symphonix
Scratch & Sniff Committee
Early this week, I purchased my first Mac game. I'm not much of a gamer, but I do like to be able to blow things up from time to time. And so, on finding Star Trek Voyager Elite Force at a good price, I thought it would be fun to try out.
My impressions of the games design, gameplay and interface are that this is a truly wonderful creation and a lot of effort has gone into making it exciting and fun. The flow of the story and the cinematics alone make it essential for any trekkie.
However, there were a lot of problems that simply shocked me. The first of these was the CD Key.
Now, not being much of a gamer, I've only ever had to enter a key for one game before: Starcraft. At the time I remember wondering how long it would be before all the game publishers were using CD keys.
It generally doesn't worry me as long as it doesn't interfere too much with legitimate players. But in this case, Aspyr had mucked up severely. The key I entered did not work and on visiting their site I learned that they had misprinted almost all of the CD-Keys. They suggested I prepend a "CD-" at the start and change all the J's to T's. It still didn't work. I then tried a CD-key they had provided on their own support site (!!!) and it still didn't work.
The other thing was the update patches. Since I really didn't fancy rebooting into classic to play a game, I decided to look for an update patch. The official page did not make any mention of the update patch, and a search on version-tracker found that there were two updates out, though the VT links pointed back to the official page.
A bit of hunting around allowed me to dig up a patch from a third-party server, though this only patched the multiplayer game, and I still have to boot into classic to play the single-player game.
This isn't the last of it either. The time taken to load a level can exceed five minutes. While I'm sure a faster system than my iBook 500 would make level-loading more bearable, the minimum requirements quoted are for a G3-266, so I would think I should get bearable, though not fantastic, performance. I now realise that the minimum requirements quoted by Aspyr are not only unrealistic, they're downright fantasy.
The botmatch mode simply did not work on my machine, with or without the patch. The levels would load with no bots, no powerups and in CTF levels no flags. There are no errors in the logs that I can see to explain this odd behaviour.
What I had hoped for would be a little fun on my Mac; I wasn't expecting the sort of graphics or performance that a hardcore gamer wants. What I got was a fantastic game with a brilliant design, that felt as if it had been rushed out the door without any quality control by a company that really didn't care about maintaining products for their customers.
I will be doing a lot more research before I buy another game.
My impressions of the games design, gameplay and interface are that this is a truly wonderful creation and a lot of effort has gone into making it exciting and fun. The flow of the story and the cinematics alone make it essential for any trekkie.
However, there were a lot of problems that simply shocked me. The first of these was the CD Key.
Now, not being much of a gamer, I've only ever had to enter a key for one game before: Starcraft. At the time I remember wondering how long it would be before all the game publishers were using CD keys.
It generally doesn't worry me as long as it doesn't interfere too much with legitimate players. But in this case, Aspyr had mucked up severely. The key I entered did not work and on visiting their site I learned that they had misprinted almost all of the CD-Keys. They suggested I prepend a "CD-" at the start and change all the J's to T's. It still didn't work. I then tried a CD-key they had provided on their own support site (!!!) and it still didn't work.
The other thing was the update patches. Since I really didn't fancy rebooting into classic to play a game, I decided to look for an update patch. The official page did not make any mention of the update patch, and a search on version-tracker found that there were two updates out, though the VT links pointed back to the official page.
A bit of hunting around allowed me to dig up a patch from a third-party server, though this only patched the multiplayer game, and I still have to boot into classic to play the single-player game.
This isn't the last of it either. The time taken to load a level can exceed five minutes. While I'm sure a faster system than my iBook 500 would make level-loading more bearable, the minimum requirements quoted are for a G3-266, so I would think I should get bearable, though not fantastic, performance. I now realise that the minimum requirements quoted by Aspyr are not only unrealistic, they're downright fantasy.
The botmatch mode simply did not work on my machine, with or without the patch. The levels would load with no bots, no powerups and in CTF levels no flags. There are no errors in the logs that I can see to explain this odd behaviour.
What I had hoped for would be a little fun on my Mac; I wasn't expecting the sort of graphics or performance that a hardcore gamer wants. What I got was a fantastic game with a brilliant design, that felt as if it had been rushed out the door without any quality control by a company that really didn't care about maintaining products for their customers.
I will be doing a lot more research before I buy another game.
