Saboteur Launch Plagued By Problems With ATI Cards 230
An anonymous reader writes "So far, there are over 35 pages of people posting about why EA released Pandemic Studios' final game, Saboteur, to first the EU on December 4th and then, after knowing full well it did not work properly, to the Americas on December 8th. They have been promising to work on a patch that is apparently now in the QA stage of testing. It is not a small bug; rather, if you have an ATI video card and either Windows 7 or Windows Vista, the majority (90%) of users have the game crash after the title screen. Since the marketshare for ATI is nearly equal to that of Nvidia, and the ATI logo is adorning the front page of the Saboteur website, it seems like quite a large mistake to release the game in its current state."
Saboteur, hey? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Saboteur, hey? (Score:5, Insightful)
It seemed that I was not alone either. Unfortunately, the games industry is being pushed by customer demand and sabotaged by shrinking budgets from the corporate side. In the end the only thing that can be cut from the budget is QA, which is a fatal mistake.
Worse still is places where you cannot return your product. Talk about non efficate product.
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Re:Saboteur, hey? (Score:5, Funny)
Try Costco. They'll take back Windows 3.1 and give you a full refund.
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They can have my Windows 3.1 when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers!
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C:\> echo You silly kids and your modern toys!
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In contrast, there was no refund when my bro bought a legit copy of Ultima Collection, Ultima 2 (and I believe some others) didn't work. And he bought it twice - one from overseas just in case it was just a dud. And no
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Good luck enforcing said laws when you're up against a faceless corporation that can drag you out in court.
Re:Saboteur, hey? (Score:5, Insightful)
For all that "the industry is being pushed", it's not ALWAYS the game developers' fault. For a "real" game (ie "not a crappy movie tie-in generic copypaste with new art") you can easily go through dozens of driver revisions during years of development, all of which work fine, and then have a new set come out after you ship the master which suddenly doesn't work with your game.
ATI, much though I love their hardware, border on completely indifferent to driver bugs, and nvidia aren't really that much better. Unless your game is a "showpiece" for their hardware, they simply don't care if something doesn't work the way it's supposed to or even has catastrophic errors in it. Case in point, every ATI driver release from April through OCTOBER this year *hemorrhaged* memory if you used VBOs a certain way. 6 months to fix a bug that critical is pretty miserable.
Yes, modern graphics drivers are horrifically complex, but still...
Sometimes it works the other way too. There's a tiny little bug in Quake3 that can make an invalid GL call at times: it "worked" for 7 years because the drivers gracefully ignored it, then suddenly started to cause *massive* slowdowns on nvidia cards (from 400+ fps to 100). Technically, it's id's "fault", but it's pretty hard to blame them for it - or to blame nvidia for the drivers going into Sulk Mode, since it IS an invalid call.
That's an extreme example, but the point is that you're dependent on drivers that you don't "own" for your game to work, they frequently don't, and you've got no control over them at all.
If you're id / Epic / Valve, and pushing a AAA title that will prompt players to upgrade their cards, you can doubtless get someone at the IHV to look into the problems. If you're at a company like Pandemic that basically folded before even finishing the game, good luck with that even if you actually have any developers left to try to get a fix or hack up a workaround if a driver rev pulls the rug out from under you.
Of course, the developers COULD have been so completely half-assed that they didn't run a single build on an ATI card, in which case they should indeed be beaten to death with cluebats. :P
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There's a tiny little bug in Quake3 that can make an invalid GL call at times: it "worked" for 7 years because the drivers gracefully ignored it, then suddenly started to cause *massive* slowdowns on nvidia cards (from 400+ fps to 100). Technically, it's id's "fault", but it's pretty hard to blame them for it - or to blame nvidia for the drivers going into Sulk Mode, since it IS an invalid call.
I totally agree with your post, but I have to play devil's advocate for a bit here: if they detect Quake3 and work around the bug this way, someone will post a story about how NVIDIA cheating in Q3 benchmarks, because if you rename quake.exe to quack.exe the FPS drops from 400 to 100. So either way, they can't win - someone will always complain. I used to write D3D and OGL drivers for a living (not for ATI or NVIDIA, no threats please!), so I'm all too familiar with these issues...
