It’s like the PC wants me to hate it as a gaming platform. Last night I was going to play games. I’d been having some video issues in a couple of recent titles, and I knew my video drivers were a few versions out of date, so I decided to update. Boy was that stupid.
I downloaded the latest WHQL certified drivers from NVIDIA, version 195.62 for reference, and installed them. I’m not sure why it took so long, but the install process was nearly fifteen minutes and required a reboot at the end (which the previous few driver updates hadn’t required). After the first few minutes I switched over to my Xbox and queued up some game demo downloads while the process went to completion.
Also disappointing was the glacially slow system restart. The machine was a little slow getting to the log in prompt, but getting from there to the desktop took over five minutes. I don’t know why stupid, porcine Vista was taking so long after a simple video driver update, but it was. I didn’t want to waste the time trying to figure it out; I just switched back to the Xbox and played the demo for Dante’s Inferno while I waited.
After wrapping up that demo, I switched back to the PC and launched the game I wanted to play, Empire: Total War (ETW). And that’s when I got the kick in the teeth for all my troubles: the campaign map was totally screwed up. Some units were missing, all buildings were missing, and some of the trees and textures were messed up as well. I spent at least fifteen minutes playing with all the advanced options before giving up.
Bottom line: the latest WHQL certified drivers from NVIDIA break ETW badly, rendering it quite unplayable. I’m so glad those drivers are WHQL certified; that means so much to me that I can trust their quality. By this point I had lost an hour of my precious game time, so I wasn’t going to fuss with it any further. I just wanted to use system restore to roll back the driver change.
The only problem was that system restore didn’t want to launch. I launched it from the start menu but it didn’t appear. I tried running it from the command line and was told the system restore UI wizard was already running. I tried rebooting and got the same behavior. I rebooted again, right clicked my computer, chose properties, and went to the system restore tab to see what was going on, but it was busy scanning for restore points. I rebooted yet again and launched system restore from the start menu and waited.
The minutes ticked by. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. Finally, after almost twenty minutes, the system restore UI appeared. I don’t know why it took so long to appear, though I suspect the reason was simply that I wanted it. The restore process itself took another ten to twelve minutes to finish doing whatever it does, and the subsequent reboot took another five or ten minutes to complete.
So after roughly two hours of frogging around with my system I could finally play my game. By that point I had less than an hour left, but I did at least have some fun. I fought two land battles and started making moves on the campaign map before my game crashed back to the desktop when I right clicked a unit for more information. Silly me for thinking such a basic feature might actually work.
At least the night wasn’t a total loss. While my PC was unusable my Xbox was able to download four large game demos, and I was able to play through two of them despite the active download list. And in the end I did get to play the game I wanted to play, albeit for less than an hour before it crashed.
It’s just so damned frustrating. Most times I sit down to play games on the PC there’s some stupid crap standing in the way. I find that Vista has reset my audio drivers, or Xfire can’t connect, or I have graphical glitches, or the controls in the game have been reset, or the networking isn’t right, or… The list just doesn’t end. In contrast, I can turn on my Xbox and be having fun in less time than Vista takes to boot.
It’s no wonder the consoles are winning, folks. They actually work.
First and foremost… How was Dante’s Inferno??? I could have sworn up and down that this was also a PC title but I guess either they changed it or I just dreamed it.
Secondly, CoD6.. you play it yet?
Thirdly, I’m so scared to move to Windows 6/7… Windows 5 is so stable. It just works. I have such minor problems compared to you. I can enumerate them right here:
1) LOTRO crashes when I zone into 21st Hall once out of every 4 or 5 times I zone in.
2) When I play Borderlands and I use Ventrilo, I need to alt-tab back to Ventrilo and reset my PTT key in the options and go back to Borderlands which results in graphics issues that are tolerable.
and the only show stopper is the series I’ve ALWAYS had problems with — Splinter Cell Double Agent blue-screens when I go back to the menu and when I reboot, the game won’t launch and requires a reinstall — yep.. a reinstall.. F that game!! (Can’t spawn Sam, please check if there is enough space in EchelonPlayerStart is the error) Damn you Sam Fisher!! Get out of bed willya!?
