I’ve just uninstalled FarCry without completing it. The portion of it I played was excellent, and when it ran, it was fine on my mid-range PC. But I got one-two-punched, and that’s my limit.
Since the beginning, I have been a fan of PC games -- even when my “PC” was an Apple //e, and the game was Zork or Karateka. When other people got into their Famicom and Genesis consoles, those platforms seemed simplistic and childish in comparison to the devastating power of my 64kRAM machine with all the buttons anyone could want on a keyboard. Jump forward a little further, and actual IBM PC type games continued to trounce console games, first with adventure games, then with higher resolution graphics, improved sound, online play, 3D visuals -- the PC had always seemed to be the obvious place to be for the best experience.
When I left my beloved Mac environment and bought a Windows PC for the purpose of maintaining seamless compatibility with my work environment, a wide range of PC games opened up; this was just prior to the Playstation revolution, and PC games were at their peak. A huge volume of games, varying widely in quality not just of gameplay and graphics, but in engineering and ease-of-access were suddenly waiting to be played. I enjoyed installing and playing and uninstalling a number of current and classic games under Windows 95, and nothing ever cropped up needing special attention.
One day, after having the computer over a year, I tried to install Halflife. After the game had installed itself and, if I recall correctly, the then-current DirectX suite, it told me that my hardware drivers for my graphic card were not current, and needed to be updated. It provided a URL, at which I found a link to my card manufacturer’s site, where I then was able to download new drivers (over 14.4k dialup). I’d never touched ANY of my machine’s hardware drivers previously, and had the jitters as it installed, and I waited for it to reboot, thinking it was going to give me a screen of static crap. When it rebooted without incident I literally breathed a sigh of relief. The game ran fine, I played it all the way through, fastidiously avoiding installation of any additional patches or drivers.
Cut forward to FarCry: The copy protection on the game was incompatible with both of my internal DVD drives, so I had to install it via a USB 1.1 connected external CD-R/RW drive. This game comes on either 4 or 5 discs, so this took over a ½-an-hour to install. The 10 or so hours of gameplay I had were excellent. I wanted to try the online component, so I installed the 1.1 patch and went through the registration at the Ubisoft site, entered my CD-KEY before being able to access the server browser, and rolled around for awhile. Everyone was jumpy-popping-vibrating in place in-game, and it was hard to get a draw on them. When the 1.2 patch came out after significant delays, I installed it immediately. A couple of days later, that patch was recalled. I hadn’t saved the 1.1 patch when the 1.2 patch was released, and strangely so had a number of download sites; they simply offered NO patch, rather than the older 1.1 patch. The official recommendation was to roll back to 1.1, which I assume means to install 1.1 over 1.2, and hope that it takes hold.
In my case, this meant finding one of the sites that still had the 1.1 patch, installing it, and booting the game only to find that all of my Save Game files would no longer load. Then I tried multiplayer, where it loaded, but dropped me back to desktop after the level-loading-bar had reached completion. I didn’t feel like re-installing it via the external CD-R drive again, freeing up the precious 1/8 of my HDD at home, only to fill it up again with a game that I would need to re-play for several hours just to catch up to where I’d left off. To me, right now, this defines the world of PC gaming. There are two games in every instance, one where the consumer plays the game that they bought, and a meta-game where the consumer tries to figure out how to play the game they bought, based on troubles with the software itself or the OS or the hardware.
Then there’s console gaming. Plug the console into a TV, drop in a disc, and in a couple of minutes the game is in play. Saving consists of files on a Memory Card (or HDD with X-Box), and the only way to screw them up is to do something the game tells you not to do; contrast this with my lost games due to doing that which was recommended. If I could get used to playing FPS’s with a game controller instead of a mouse, I’d be in pig heaven.
This is the way that entertainment should work.
Since the beginning, I have been a fan of PC games -- even when my “PC” was an Apple //e, and the game was Zork or Karateka. When other people got into their Famicom and Genesis consoles, those platforms seemed simplistic and childish in comparison to the devastating power of my 64kRAM machine with all the buttons anyone could want on a keyboard. Jump forward a little further, and actual IBM PC type games continued to trounce console games, first with adventure games, then with higher resolution graphics, improved sound, online play, 3D visuals -- the PC had always seemed to be the obvious place to be for the best experience.
When I left my beloved Mac environment and bought a Windows PC for the purpose of maintaining seamless compatibility with my work environment, a wide range of PC games opened up; this was just prior to the Playstation revolution, and PC games were at their peak. A huge volume of games, varying widely in quality not just of gameplay and graphics, but in engineering and ease-of-access were suddenly waiting to be played. I enjoyed installing and playing and uninstalling a number of current and classic games under Windows 95, and nothing ever cropped up needing special attention.
One day, after having the computer over a year, I tried to install Halflife. After the game had installed itself and, if I recall correctly, the then-current DirectX suite, it told me that my hardware drivers for my graphic card were not current, and needed to be updated. It provided a URL, at which I found a link to my card manufacturer’s site, where I then was able to download new drivers (over 14.4k dialup). I’d never touched ANY of my machine’s hardware drivers previously, and had the jitters as it installed, and I waited for it to reboot, thinking it was going to give me a screen of static crap. When it rebooted without incident I literally breathed a sigh of relief. The game ran fine, I played it all the way through, fastidiously avoiding installation of any additional patches or drivers.
Cut forward to FarCry: The copy protection on the game was incompatible with both of my internal DVD drives, so I had to install it via a USB 1.1 connected external CD-R/RW drive. This game comes on either 4 or 5 discs, so this took over a ½-an-hour to install. The 10 or so hours of gameplay I had were excellent. I wanted to try the online component, so I installed the 1.1 patch and went through the registration at the Ubisoft site, entered my CD-KEY before being able to access the server browser, and rolled around for awhile. Everyone was jumpy-popping-vibrating in place in-game, and it was hard to get a draw on them. When the 1.2 patch came out after significant delays, I installed it immediately. A couple of days later, that patch was recalled. I hadn’t saved the 1.1 patch when the 1.2 patch was released, and strangely so had a number of download sites; they simply offered NO patch, rather than the older 1.1 patch. The official recommendation was to roll back to 1.1, which I assume means to install 1.1 over 1.2, and hope that it takes hold.
In my case, this meant finding one of the sites that still had the 1.1 patch, installing it, and booting the game only to find that all of my Save Game files would no longer load. Then I tried multiplayer, where it loaded, but dropped me back to desktop after the level-loading-bar had reached completion. I didn’t feel like re-installing it via the external CD-R drive again, freeing up the precious 1/8 of my HDD at home, only to fill it up again with a game that I would need to re-play for several hours just to catch up to where I’d left off. To me, right now, this defines the world of PC gaming. There are two games in every instance, one where the consumer plays the game that they bought, and a meta-game where the consumer tries to figure out how to play the game they bought, based on troubles with the software itself or the OS or the hardware.
Then there’s console gaming. Plug the console into a TV, drop in a disc, and in a couple of minutes the game is in play. Saving consists of files on a Memory Card (or HDD with X-Box), and the only way to screw them up is to do something the game tells you not to do; contrast this with my lost games due to doing that which was recommended. If I could get used to playing FPS’s with a game controller instead of a mouse, I’d be in pig heaven.
This is the way that entertainment should work.
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