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.

The third episode of Max Payne has been announced, but it’s not being developed by Remedy Entertainment (the developers of the first two Max Payne games). Instead, it’s being developed by Rockstar Games- famous for Grand Theft Auto IV, Bully and and Midnight Club.

From my perspective this is bad news.

GTA IV was massive in it’s hype, but at the end of the day I could only force myself through 50% of it before I traded it in. Graphics were average with the occasional nice effect. It tries to tell a story but it’s certainly no RPG. It tries to have car and bike racing, but the physics are awful. It tries a little to be a third-person shooter, but clearly it isn’t. It is the game that survives on the reputation built from it’s former editions and does little to entertain.

Midnight Club: Los Angeles had nice graphics – a vast improvement on GTA IV. But the driving parts still suck (a fatal flaw for a driving game). I think I managed to get through about 4% – it got traded in within a week of buying it. If you want a driving game, check out Burnout Paradise, Grid and Gran Turismo. Forget Midnight Club.

I’ve not played Bully, so I can’t comment.  I do not intend on purchasing it – perhaps if a friend has it I’ll give it a shot.

Rockstar Games seem to make games that sell despite their lack of playability.

I will keep an eye out on the reviews for Max Payne 3, but based upon past experience with this developer, I won’t be buying it.