r4ndom h4x

I am on two weeks leave at the moment. Blame the GFC. While wondering around at home I thought I might try one of those 14-day trials I’ve seen for the MMO City of Heroes. Can’t be that hard, can it?

First, I went to the City of Heroes web site – http://www.cityofheroes.com/ and signed up for an NCSoft account like it says to. Downloading the game client offered on the web site is very quick because it’s actually just a downloader that will download the actual game.

In my case, the installer wanted to download 2.7GB. That’s not such an issue – I expected to have to download something of that size – but the time it was estimating was rediculous. 40 hours.

Surely, I thought, there must be a local mirror of the installer? So I did a quick search and did indeed find a local mirror. I’m in Australia, and found the good guys at Ausgamers.com have a copy of the installer which downloaded much faster.

After cleaning up the City of Heroes folder and installing the newly downloaded game I proceeded to run it. After about three minutes spent waiting for the installer to verify the files I then get an atioglxx.dll error and the game bombs.

I’m not a total dumb-ass, I can see immediately the error is related to my ATI graphics card and probably some OpenGL driver issue. The problem is that my card is very old – it’s a Radeon 9700Pro. As far as I can tell it still meets the specifications but I cannot update drivers for it any more. I’m already running the newest that were ever relased for it.

So, I do what many ATI owners do. I installed an nVidia card. I just happened to have an Geforce FX5500 sitting in a box. Granted, it’s not much newer than the 9700Pro – and probably no faster (maybe even slower). But I was rewarded with the game actually starting. So. I’m off then.

Oops. No. The game keeps telling me I’ve entered the wrong username and/or password. So I log onto the NCSoft web page, check out a few things, change my game password and try again. Still fails. Time for google.

It turns out that there are two versions of the game – one for US and one for EU. I have an US account but the game client is EU. So, I log onto eu.plaync.com and proceed to set up (another) account and asking for (another) trial. After confirming my email details (using a different email account) I’m now greeted by “Sorry, all codes have been allocated.” – ie: piss off, we have enough freeloaders already.

I don’t feel hard done by, I’ve not spent anything except time and my download quota. But the whole experience brings front-of-mind why PC gaming is in such a bad state and why I prefer gaming on my PS3. I shouldn’t need to jump through hoops to get this shit going.

Actually, now I think about it, I installed Free Realms the other day. The install starts easily from the web browser, there is minimal to download up-front as the game will stream content as it needs to while you’re playing. It is so simple – it’s the exact opposite as my trial of City of Heroes. I’ve spent maybe three days trying to get City of Heroes working (ie: started downloading one day, gave up the next and downloaded a canned install, then had graphics card issues etc). Free Realms took me maybe 30 minutes before I was playing.

Maybe there is a chance for PC gaming yet.