SingStar dev sorry for catastrophe patch

SingStar game director Dave Ranyard has apologised to fans of Sony's multi-million-selling karaoke series who have had to put up with the fallout of a disastrous patch.

Writing on the European PlayStation blog, Ranyard revealed that "several serious bugs" slipped through the "normally rigorous" testing procedure before update 4.2 was released.

These included "SingStore songs being deleted from the hard drive", "Game crashing in the middle of a song" and "Media file corruption". Whoops! Not what you want after eight pints.

"As soon as we were aware of these issues, the senior SingStar development team came together and have been working flat out to fix these issues with the aim of getting a patch out as soon as possible," Ranyard explained.

Apparently software update 4.3 has an estimated release date of 1st December, which is also my birthday (all presents and karaoke patches gratefully received).

Ranyard also reassured gamers that anyone who had a song deleted would be able to re-download it as soon as the next patch comes out, if they haven't been able to do so in the meantime.

"Whilst this has been a really unfortunate experience both for me, my team and especially for you, the positive side of this story is that we have now put in place several steps to ensure that this does not happen again, including a more vigorous QA period and, starting next year, a Closed Beta where SingStar fans will be able to experience new features before they are released," Ranyard concluded.