I have been reading the board quite
seriously for the last couple of months, delving into all aspects of it,
rather than just contributing where I saw an interesting topic.
Something has been niggling at the back
of my mind and it is now coming to fruition. We as gamers are in a state of
flux. On one side of a very complex equation, we have developers and
distributors trying their best to combat piracy, in doing this they have
narrowed their playing public as many do not have the relevant hardware to
cope with the protection software. Those who would flout the copyright laws
however have the self same games up and running via dubious means. Then we
have the hardware sellers who don’t actively sell the relevant hardware so
games can install properly (even on the big UK sites, finding a CD-Rom
player is getting more difficult) On another side of this we have game
developers writing for different versions of graphic drivers.. The newest
game may Not run with the newest graphic drivers, but need an earlier
version. Downgrading your graphics drivers can be an absolute nightmare (as
we experienced personally earlier this year) and can cause serious problems
with your system.
We can’t play very early games without a
great amount of tweaking and some just won’t perform at all no matter what
you do, apart from move it to a win 9x box rather than XP doing what it said
it did on the tin and being more User friendly. I don’t consider a package
where I can have up to 21 background tasks user friendly!!!!
In all the time I have been playing on
the site, I don’t think I have ever seen so many diverse problems and
glitches with new games. Previously, we had patches for relevant problems
out quickly and were able between us to sort many other tech issues which
were either due to processor speed or game specs.
Adventure game installation is becoming
an adventure in itself and I’m not too happy with the way it is panning
out. I’m sure other genres have the same issues, maybe its time for the
developers to get round Arthur’s table and have a serious discussion rather
than all going their own routes, thus making gaming harder for the rest of
us. Or maybe they just want us to buy X boxes…
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