In this case, Q3 is fairly
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Of course, the developers COULD have been so completely half-assed that they didn't run a single build on an ATI card, in which case they should indeed be beaten to death with cluebats. :P
Lets not forget "We're still working on that nasty ATI bug." "I don't care, we have a deadline. The GM needs to be on my desk by noon so it'll be at the duplicators on Monday."
Re:Saboteur, hey? (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, the games industry is being pushed by customer demand and sabotaged by shrinking budgets from the corporate side.
Definitely no.
I worked for the video game industry, and this has nothing to do with QA or anything...
The period of the year when the games sell well is Christmas.
But selling your game at Christmas means that the game MUST be ready by the end of September.
If you miss September, you can say goodbye to make money with your game (especially if it's crappy).
There is also a small period at the beginning of January: parents gave money to their children, and the children tend to buy games.
In general, the company does not care if the game is ready for launch or not, because it does not want to miss the launch date, so the game is sold in the state it is in September.
Also, the company believes that a patch will be available by December and won't affect most of the customers, since the game is scheduled to be played after the Christmas sales.
Only the early customers will discover the problem.
Note also that when a crappy game is published, the company behind the game does not send the game to the magazines, since it does not want to ruin its Christmas sales.
QA has probably found the problem before September, but the marketing department told that the game must be available whatever the circumstances are.
So, instead of blaming QA or developers, blame the marketing department instead !
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But...but...(lips trembling)...but I thought we were the wild?
/** runs sobbing **/
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Yup, me too. My general rule is six months, in fact. I just bought Fallout 3 GOTY, for example.
NWN is an awesome game, but I can understand why someone who got the original buggy release returned it.
I'm especially leery of Bioware first releases, especially because of NWN...it's why I'm waiting to buy Dragon Age for another few months.
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That used to be the case, but now since they have bulit in storage, they can patch them too. That's also encouraging developers to ship now and patch later even on the consolesm and I'm not happy about that.
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"Me too." but I always went one step further and switched to using my Mac laptop all the time (except when I'm at work; we do .NET and Silverlight software).
I've still got a (shrinking) cache of games that I need to BootCamp to finish, but I've sworn off buying PC games. Dragon Age is tempting me, but I imagine we'll get a Mac port in a year or so. :-\
Whenever I boot into XP to play one of these older games (all circa 2006 or earlier, I think), I get to waste some of my rare gaming time installing updates.
That's no promotion, it's a warning label (Score:2)
Like the surgeon general of gaming telling you to stay away if you have ATI...
I tested Saboteur (Score:5, Interesting)
I tested Saboteur across all platforms and, of all the titles I tested, the Pandemic devs were more open to fix issues than any development studio i've had experience with. Unfortunately the 360 and PS3 versions were much more thoroughly tested (we're talking a few weeks a piece). This was because 4 days into Saboteur PC testing (of which 4 of 5 testing stations were nVidia, btw) EA (the publisher and last end-tester before final submission) laid off 2000 people, which included almost all North American testers (essentially cutting the amount of testers globally by half).
The bottom line is this: the company's agenda is to release the product on a set day, and regardless of the quality of the product it WILL be out that day. You may see street dates pushed ahead a few months in advance but people test until a week or two until it hits the shelf, and if issues arise during the final hour most times the bugs will be swept under the table until one day they may get patched (if enough people bitch). It's sad that first day patches are not only considered acceptable, but are the norm these days.
Re:I tested Saboteur (Score:5, Insightful)
This is exactly the problem and I don't blame you for posting anonymously. Every single EA game I have owned after a certain point shipped with horrible bugs. Things that you could have caught in testing after about an hour of play time. Game stopping bugs. Only to be fixed a MONTH later when I shelved the game or had taken it back and swore off EA. It's getting harder and harder to avoid their games, though, since they keep buying out good ideas and then turning them to shit.
You know, EA, games take a while to develop. If you don't have the resources, time, or patience to deal with it, you're welcome to go eat a bowl of dicks. I'm tired of promising games being snatched up by EA, only to have them lay everyone off at the last minute and skip testing. They've done this with pretty much every single game, even their successful ones.
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EA is well known for forcing game developers to release Beta and even Alpha quality software as final.
Another thing EA is well known for is the, after release, quick redirection of resources from bug-fixing/patching to making (paid for) expansions.
