PC Game Fun Time

Another week, another heinous DRM debacle. This time the travesty is with the recent release of Grand Theft Auto IV for the PC, a game that I was really looking forward to because I enjoyed all three of its predecessors on the PlayStation 2, but do not own a “current gen” console system on which to play it. Unfortunately, it looks like the PC release has been completely botched by poor quality control and Digital Restrictions Management issues, to the point that I’m not even considering wasting my money on it.

Let’s do a quick comparison between the console experience and the PC experience for Grand Theft Auto IV, shall we?

• Console
  • Put the game disk into your console and it works.
• Computer
  • Put the game disk into your computer.
  • Go through multiple stages of authorization, including DVD validation, entering a serial key, and entering a code from the manual.
  • SecuROM gets installed (naturally).
  • Mandatory sign-up for both Rockstar Social Club and Windows Live, both of which require email validation.
  • Download the decently sized Windows Live update.
  • The game menu takes forever and a half to display, because the menu is downloaded dynamically from a heavily overloaded server on the Internet each time you launch the game.
  • The game is buggy as hell, with lots of crashes to the desktop, and performs poorly even on high-end hardware.

The game cannot be played without Internet access, even if you are just trying to play the single-player mode. So much for gaming on the go. And if you’re running Windows Vista 64-bit, which you should be because the limit of 4 GB RAM with the 32-bit version is turning into a huge liability, you’re hosed, because the game flat-out does not support 64-bit operating systems.

I have a simple message to the craven idiots responsible for the release of Grand Theft Auto IV on the PC: This is why gamers migrate to consoles, you fools! Instead of wasting your development time on DRM and activation features, you should have spent it on 64-bit compatibility, stability fixes, and performance boosts. In an age when most higher-end PC graphics cards have two GPUs on a single card, Grand Theft Auto IV’s developers had the utter shortsightedness to not even bother including dual-graphics card support, thus guaranteeing that no one can get high quality performance in the game.

Grand Theft Auto IV suffers from a lethal combination of obnoxious DRM and terrible quality. How much longer can this situation go on for before PC gamers collectively exclaim “Enough!” and refuse to buy the rubbish that publishers seem so intent on feeding us?

I’m a huge fan of space shooters. I have been ever since I played the first TIE Fighter game on my dad’s 386 when I was still in elementary school. I played that game with a joystick plugged into the computer’s game port (Anyone remember those? The game port was analog). The genre has unfortunately declined since then, though my love for it hasn’t. I even have a modern USB joystick now, which I bought a year ago without even a specific game in mind out of a sheer sense of nostalgia for the genre. Alas, the last great space shooter I think I played was Freelancer, which came out over five years ago.

So you can imagine my excitement when I found out about the X3 series, which is a modern space shooter series created by German developer Egosoft. I decided to give the latest entry in the series, X3: Terran Conflict, a spin. After several hours of playtime, here’s my take.

X3: Terran Conflict is ultimately defined more by its flaws than by its successes. My major reaction to the game is a sense of sorrow over the potential of what could have been, a potential that tries desperately to shine through the game’s thick veneer of buggy execution. I guess we’ll start off on a high note and look at what the game does right.

The graphics are excellent, and really help to set the mood of being in space. I do have one minor quibble though: the asteroids don’t scale up the number of polygons composing them as you approach them, so while they look fine from far away, when you skim along the surface of the bigger ones you’re typically flying over triangles a kilometer to a side — not cool. Considering how detailed all of the rest of the models in the game are, with the exquisitely crafted space stations and the planets with multiple shading layers for atmosphere, terrain, and city lights, this is a very curious oversight.

The music, which I’ll roughly describe as ambient techno, really fits the theme of flying in space, and I enjoyed it a lot not only as a complement to the game but also simply as a fan of the genre. I guess it’s a good thing the developers are German, because it was evidently very easy for them to find talented techno artists to work with. The combination of the graphics and music sets an authentic mood of being in space, and I found I had the most fun when I simply turned down my engines and cruised through the stellar systems at a leisurely pace, taking in the sights and sounds.

But everything else about the game left me feeling a bit disappointed. The plot is so far completely forgettable, seeming to serve as nothing more than a way to introduce one to all of the star systems in an orderly manner. The voice acting is incredibly atrocious (every character sounds like they’re voiced by a German developer who doesn’t quite possess mastery over the English language) and the poorly animated comms portraits don’t help establish connections to the game’s characters in the slightest. The missions are bizarrely paced, with one early mission requiring me to follow an enemy moving at a slow pace through several stellar systems before following him from the terminal jump gate to a pirate ship that was really far away. Even with the game’s built-in time acceleration turned up to its maximum of 1000%, it still took me something like an hour to complete this completely trivial mission. It didn’t help that the autopilot would occasionally drive me right into another spaceship, forcing a reload from the last space station — oh, did I mention that there’s no quicksave/quickload? Gahhh!

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