and artifacts that are traditionally held at the end of a long dungeon are simply handed over without any expended effort, Super Mario Sunshine's loose ends and rough edges, and if you really want to reach back there's always the whole debacle that split Sonic the Hedgehog 3 into two parts cobbled together with lock-on technology. 

I can't believe that the editorialist managed to get away with this line in regards to Army of Two: "[T]he tampon first-aid mini-game was taken out for gameplay flow[.]"