I strongly suspect that EA's recent "downsizing" simply exacerbated the negative-effects of their usual pattern of behavior.
As long as people keep buying their games, EA will keep doing the same thing again and again and people will keep getting shafted.
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I learned this probably 7-8 years ago. If it's stamped EA, I don't buy it. Period. In fact, I don't even pirate it.
I've got no interest in supporting companies who produce crap products. While this has seriously cut down on the mainstream titles I play, I spend less money and buy more games. There are plenty of fun little games from small publishers who do a good job, polish their game, and support it. Those are the folks who get my money now.
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This is of course because all the biggest game publishers are now public companies with shareholders who DEMAND profit on a set schedule promised in advance and written in blood at midnight in a graveyard.
Thou SHALL release SOMETHING on release date! Or else the exec board gets axed.
There are marketing campaigns to think about, magazine ad placements, store displays, mass production and packaging, huge trailer loads of the stuff shipped to Walmart alone. All of this stuff is planned out before the game is
"EA released Pandemic Studios' final game" (Score:3, Insightful)
The studio is being retired; there's no value in having the product work at launch. If it takes them a month to get the patch out, so be it, people will blame (the now defunct) Pandemic, and people will continue to buy EA games. If they ever revive the Pandemic name (why? what notable titles have they made? Dark Rein comes to mind, if only because my buddy was obsessed with Dark Rein 2 for so long in high school) nobody will remember this flop in 5-10 years time. The only flop anyone ever remembers is Duke Nukem Forever. I doubt most geeks could tell you the name of the rouge iD developer who made his own FPS (which failed miserably), or what the name of his game was. In two years nobody will remember the "Pandemic studios Pandemic of 2009".
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People won't blame Pandemic, they'll blame EA. But what chance do we have of boycotting EA for it's well-known and shitty practices? Seems like 90% of all big name games come out from them. Perhaps the various Departments of Labor should look into how they treat their staff? Finish this project, lay everyone off, skimp on pay, hours, blacklist people, contract violations, etc.
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Hey, there are people who think Daikatana was rather good...
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Yup, like Penny-Arcade
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/11/22/ [penny-arcade.com]
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The studio is being retired; there's no value in having the product work at launch. If it takes them a month to get the patch out, so be it, people will blame (the now defunct) Pandemic, and people will continue to buy EA games
There's definitely value in having the product work at launch - if there wasn't value in that, why develop the game at all? EA has spent most of the title's budget by now - now is the time to get income. Looking at EA's results, that income is sorely needed too.
And of course, I
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For God's sake, don't give them any ideas!
Re:"EA released Pandemic Studios' final game" (Score:4, Informative)
If they ever revive the Pandemic name (why? what notable titles have they made?
Battlezone 2. Though that franchise seems to be long forgotten (which is a pity... it was a very interesting genre).
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I doubt most geeks could tell you the name of the rouge iD developer who made his own FPS (which failed miserably), or what the name of his game was.
I "remember" John Romero and Daikatana, and I wasn't even aware of the PC games scene when it was current news.
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I "remember" John Romero and Daikatana, and I wasn't even aware of the PC games scene when it was current news.
That's because John Romero made you his bitch. Duh.
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Ditto, but the game was also released on the N64.
Problem with Sabateur, with DirectX, or with ATI? (Score:2)
Wasn't that the exact experience with GTA SA? (Score:4, Interesting)
I friend of mine bought it, back then. And it hat not one, not two, not three, but four points in the loading of the game, where it could crash. Which means that pretty much everyone got into one.
And then, on all nVidia cards, all triangles were messed up. With one of the 3 points of each triangle being wayy off in its position, moving all over the screen. Like a ton of spikes.
There was not a single comment from Rockstar. Let alone a patch.
And now for the funny part: I loaded it of bittorrent, and as always, I went to gamecopyworld.com, to look for a crack.
They not only had more than one working crack. No. They hay patches for every single of those four crash points, *and* the nVidia bug!
I couldn’t hold back to laugh at him. ^^
With GTA 4 it was not much better. Right from the start, the input lag was around 3 seconds! The intro was full of weird graphical errors. And the game still runs slow as hell, even on computers that have the power to run a game with those weak graphics and physics twice or thrice!
