MSN put together a list of the ten most broken games at launch, and reading it felt like flipping through a photo album of my own worst launch nights. Broken launches aren't new, but the modern version, the always-online server meltdown, hits different than the old cartridge days.

Back then a broken game was just broken. You popped in a glitchy cart, shrugged, and played it anyway because no patch was coming, ever. I remember renting NES games that froze if you looked at them wrong, and that was just life. Now we get day-one patches, which means studios can ship first and apologize later, and the MSN list is basically a hall of fame for that approach.

Halo: The Master Chief Collection deserves its spot near the top. That November 2014 launch was rough in a way that still stings. The campaigns mostly worked, but the multiplayer, the entire reason a lot of us bought an Xbox One that holiday, sat in matchmaking limbo for weeks. The fixes took a long time coming, and I know people who never came back to it.

Destiny's early days get a mention too, and that one's more disconnects and error codes with cute names than outright brokenness. Baboon. Beaver. You'd memorize a small zoo of error codes just trying to finish a strike. And yet the gunplay carried it, which is the pattern with a lot of these: great game underneath, terrible launch on top.

The usual suspects round out the territory. Unoptimized PC ports that chug on hardware triple the recommended specs. Server queues on launch day longer than a Final Fantasy XII hunts list. Live-service games that buckle the moment too many people show up at once.

What gets me about the full list is how forgiving we've become. Twenty years ago a game either worked or it didn't, and the ones that didn't died at retail. Today a rocky launch is practically a genre convention, and publishers budget for it. Pre-load servers, staggered early access, the whole rollout choreography exists because everyone involved assumes day one will catch fire.

It doesn't have to be this way, and the games that launch clean prove it. But as long as launch-week sales charts reward shipping over stability, we'll keep updating this list every fall.

If there's a lesson in it for players, it's the one I keep repeating: never pre-order the thing you can't return. Wait 48 hours. Let somebody else be the beta tester. Your backlog won't mind.