GODDAMN PC GAMING

By Plagiarize

That’s it. I’m done. My experiences this past week with the new Prince of Persia game on PC have driven me over the edge.

I’m sure you’re all going to dive for the comments to tell me that ‘Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones’ isn’t a PC game, but I ask you to read my complaints before doing so. It is, after all, a game on PC, and it has for me, completely summed up all my problems with PC gaming.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the game to pieces, it’s more than I ever hoped for after the massive fumble that ‘Prince of Persia: Warrior Within’ was, and for me the best written game I’ve played all year. The game is great… certainly a must play title for fans of Sands of Time, so what’s my problem?

Getting to it.

Oh and not just getting to it… I also have a problem with the way such games are reviewed, the medium they’re launched on, the stupid boxes, the crap shelf space and the extra week or so wait for the PC version of any multiplatform title.

So where to begin? Let’s start with the retail end of things. Why is it, that PC version of Serious Sam 2 only made it into stores a week or two after the console version, even though both were announced as shipping on the same day? The same for Psychonauts, and The Two Thrones.

You can kind of understand the last two because the PC wasn’t the lead development platform, but in Serious Sam 2, it was. I’m really not sure who is responsible for this, if it’s the retailers under pressure from the console manufacturers not to put the invariably cheaper PC versions on shelves at the same time as the often more expensive and graphically inferior console versions. I’m not sure if it’s the publishers under pressure from the console manufacturers. I’m not sure it’s not just the stores since I don’t know if they make more money on a console game than a PC game.

I do know that the console manufacturers buy shelf space and prominent positions in stores, and that nobody currently does that for the PC. Microsoft have pledged to start doing just that, and I hope they start getting their act together soon. The problem with current store arrangements is, that the PC section is often so small, they can’t have a new released section to highlight the latest games.

Often a game is out, but you’ll just miss it in the disorganized throng of PC titles with no filtering for genre or age.

I know it’s a bit silly to complain about those new PC boxes, because everyone does, but my problem with them isn’t because I think there’s anything wrong with them in size shape or aesthetics, but simply because America hasn’t yet started releasing all big titles on DVD.

Want me to explain that one to you?

So, four CDs are cheaper than one DVD… but we’re still talking tiny margins here. Installing is one of the pains of PC gaming anyway and installing from one single DVD is a lot less of a pain than installing 4 or 5 cds.

But here’s what I don’t get. If they’d gone with DVDs, they could have moved over to the already readily available, cheaply produced DVD cases for PC games, as Europe say has done. Instead, they spend money developing and producing a more expensive product to accommodate the fact that the game is on a cheaper media.

And shelf space? Well, DVD cases would essentially double the shelf space for the PC section… they’d make that ‘new releases’ bit much easier to do.

You may be wondering why, at this point, that I buy multiplatform games on PC. Well it started like this… I loved the GameCube pad, and since I had a PC adaptor for it, any multiplatform game that wasn’t coming out on GameCube (and favoured pad control), I could buy on PC and play on my favourite pad.

Nicer graphics are more than just a neat bonus, and not having to worry about having a limited memory card space to archive saves is good too.

More recently I’ve been swayed by the charms of the X-Box 360 pad. I don’t have my 360 yet, but I have a wired 360 pad for my PC. It’s overtaken the cube pad as my favourite pad, and as if that wasn’t enough Ubisoft had specifically promised support for it on the PC version.

My cube pad has always, always been a pain in the ass to configure to games, but this was meant to solve that. This was quite literally meant to be plug and play, and this game was meant to smooth over one of the biggest problems with PC games that favour a pad… setup, control and in game tutorials. I’ve never off hand known what ‘button 5’ say was. Very few pads are labeled that way.

If a game specifically supports the 360 controller, it’ll go by the proper names of the all the buttons, heck it’ll even light up quarter of the X to show you which player you are.

Eager to get home and play the game, after having put up with people talking about the console versions for a week and dodging spoilers, I get confronted with the first stupidity.

The box says it’s a 4 CD set. The manual talks about a ‘Play CD’ you need to be sure to put in when running the game. My box has 3 CDs inside it, labeled CD 1, CD 2 and CD 3. I start installing and crossing my fingers that it’s just a labeling screw up because I really don’t want to drive back to the store and try and convince them that I wasn’t given a copy of the CD that you need to play the game.

I’ve heard of it happening more than once. When there is five CDs it’s a lot easier for the staff at the game store to leave one out of the box when they grab the contents than it would be for them to forget to put the only DVD in. I’ve heard many more testimonials of missing CDs than I have of missing DVDs.

It had never happened to me, but I knew it happened.

Fortunately the box was wrong. There was no fourth CD and CD 3 was the ‘Play CD’. It doesn’t ask for a disk I don’t have, and after asking me if I want to install Direct X 9.0C (which is already installed of course), the game loads fine, asks for the CD key and passes the copy protection without problem.