18 fps at 1024x786 with a Radeon 4850? Are you fuckin’ kiddin’ me??
Because most gamers have zero awareness (Score:4, Insightful)
...about the games they're going to spend money on, and then find out too late that it has problems (ie, after they've paid for it).
Gamers need to get over that urgent, gripping need they have to rush out and buy a new game the second it is released. They've become too complacent and accustomed to game developers not releasing demos, and - sadly - this has become the status quo. Instead of a demo being something that absolutely has to happen before people even glance at your game, publishers have figured out that they can release some PRs, screenshots, and trailers, and slap anything in a box and it will /still/ sell enough to justify doing it that way.
Once they've gotten your money, it's basically too late (unless you have the energy to go and demand a refund).
BE A DISCRIMINATING GAMER. Read reviews. Try demos, and if they don't have one post on their forums asking where their demo is. Check out their forums and see what people are complaining about. It's all about knowledge.
Further, anyone that has touched an EA game in the last 10 years should know by now that they make games based on a deadline. Unless a game is catastrophically not ready, then it will be shipped and shelved, and any problems will get fixed later (maybe). They make a lot of great games, but a good rule of thumb is to only buy them after it's been out for a month and they've fixed all the critical bugs (a good rule for PC games in general).
Note: I'm not trying to justify shitty development practices. Far from it. I'm trying to make sure people understand the most effective way to vote on this stuff is with their feet - don't buy broken video games.
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My habit is to wait at least six months after launch, the games are cheaper, the bugs will be well known and most importantly if a Publisher hasn't released a patch by then they never will.
I recently bought Mirrors Edge and Far Cry 2 for the PS3 brand new for £5 each the Internet told me neither was particularly great but at £5.....
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My habit is to wait at least six months after launch, the games are cheaper, the bugs will be well known and most importantly if a Publisher hasn't released a patch by then they never will.
Also excellent advice generally - living 6-12 months behind the latest and greatest will save you a ton of money on hardware.
The only time it's not great is for games that are primarily multiplayer in nature. Unless they're exceptional (and few are), the multiplayer is often much less viable after 6-12 months, simply because people have moved on to other games.
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It was easy, in days gone by, to try demos before you bought games, but these days you're lucky to get a demo at all, let alone one that's available before the game is actually released.
Add to that the fact that if there is a demo available prior to release then unless it's on Steam you're usually stuck between buying a magazine with a coverdisc containing the demo or queuing for hours on one of the many slow and difficult to navigate download sites (Fileplanet and the like).
The only demos I've played in re
Temporary workaround (Score:2)
The game is playable (low FPS) with ATI cards if you revert the processor to single core, either through task manager / process affinity, or right at boot with (e.g.) the msconfig utility.
Of course, you're better off exercising some patience and waiting until a proper fix comes out than running with a crippled game. The game isn't exactly *gorgeous*, but running at 800X600 and all settings at minimum is a surefire way to sabotage the experience
Proper blame? (Score:2)
Has anyone even considered the possibility that the blame here lies with Microsoft or ATI? It bothers me how most Windows users blame an application when a library or driver is at fault. Just because only one app crashes doesn't mean that app is broken. If MS says some_rare_function() works, and it really causes one game to crash on particular systems, that's MS's fault.
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I've never had any luck with Nvidia hardware. I even had one card overheat and burn out the motherboard it was installed to.
besides this isn't a video card issue this should have been discovered within two minutes of Q&A testing. I guess they just skipped the Q&A
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I've been using nVidia hardware since the GeForce 2.
I've had zero problems, and the models I buy have been one of "PNY" "OCZ" and "BFG"
The 3-letter acronym is a coincidence, I have to say I never went for a particular brand but went for what I was looking for at a sale price at the given time.
Inversely, whenever I have tried ATI, I've had nothing but issues. You can blame drivers, but I even have issues using the GPL 2D driver. I personally think ATI graphics hardware just plain sucks, but remember that is
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er, to clarify since i bring up the GPL driver... I'm talking about Windows primarily, but used that as an example of why I don't think it is entirely the driver's fault.
I've had a few (very minor, very few) niggles on Linux, but not in a long while (at least a year now).
My current hardware is a 9800 GTX+. I can't remember the vendor, though. Either PNY or BFG... fairly certain it's PNY.
