The Blog Of Rhian D. Block | Life In My Words

My Thoughts and Life for the World! | Rhian Douglas Block | http://www.rhianblock.com
Email: rhianATvazoom.com -- Server date is ~ September 09, 2010

This weekend I decided to make the plunge and purchase an Xbox 360.  I really wanted to get my hands on GTA IV, and unfortunately it wasn’t available for PC.  I am feeding the video into the component inputs of my Gateway 21″ widescreen monitor.  With a 1680×1050 resolution it was able to take a 1080i signal although it’s obviously downscaling just a bit.  It looks nice but my biggest annoyance is having to plug the audio output into the Line-In of my audio card on my PC.  This means I have to keep my computer on in order to receive any sound out of the Xbox.  I have an older Cambridge Soundworks 4.1 sounds system.  I may go hunting for a similar system that has an input so that I can bypass the PC entirely.

GTA IV definitely gets a full 10 out of 10 stars from me.  Rockstar did a great job of making the city you are in feel alive and free of any invisibal boundaries.  You can practically go anywhere you please.  At one point in the game I ended up speeding away from cops in my stolen police car.   I drove the car right onto the beach and ended up ditching it in the ocean.  I then just calmly swam out and proceeded to run around the beach in an attempt to avoid police gunfire.  If you want, you can enter almost any business on foot and begin your mayhem that way too    I read that Rockstar began developing this edition of the game back in 2004.  I’m sure the development of GTA V is already underway with the high number of copies that were sold. 

 Lately, I have been playing one of the top rated games for PC and other console systems - Call of Duty 4 by Activision.  Overall the game is amazing with both its storylines, and graphical makeup.  My biggest problem with the game however is that enemies are at many points in the game infinite in their numbers.  You can get to many points in a level and shoot tons of enemies only to have them continue coming and coming.  Until you push forward and make it to a check point the enemy will never cease.  This takes away from the realness factor of the game and makes many parts an outright joke.  I have read many posts from other people who also feel that the infinite enemy situation throws any strategy out the window.  Activision, you really should change this.  It’s just plain stupid. I can understand having tons of enemies and maybe several waves of them to really peg the difficulty, but when bad guys never end it just becomes kind of comical.  All the cutscenes of the game are so real and believable, its difficult to know why the gameplay with limitless enemies is prevelant in the levels.  I will give Activision high marks for really putting such a large budget into a game like this even so.

Ok maybe my system isn’t the most top of the line, but it seems that there are a tremendous number of bugs in the PC version of the BioShock game.  My system specs are better than the minimum quality and are:
Pentium 4 2.6GHz
3GB DDR 400 Memory
Nvidia GeForce 7900 256MB AGP

The game seems to run just so so.  The frames per second are quite low and things just aren’t smooth even if I drop the quality settings. Additionally, the mouse control isn’t smooth.  This problem has been reported by many in the 2K Game Forums in additional to crashes, lockups, loss of audio, and problems with the SecureROM activation scheme.  One big problem I am having now is that while I attempt to drop the resolution from 1680×1050 to 1024×768 , by the time it gets to the confirm these new settings screen, it has already timed out as a failsafe thinking that the resolution wasn’t correct.  It then dumps me back to the original resolution.  I was finally able to get it back to 1024×768 by exiting out of the game and coming back into it.  There have been posts on this very topic along with numerous complaints on extremely long load times.  It has taken upwards of 2 minutes to just load the beginning of a stage for myself.  Most of the forum comments on the 2K Games website indicate that a patch for what many are calling a much to early released PC version cannot come soon enough.  2K you really dropped the ball.  Excluding my problems for just a moment, and looking at just the thousands of posts on issues, this game shouldn’t receive Game of the Year.  If you decide to jump the gun with a product that isn’t ready for prime time then you also sacrifice your award.  Everybody seems to be waiting for an upcoming patch to try and play the game without running into the hundreds of bugs people are reporting.  2K has been pretty crappy in providing any ETA on the patch.

Last night I decided to pick up a copy of BioShock from publisher 2K Games.  It’s slated to be the game of the year.  BioShock is a first person shooter.  I haven’t even opened the package although there is a lot of controversy over the copy protection schemes they decided to build into the software.

By way of a anti-piracy software called SecureROM, they have made it so that any installation requires activation.  As of the writing of the blog post, 2K Games has received hundreds and hundreds of disgruntled posting from consumers regarding their decision to build this software into the game.  The main sticking point seems to deal with activation/deactivation attempts.  Since the original release of BioShock last Tuesday, the number of times BioShock could be installed simultaneously has been increased from 2 to 5.  This means after 5 installs your game is basically a sitting coaster when it comes to installing again.  2K Games did attempt to build deactivation into the software but from every post on their support site, it apparantely doesn’t work.  If I uninstall the software from my computer, the deactivation should credit me back 1 of my 5 installs.  Without admitting there is a problem, 2k Games has stated that they are working on a ‘revoke tool’.  Obviously, if there uninstallation worked to credit back a license, there would be no need for such a revoke tool.  Additionally, to even install the game, you must have an active Internet connection so that the game can communicate with activation servers.  Unless these activation servers stay up and running installation of the game in the future will be impossible.  I would hope that if this day came, the publisher would release a activation crack.  Of course this crack will probably come from a 3rd party in several months from now anyway so the whole SecureRom issue will be mute.

Finally, there appears to have been another problem with widescreen monitor support.  A forum user has created a patch but 2K has yet to release the ‘official patch.  From an interview with BioShock’s Kevin Levine on Joytiq.com on August 24, 2007 :

Now, let’s see if we can put this in the simplest terms, this screen thing has taken on a whole life of its own. The game was designed for widescreen. Instead of doing the normal thing and just chopping off the sides for full screen, you actually added more to the top and bottom so full screen people wouldn’t lose anything from the sides — a very nice thing to do actually. Thus, infuriating the PC owners and almost anyone else with widescreen because how dare you not give them more to see like they’re used to. So, now this patch will add in the stuff to the side of the full screen. So, in essence, to use a visual term, this patch just zooms the camera out a little bit to appease PC widescreen owners to give the option of increased field of vision?We started the game widescreen. We primarily designed it for widescreen. Then we had to ask, “How do we make it full screen.” Your options are to put black bars at the top and bottom, keep same width perspective. Or you allow to … add pixels to the top and the bottom if you can afford the frame rate — we could. So the call was made to show those few more pixels. Now this is one of those things when you’re making a game — like I was making a game — honestly, if somebody came from the future and told me this was an issue I would have laughed at them. I would have said, “Are you kidding me?” But that’s what’s interesting about gamers, they’re an interesting and diverse group. Now that I know that there’s this huge contingent out there that actually really cares about this, I wouldn’t have laughed at them because they’re stupid, I would have laughed because I couldn’t have imagined that people are passionate about this. And now that we know they’re passionate, we have a responsibility to respond to those people and give them what they want. It’s their game, they paid money for it, they should be able to play in the way they want to play. We may disagree with them aesthetically, but sure, we’ll make a patch and make if work for them.I cannot wait to play BioShock and check out an amazing game.  I understand that software developers need to put anti-piracy measures into the software, but it’s important to first test that your anti-piracy measures are working correctly.