Except you don’t HAVE to do any of that. How long does it take to set up video options in a game? Really? 60 seconds? Depending on the game, I mean you COULD spend an hour tweaking it up but you at least have the OPTION to adjust shadows and AA, etc.
How many patches do you have to hunt down for a game? 1. The latest one. If there is one, of course.
I’m sorry you spent an hour in Company of Heroes playing with the video options, it’s a terrific game, but that was your call.
thamer
1642
he’s not writing reviews so that you can make a proper judgment on what a good game is. he’s writing reviews to make you laugh and think a little about why you enjoy these games.
Damn Relic and their evil plan for giving you a free expansion in multiplayer which doubles the number of armies in the game and also brings new maps and add new settings for most of the old maps!
Next time it should be a DLC, then you won’t have to wait an hour downloading and installing the new content.
Assassin’s Creed or Guitar Hero be damned, this has to be the first review where he’s made a triple A title sound like absolute shit. You’d have to include an incredible amount of sex appeal in the ad campaign for this game to make me think about purchasing it again.
It’s like Time-to-Crate.
I’ve got Wing Commander 3 in my backlog. I’ll have to time that one.
shang
1646
I wish! Company of Heroes is notorious for its terrible patching process. It has dozens of incremental patches, and some can randomly bork your install, forcing you to re-install completely. It’s gotten a bit better now that they’ve combined some of the incremental patches into larger packs, but CoH and Dawn of War are still model examples of how to NOT implement a patching system.
Zylon
1647
So, just to make sure I’m following this thread correctly-- It’s okay that MGS4 makes you slog through ~20 minutes of cutscenes at the beginning because some PC games have large patches. That about sum it up?
No. One poster made that silly claim, and all the other posters have been discussing why & how that’s an unfair comparison.
Yikes! It’s been awhile since I played CoH (though I do recall the expansion being a pain to active/play - I blame Pirates though, not the PC, for this behavior). So, let me amend be adding “usually” as appropriate.
COH is okay, at least they are supporting the game with balance patches and not breaking the community in half with their expansion. A few people that don’t get what’s going on with that are understandably confused, but it’s good stuff in the long run.
The sad thing is Relic just decided to pack all their data files into huge lumps that must be opened up to apply a few tweaks here and there. I think the Steam guys end up having to redownload the enormous files every time.
Brakara
1651
Only because I wanted to play the game with the best possible settings that gave me a good framerate. The default ones I got was pretty much crap. I guess if you live and breed PC games, tuning the video settings is a breeze. But for someone like me, it feels like a scientific process (try this, test, try that, test, etc.).
And the patches have already been explained. Yes, it was that horrible (I had to download 3-4 different patches and apply them in the correct order). Of course, not all PC games are that bad. But the last retail games I’ve bought have been like that, with multiple patches instead of just a single one (Stalker and ArmA among others). That’s one of the reasons I’m only buying PC games from Steam and totalgaming.net these days.
Pod
1652
You didn’t have to apply the patches? Surely the game would have played fine as is?
Brakara
1653
I didn’t bother to read through the Changelogs in order to find out. Nor did I bother to play the game without the patches and find out the hard way.
Just bought Bioshock and loaded it up. Time to wrench first splicer: 35:12:6
The game automatically phoned home for the newest patch, but it took me several times to correctly enter the 16 digit activation code. Apparently the dashes are not only mandatory, it doesn’t like you inserting them in after the fact.
Also, changing the graphic option to select window mode crashed the game to desktop.
I thought it did take around 20 minutes to get to the first enemy in gametime. The intro cutscene seemed long, and then you gain control and five seconds later when you crawl under the truck you get another cutscene.
Is reading the thread too taxing?
shang
1660
Actually, since Opposing Forces came out, CoH forces you to patch even for single player. :P
I guess you can bypass it by yanking off your network cable or something, but…
