Dark Me...

So a little later than North America we got Dark Messiah over here. I had a busy weekend and I was trying to cram in a few hours with this game. I've been looking forward to the game since I played the demo. Started it up it carried over all the settings I had in the demo. Great. Played through the Prologue again, quickly, to get on to the new stuff I hadn't seen. New cutscene revealing much more of the plot (interesting stuff). Followed by the next level loading with lots of static where talking should be and then the game crashing in the scene. A quick visit to the Steam forums... one of the files downloaded is corrupt validate the download. Did that and it fixed, great! Played a little more, it hung (in a way that means you have to turn off your machine, Windows can gracefully shut down if you wait an age to end the task). Tried again, it hung. Tried reducing the graphic quality and it hung less (though not entirely); which makes sense since my graphic card is puny but then the graphics settings was something it picked automatically. Tried to find a happy medium work ok on one level but on the next (where the demands are probably higher) it hung. Tried another fix from the site. That caused the game to crash to desktop. Upgraded my video drivers (hey, just in case). That caused it to crash more as well.

Yeay.

I went to play Company of Heroes to help me contain my increasing annoyance.

It's been a problem that has plagued me with Source games for a while (well Half Life 2 as well). I don't like games crashing on me but I understand that sometimes building something for all the permutations of system configurations isn't easy at all. Still it has been a long standing, common, issue so you'd think they'd put the resource onto tracking down that bug. What annoys me the most is that it doesn't just die it renders the machine unstable too resulting in a reboot.

Anyway except, maybe, a couple more goes I'll wait for the forthcoming patch to see if it resolves the lockups. If that fails I'll play it when I get a new PC.

Blogger Upgrade

Not Related to gaming at all but with the blogger upgrade I've upgraded the template on this site. Let me know if you have any problems with it or such.

I bought Sin Episode 1 from Steam yesterday. One of the reasons for doing this is it was $15 which is a really good price; even for a short game. The second is that it's a Source based game and with all the problems I've been having with Half Life 2 at the moment I thought I'd see if I had with another game using the engine. I played it for about an hour and a half with no problems. Still something to do with Half Life 2 then. That's good as Dark Messiah looks good and I'm hoping it runs ok. Anyway Sin has been really good fun so far. It's not breaking any new ground on the FPS front but it keeps the pace well and has a good action feel to it.