At any rate, I guess I’ll also stay away from 195.62 WHQL
Sigh… then I wonder why PC gaming is dying.
Actually, I thought Dante’s Inferno was coming to the PC too, but now that I dig around a few places (e.g., GameSpot) I don’t see it listed as a PC title anymore. Maybe we were both wrong? Or maybe they dropped the PC platform? Either way that’s not helpful.
As to the game, the demo leaves me with mixed thoughts. The artwork and overall look is fantastic. My main interest in the game is to see the various circles of hell realized in such interesting ways. The demo certainly doesn’t disappoint in that department, not one bit.
And the game mechanics are really promising. It’s another third-person beat-em-up, but it obviously has a wealth of different combo moves to be purchased as you reap souls from the bad guys. I found the control scheme a little weird–the right stick doesn’t move the camera as with most titles, it makes the character dodge quickly in the selected direction. I found one bit of the demo confusing, where it wasn’t clear how to progress, but it wasn’t a big deal.
What I’m not so sure about is two things: (1) the game has a lot of QuickTime Events, and (2) I’m not sure how much variety it provides. I’m not bothered too much by the QTEs, largely because they trigger some awesome action sequences as finishing moves for bosses and such. But I saw a lot of moves, I didn’t see any variety of weapons. All the moves were with a sickle and seemed to be some variant of how to swing it.
Now maybe that’s not so bad. Or maybe the game features other weapons along the way. I’m not sure. I’m not even sure it’s that big a deal. I’m just used to some choice in weapons for different tactics and situations. What I saw in the demo tells me that the game has two approaches: beating the crap out of low-powered nobodies and boss-puzzles that involve some fighting. I need to play it a couple more times to be sure. I know it’s easily worth a GameFly rental, but I’m pretty sure I won’t be buying a copy on launch day (unlike, say, Dead Space 2).
Regarding Modern Warfare 2 (MW2), yeah, I’ve played about a third of the single-player game so far, and it’s pretty engaging. There’s one level that I found pretty irritating, but even then I got through it by slowing down, being extremely careful, and pouring lead into every window that opened. The whole shocking terrorist scene is actually pretty stupid insofar as you can’t shoot the terrorists; I know they’re doing a carefully scripted game on the rails, but I thought that was just dumb from a story standpoint.
I tried multiplayer once and quit in an hour or so. It was nuts. It seemed like half the players were doing the javelin-glitch thing (dying makes a javelin round go off and kill everybody in the area) while the other half were doing the n00b-tube glitch thing (unlimited ammo for the grenade launcher). Infinity Ward clearly has some patching to do. And even then I question some of the design decisions. Many of the games I played followed a pattern: glitching, followed by airstrikes, predator missiles, more glitching, and then a nuke that kills everyone and ends the game. Not what I call fun, but hopefully it will improve with some patches.
Regarding Windows, don’t move to Vista. Period. Vista x64 is a clear improvement over Win2k/WinXP in my view, but it’s stupid, porcine, glacially slow, and never stops being stupid in the way it abuses your time and patience. If you’re going to move, go to Windows 7. I plan on migrating my gaming system pretty soon; I’m just waiting to hear that the issues with the Creative Labs sound cards are resolved. My next, new hardware build will definitely be Win7 x64.
FWIW, I don’t have that LotRO crash. Since I switched to software audio, LotRO crashes on me maybe once in a blue moon. It’s very solid. I don’t have the Vent problems you mention with Borderlands, though Vista does keep resetting my bloody mic +20 db checkbox all the time–craptacular nightmare of a quasi-OS that it is. Also, I don’t seem to have that issue with Splinter Cell: Double Agent, though maybe I haven’t played it enough to know?
But definitely, definitely avoid NVIDIA’s 195.62 drivers if you want to play Empire: Total War. The support forums are lit up with people having that issue. I’m telling you, man, think about getting an Xbox. I can hardly believe I’m saying that, given that I’ve been a pretty hardcore PC gamer for decades, but it’s simple, elegant, and just works. I do miss the better graphics, and I really wish it supported a keyboard/mouse for shooters, but the purity and simplicity of the experience is just a joy.
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