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I'll chime in on nVidia's side. Been using them ever since I switched to Linux, and thanks to their 100% consistent, solid Linux support since like 2000 or something, I will almost certainly never switch away. Out of the probably more than a dozen nVidia cards I've had, each one has worked flawlessly with great 3D in Linux and Windows alike.
In contrast to that, my friend who used to be an ATI fanboy had nothing but issues with both the open source and the ATI-provided Linux drivers until like 2006, when he
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I will. I keep up to date with it whenever I need to buy a graphics card.
Nvidia just came out with vdpau which will keep my media computer with them for some time to come but my computer and my wifes are always up for grabs.
That said, I probably not would run out and buy a new card I didn't need. It would determine my next purchase, though.
Last I saw, I only noticed solid development on the old cards. While this would not be a deal breaker it would be something I would consider.
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Funny you should bring up driver quality; the latest nVidia driver update for my Win7 laptop (9600M GS) broke suspend (to RAM) and an older one (for a Vista laptop, 7600 GO) broke hibernate. I'm used to this kind of garbage with proprietary drivers on Linux, but on Windows I really expect better.
Furthermore, during Vista's beta period, ATI already had solid, functional, stable, and fast drivers. By comparison, at least for the GeForce 7600 GO in my older laptop, it was some 6 months after Vista RTM before I
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So you're modifying INF files to install drivers when the drivers would otherwise not install for your card. Now you have issues and blame Nvidia?
Blame the vendor of your laptop for not giving you updated drivers.
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I use ATI cards since Mach64 was introduced, with some short detours to Nvidia, 3dfx, and PowerVR. I was even an early adopter of the ATI Rage Fury and I never had a single problem with ATI drivers. Never ever.
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Note that I didn't have many issues with their discrete graphics cards under Windows and Linux but that was before I used
Re:This is where consoles win (Score:5, Insightful)
From a non-biased GAMER who's still sees both sides, I would say consoles (as an experience) today suck!
Consoles today are basically the worst of the PC world and the worst of the old console world.
Consoles used to be about highly polished games that the developers (not the artists & marketing) put a lot of work into. Now a days with the net connection, most games deliver as betas (like the PCs), and then after 2 updates become... ok. The graphics are better, but the controls, storylines, action, and overall game play has gone down the crapper. We have games that are cross platform on the PSP, Xbox360, and PS3! So those games basically cater to the lowest common denominator of all three and not take advantage of any specifics. Xbox360 ports to the PS3 look like crap (I am looking at you EA)!
The worst of the console world... the price tag. Cause its on a "console," there is a huge upfront price tag. And with the net connection, you get the rest of the game delivered via additional charges! There is also the bombardment of marketing (which I think is the major reason for the price tags) that drone on and on about the latest upcoming game that is either a sequel or must have new concept. Which of course rarely lives up to the hype. Not to mention, we mostly lose that big benefit of consoles... local coop play. With the net, every bloody stupid game wants you to connect to some random 12 year old to play what should be local coop, or a rip off of counterstrike.
All consoles today are: locked down, controlled, 2 year old proprietary hardware... PCs! The only advantage is the massive number of games made for it (cause its a great way to lock in customers).
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Luckily there are not only some good console games still being released, but there's also little hassle generally with running older games.
But nice to see that some other people also see roots of the problems (on both consoles and PCs...) in similar way to mine. Unfortunately I almost lost hope for the situation to improve, with so many people simply pointing fingers at "teh evil consoles". It's almost like publishers are playing them, with convenient scapegoat that people swallow, not seeing incompetence a
Re:This is where consoles win (Score:4, Insightful)
I've got a bunch of old N64 and SNES cart (yes, spot the fanboy*) but why I cant play these in my Wii. Yet I can play Mean streets and Martian Memorandum on my new gaming PC. Not a problem via DOSBOX, I can also run Half Life 1 and System Shock 2 without a problem on XP.
* - Yes I still have an N64 and SNES, although the SNES was not my first one.
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There's a lot of games that can't be run on DOSbox (well, perhaps on a ridiculously overpowered PC), don't run well on modern OSes and look much better with 3D acceleration (meaning VMs aren't optimal). The only way to sensibly play them is to maintain some old machine...
