He’s Back (The Man Behind The Mask)

Whoops. Too much Alice Cooper in the car the last few days.

Well, it’s Saturday. Courtesy of a few gusts of wind, I’ve had to axe my night out. The A1’s had more than its share of problems over the course of the day and the weather report is for it to get worse later on.

So I thought I’d play one of the games I bought from Sold Out recently. Three games for a tenner and good (if old) titles. Smashing. They even turned up 2 days after I ordered them right before xmas. Even smashinger.

Sim City 3k works a treat, though does look its age.

Freedom Force installs, patches… then crashes. After digging for ages (on the developer’s site, not the publisher’s which doesn’t tell you) I find that it won’t run under Windows XP with Service Pack 2. At least they’re developing a patch (though it’s been in the works for 4 months now). You’d think after this, they’d mention such a problem on a retailer’s web site so you’d know before you bought a game. But no.

Thirdly, another old-timer: Command & Conquer Red Alert 2. This one won’t even install, the setup program crashing out. After several emails from EA support, I think we’ve narrowed it down to one Windows patch. Thing is, since SP2, this patch is not uninstallable so I’ve got another game I can’t play. Though they were trying to blame it on a duff CD. The game comes with 2, both installable, both not working. I tried them on Kim’s laptop (not running SP2) and the game installed fine.

Their solution? Mail the CDs and receipt to an address in California. Erm, yeah. Right. That’ll solve a coding problem.

My solution? Return the game to the UK supplier and refuse to buy anything else published by EA unless I get a pre-sales guarantee that it’ll work with SP2. I don’t think that’s too unreasonable seeing as it’s such a prevalant patch.

OK, now I’ve bored you all to tears I’m off to do some maths work instead.