A lot of people are very uncomfortable with the Starforce copy protection system that Ubisoft and others use, and you can find their reasoning on many sites around the internet. Heck I know people that boycott any game that uses it and encourage others to do so. I know enough about my PC to fix it if it goes wrong, and I’ve never had problems with it, so I’m not going to let it stop me enjoying my game…

But it’s just another one of those things that console gamers don’t have to deal with. I remember Morrowind on the PC had terrible performance issues, the patch that fixed it? Well it disabled the copy protection. It wasn’t an isolated case either.

As many will tell you, copy protection punishes the good user, and the pirates will find a way around any system. Yes it nails casual copying on the head, but so did the much less intrusive copy protection systems that only required a cracked executable to defeat. I had no problems this time, and I can’t vouch for the number of people that do have problems, but I know they’re out there.

But anyway, the game is loaded, I dive into the configuration page and am pleased to see the pad configured just as it would be on the console versions, just as I’d personally configure it. I see ‘A’ listed as Roll/Jump instead of ‘Button 1’.

Next I stop by the graphics settings. Knowing that the game uses the same engine as the last game I’ve got a pretty good idea of what the game will best run at and set the resolution, and filtering I want, and hop into the game. After the intro video finishes, and the first in engine cut scene begins, I’m pleased to see it running nicely.

There’s nothing more annoying than having to fiddle about with performance settings as you’re trying to get into the game. It’s often the case (as it turned out here) that the initial areas of the game aren’t the most demanding and you’ll end up tweaking it up a few times as you play through the game. It kills the immersion when the frame rate takes a nose dive forcing you into the settings menu, and it’s just something that’s pretty much standard on any game that didn’t have a demo.

It’s at the stage where any game with an autodetect, I don’t mess with it until after I’ve finished the game. Autodetects are almost always overly conservative and you might end up missing out on some of the nicer effects or a higher resolution, but for me, it lets me enjoy the game first time without worrying about tweaking.

The cutscene ends and I go to move.

Nothing. No response. I go into the menus, it’s seeing my pad, but ignoring all input from it. I’m not playing the game on mouse and keyboard when I pretty much bought the 360 pad for this game, and so I head to the Ubisoft forums where there’s already a thread on the matter.

The first poster had already had a response from Ubisoft: ‘We can’t test every game with every pad, so if it doesn’t work, we’re very sorry. Have you tried installing the patch?’.

I’m a little dumbfounded at this point… First of all, there isn’t a patch. Secondly, Ubisoft had stated in the big press release announcing the 360 pad for Windows, that it would be supporting it, and had only named one game, this game. Thirdly, the game is recognizing what pad it is, since all the other games I have that work with it, list the buttons in the standard crappy way, ‘button 1’ etc.

So, being the patient type I decide to wait before playing the game. See, when I start playing a game, I want to be lost in it. I don’t want to be thinking about controls, and when I’ve played a game series solely on pad, I’m not switching to an inferior set of controls that I don’t know, just as I went out of my way to play Halo 2 on mouse and keys as I was used to playing Halo.

More people stop by with the problem, and after a few days, finally, someone finds the solution… Install the version of Direct X 9.0c on the first disk.

It mentions this nowhere in the manual or in the read me, but the copy of Direct X 9.0c on the disk contains beta direct input drivers required for the 360 pad to work with it. I mean, given that every game asks you to install 9.0c even if you’ve already got it, and that there’s no indication from the version number that there’s anything different about this version.

Ubisoft’s support people had no idea either, naturally, but finally, the pad was working, and I could play the game. I had to tweak the controller speed to stop it the prince strolling slowly forwards at all times, and am again left wondering why you have to calibrate PC pads but not console ones.

Oh and, about an hour into the game I reached an area where my frame rate died. What do you know?

So, I have this simple question… the game isn’t doing any new effects that the first didn’t do. Yes the environments are more detailed as are the characters but… the console versions run with those improvements on the exact same hardware without problem. So, why is that the same engine is made more efficient on the console versions but the same PC hardware can’t run the new game with the same settings?

The Two Thrones is a brilliant game. A worthy follow up finally to Sands of Time, and once everything was installed and set up properly on my PC, I was swept up inside it’s majestic world and didn’t come back out until the credits started to roll… but I’m really left wondering if all that waiting was worth playing a game I could have bought a week earlier for the X-Box and started playing instantly when I got home. No installing. No researching. No patching. No calibrating. No finding a way around the CD check because it doesn’t believe my legal copy is a legal copy. No tweaking graphics settings. No updating drivers… just instant fun.

Goddamn PC gaming. It’s going to take some amazing titles on PC to convince me I need to upgrade once I get a 360 and my PC loses the graphics advantage.

Bring on drop and play PC games. Bring on what the 360 pad support should be. Do away with multiple CDs. Make auto adjusting performance standard. Give the tweakers the options to turn all those things off… but let me bring home a game knowing it’ll work.

And reviewers? Don’t mark down a game like The Two Thrones because the keyboard and mouse controls suck. The game recommends you play it with a joypad. It’s designed for a joypad. That’d be like me complaining to Ubisoft that Far Cry: Instincts doesn’t work very well with my mouse and keyboard adapter. If you’re going to mark it down, do it because joypad support was partially broken, but not because the keyboard controls suck.