HL1 is not a typical game. SS2 does have problems on current OSes/GFX drivers.
Consoles...yeah, you must also "maintain" some old one, but if one breaks another is easy to find for the time window I'm talking about.
Re:This is where consoles win (Score:4, Informative)
There's a lot of games that can't be run on DOSbox...
And there are a lot of games that CAN be run on a modern system. Just for a laugh, I tried one of the oldest games taht I could find in my collection under Windows 7 (beta). It is Microsoft Fury 3 [wikipedia.org], released in 1995 (before the N64). It played perfectly! The game never came with an option to change the resolution of the game, so it looked better when playing it in a window rather than full screen.
I have tried some older ones under DOSBox before, but they were non-action ones so they didn't really stress the system. So at least you have SOME chance that a game that old will play on a new PC system.
Also, it should be pointed out to the GP that you can still play some old SNES and N64 games on the Wii using Virtual Console [wikipedia.org]. But this requires that you buy the games again, which annoys me when I still have the original in my hands. At least there is no hassle having to transfer the games from the old catridges.
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Well...yes, that's what I'm talking about. Some games have problems, some don't; and you're on your own to waste time figuring this out if it's a less popular one.
Consoles OTOH...every game works with compatible system. Every TV has required input. And...that's pretty much it.
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Yes, and if console makers started using similar architectures between console generations and abstracting the hardware, you could stop having to maintain your old consoles when you upgrade.
Why aren't we writing letters demanding this?
It's the one advantage PC gaming offers.
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SS2 runs fine on current OSes. [winehq.org]
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Yeah, keep telling that to yourself...
Console games almost never had any kind of expansions (the few instances were more or less separate, full games). OTOH expanding the gameplay/story/etc. of a game is a concept that has a long tradition on the PC.
What does it matter that the pricing structure changed? It's a case of publisher, not platform.
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Ok, so you go on to bitch about poor game quality on consoles. Ok, you have a point; it's just ironic that you're making that point in a comment thread on an article about a shit quality PC game.
This happens on both sides of the fence, friend. Are you sure you haven't gained maybe just a little bias and not realized it?
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Yes, but on your console, your AV and all the shit it doesn't notice, are all running in the background, degrading your performance.
Plus, we're ignoring that some games are actually better with a controller and, unless you have the specific controller the game was designed around, you're not getting the optimal experience.
There are arguments on both sides, but I still see more weight behind arguments for console gaming.
Re:This is where consoles don't win (Score:5, Insightful)
This is offset by PC games being cheaper to buy. A$10 cheaper in fact. Lets look at Modern Warfare 2 shall we, Xbox 36 = A$119 [ebgames.com.au], PS3 = A$119 [ebgames.com.au],PC = A$99 [ebgames.com.au]. OK that's A$20 dollars cheaper but I'll argue at A$10 because I'm nice.
I buy two games a month, that's A$540 off the cost of my A$2000 gaming rig over two years. So that reduces the cost of the rig to A$1460. The cost of a PS3 is still $600, a new HDTV is A$1000. The price of a PS3 when I built my gaming rig in Feb was A$999. A$2000 is a top of the line gaming rig, Phenom II 955BE with a Geforce 985
This is of course ignoring digital distribution. I can pick up steam and Impulse games for A$50 easily.
Beyond price there's usefulness. After the Xbox 360 is superseded the Xbox 360 is useless, my PC can be re-rolled into a word processing/email machine.
There's also the question of graphics, As FarCry 2 proved the PC is still the superior graphics machine. I also get flash games for free, a superior control system, cheaper add-on packs and strategy games. In fact I just bought the latest add-on for Sins of a Solar Empire for US$10.
PC gaming is only more expensive for those who do not know the real costs.
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But you pay full price for the console, right?
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I said PC gaming sucked.
I said console gaming was too expensive.
Further, once the x-Box 360 is discontinued, I'm fairly sure all the old games will still play and it won't magically stop begin able to stream and play video across the LAN. Media center PC, anyone?
Certainly not useless.
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How sad that you got modded troll when what you say is true.
I've been playing The Saboteur on my XBox for a week now without any problems, despite being a PC gamer for years I switched to the 360 in 2006 and have never looked back. The key drivers have been no fucking around with drivers and stuff to make things even work, and also no real serious issues with cheating. Sure you get people exploit game glitches but at least there are no aimbots, radar or anything stupid and game destroying like that.
