Monday, April 14, 2008

Unreal Tournament 3

OK, this game has been out for a while now so I feel that it is a truly fair game to rant against. They have had plenty of time for updates and patches.

My first argument is that Epic had a great game with UT2004. The load screens and times were fair. It was user friendly in many ways and all in all a nice game to play and look at. With the new engine I can understand some changes coming but did you really need to frell up the basics of the game?! What the frak!? Just to get past the basic menu selections are a chore. How many times do I need to say that I want to play a frelling game?
Your server history also only holds so many servers before it just quits showing any more. So if you have met your limit and you get on the great server that you actually love to play on, you are unable to save it to favorites because you can only do that from the server history! You can only access your friends list from the community area which you have to go all the way back to the main menu to get to. The in order to add your friends you have to not only know exactly what their name is and how to spell it correctly but then you have to ask them and they then have to respond and then they have to ask you and then you have to respond top them! WTF?! I miss the simplicity of "right click-add to favorites" and "right click-add to buddies" . Why couldn't that have stayed?
I mean, the game is beautiful and has lots of potential (when you can get pass the frakkin' crashes and .dll errors). When I first put it on my system (which significantly exceeded it min. req's) I had to clean boot my system in order to run the game. No support was given to help me figure out why after multiple posts to forums. There are huge long threads in the Unreal Forums about others having problems with this and no solutions given. Not a single patch has helped and some even made it worse! A change in my OS ended up fixing whatever was wrong before.
This leads also to another issue I have (this is a rant, duh), after spending $50 on this game and finding out that I couldn't get it to run normally on my system I had no choice but to keep it anyway because you cannot return opened computer software to retailers! ARRGGHHH!!! If I am responsible and know my system specs and have run the demo with no problem and decide to buy the full version of the game to take it home , install, and try to run and find out at that time that it doesn't work - I should be able to return said merchandise without grief from the frelling store! I get the whole copying and getting money back thing and whatnot but why should those of us with legitimate issues have to pay the price when the cost of games are so excessively high? I mean if I really wanted to get a game without paying the full price for it I wouldn't bother with buying and returning the game I would get it from one of my many friends around the world who will generously let me have for no cost what so ever. Games I really want I buy and if I am unsatisfied with a product I should be able to return it, period.
Well I think I am tired out now. We can only hope that UT games run the gambit like Star Trek films with every other one being great. I am just pissed that I had to find out the hard way that this is just not what we expected from the pre-release hoopla.

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