I have t
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Contrary to popular belief amongst PC gamers, FPS and even RTS games are just as fun with console controls
You say that as if PC gamers hold those beliefs mistakenly and have never actually tried it.
I have. It isn't fun. For instance, Halo 2 only became fun for me after I bought a SmartJoy Frag (keyboard+mouse adapter for Xbox), and even then, it wasn't as fun as Halo 1 was on PC.
In terms of RTS games I complete C&C3 and RA3 on hardest difficulty on the 360 no problem and find no issue playing online either.
Playing online against other console players, right?
Ever wonder why games that are released on both console and PC rarely have cross-platform multiplayer?
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"You say that as if PC gamers hold those beliefs mistakenly and have never actually tried it."
You say that as if I wasn't a PC gamer who knows first hand that if you give it a chance and get used to the controller just like you had to with mouse and keyboard originally then there is absolutely no issue. This is mirrored by the fact there are so many console players playing online now, enough to dwarf the PC playing population in just about every dual platform multiplayer game- because it's just not a proble
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You say that as if I wasn't a PC gamer who knows first hand that if you give it a chance and get used to the controller just like you had to with mouse and keyboard originally then there is absolutely no issue.
Believe me, I've spent as much time with the gamepad as it took me to get used to the mouse and keyboard, and I'm not alone. The gamepad still feels like playing in quicksand.
Maybe you're an exception. Or maybe you were just never very good with the mouse and keyboard, so you don't notice a difference.
This is mirrored by the fact there are so many console players playing online now, enough to dwarf the PC playing population in just about every dual platform multiplayer game- because it's just not a problem, or at very least not enough of a problem to be unable to outweigh the rampant cheating issue on the PC.
The reason it's "just not a problem" is that they all have the same handicap.
And don't kid yourself about "rampant cheating". Few people choose consoles because of cheating; they do it because they want to pla
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"Believe me, I've spent as much time with the gamepad as it took me to get used to the mouse and keyboard, and I'm not alone. The gamepad still feels like playing in quicksand.
Maybe you're an exception. Or maybe you were just never very good with the mouse and keyboard, so you don't notice a difference."
On the contrary, I'm far from the exception, as I pointed out, multiplayer PC gamers are by far a minority nowadays like for like.
"The reason it's "just not a problem" is that they all have the same handicap
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Games released on console and PC rarely have CPMP because console users would rage every time some aimbot-wielding PC gamer cheated their way to the top.
Why this doesn't seem to bother most PC gamers is beyond me. All I can think of is, maybe, they all use aimbots and hacks like a bunch of "daddy, don't take off my training wheels" assholes.
I know, personally, when I did play a few games on the PC, I stayed away from bots and hacks because they took away from the experience of kicking your pansy ass with my
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Even better, modern consoles support keyboard and mouse, for those who just can't wrap their head (or hands) around using a controller for an FPS or RTS.
The problem is that not all (as in very few) developers bother to code it into their games; which is sad, especially for games being released on both sides of the fence. If you're coding it in on one side, why take the time to rip that code out on the other?
Start writing angry letters to game developers and demand keyboard and mouse support in your console
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Mods are fine, but you know what happens. Some folks buy games, mod them and then play that game pretty much exclusively and buy no other games for 5 years. Game developers make no money from those people.
Besides, there comes a point when there's plenty of content in the main game itself and that it doesn't "need" mods to extend gameplay. Sure, a competitve FPS can use more maps, but really, how much more stuff does Fallout 3 and Oblivion need. I put 189 hours into Fallout 3 and still didn't go everywhe
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Further that by emphasizing the fact that lack of custom maps has nothing to do with consoles and everything to do with developers not coding it in.
Once developers start including (or offering as a download) map editors for consoles, that will be a moot point.
Mods, though? Really? Mods? Seriously? Ok, some of them have been pretty damn good, but yeah, it's unlikely that developers will ever allow them on consoles, for precisely the reasons you state.
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You might want to brush up on the design goals of DX10, IIRC the only real graphical improvement was something to do with shadows (blame
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I never mentioned the PS3.
I never mentioned DX10.
I did, however, state, that a common architecture and hardware abstraction layer between console generations would alleviate the backwards compatibility issue.
I never said this had already been done.
That's what's insightful about my post and trollish about yours; though it seems you were successful in turning the tides against me this time, I've got karma to burn so I can afford to speak both the truth and my honest opinion.
How's your karma lately?
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Yes and no...
You're more specifically talking about PC-style FPS games and strategies, with PC-style game mechanics and UIs - one which revolve around pointing at things.
There are different game mechanics possible...though not used for the most part because of hybridization of gaming market brought mostly by Microsoft - since devtools, code, assets are almost the same it's "sensible" for publishers to create hybrid kind of games, not exploiting the strengths of both platforms.
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Yes, that's what sets a First Person Shooter is.
I remember playing GoldenEye on the N64, a decent enough game but not equal to Half Life in any way. It had the option to turn auto aim off and it quickly became impossible to play on the easiest settings. It did make for an interesting multi player match though, lasted 5 times as long because no one
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Yes, that's what sets a First Person Shooter is.
No.
Descent 3 is also regarded as FPS game. Yet it doesn't use pointing mechanics (as a matter of fact, there was a clone of it for PS1; DualShock worked beautifully). For another example - there were melee combat FPS games for PC. But it's hard to argue that such game with Wii-like control wouldn't be great (well, assuming the game generally is ok...). Another example are lightgun games - totally different kind of "pointing", also FPS (yes, there are lightgun games which aren't on rails)
GoldenEye is exactly
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Yes, that's how primitive* PC trends are destroying good console gaming for some time.
*walking, inherently a 2D thing, in a 3D game? (oh, right, the simplistic control scheme can't handle more, not efficiently) Game mechanics determined by showing off shiny GFX and players falling to it?
(yes, such pointless "argument" can go both ways)
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Yes, that's how primitive* PC trends are destroying good console gaming for some time.
*walking, inherently a 2D thing, in a 3D game?
How primitive indeed! Ever since I realized we live in a 3D universe, I've only traveled by jet pack and pogo stick. Why let that third dimension go to waste by walking or driving around in 2D?
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Super Mario Galaxy?
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Indeed, the daily experience, which is the simplest to emulate and apparently the only acceptable to PC players, happens on more or less 2S plane.
Gamers on other platforms can handle more than mimicking daily activities, though.
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Sony does, though it's up to the developer if they implement it. Surprisingly, more PS2 FPS's than PS3 FPS's support mouse aiming, and one such game, Deus Ex, does not mention such support anywhere on the box or in the manual. One good thing is that any game that uses the PS3's on screen keyboard for entering text (like Oblivion does for naming spells and items) also supports USB (or bluetooth) keyboard input.
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Your first point is a problem with software, not hardware, which occurs on both sides of the fence.
As for your second point, modern consoles (PS3, X_Box 360, hell even the PS2) support a keyboard and mouse. A standard keyboard and mouse, like you use on your computer. Try using one sometime; if your game supports it, it's just like playing on a PC, only faster and smoother since you don't have your AV and all the stuff it didn't catch running in the background and the game was designed for that system. If i
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Did I say consoles never have these issues? Nope.
Sorry to burn your strawman at the stake.
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A game I worked on that was released in March was developed on XP-32. All the workstations at my new job are brand new Vista-64 machines.
I think it's more of a case of not wanting to change the version of Windows running on the dev machines mid-project, or even at all.
QA should have tried it on Vista / ATI though, so despite the possibility of the Saboteur devs not being on Vista themselves this should have been noticed.
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I'm not blaming QA btw, it's just as likely that they did find the bug but it was swept under the rug due to being "a crash that affects a small minority of customers and would be very difficult to fix" by people in charge.
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29% to 63% *of Steam users*
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Your *last* ATI card was designed seven years ago, and was a budget card with no T&L unit so how exactly could you claim you have relevant experience? I ran an ATI 8500, and then an Nvidia 6600GT, and had the following problems with both cards:
ATI 8500:
Battlefield 1942 flickering textures. Never resolved fully (but it happened less and less with newer drivers).
And unlike you, I had no issues playing Wolfenstein on my 8500.
Nvidia 6600GT:
Water shaders incorrectly rendered in Source Engine [thetechlounge.com]. This bug wa