Cygon’s Blog

Quality doesn’t seem to be what quality once was…

Installed the game, launched it and did the obligatory video settings adjustment. When I jumped from page to page, one part of my settings was kept, the other discarded. At least until I found the little ‘apply’ button in the lower right, which was only there on some pages, but not all.

I launched the campaign, was about to finish the training course when the game crashed back to the desktop. Wow…

Installing the latest ATI drivers seemed to help, at least I now was able to finish the training course.

This training course needs to be done as quickly as possible and starts with you having to climb down a rope. Wanting to improve on my time, I did the clever thing: I jumped, not climbed down the rope. But someone yelled “you missed the rope!” and the screen faded out. Interestingly, the game had autosaved just then. Fade in, I’m falling, “you missed the rope!”, fade out. Fade in, I’m falling, “you missed the rope!”, fade out. Fade in, I’m falling, “you missed the rope!”, fade out. Fade in…

Starting the campaign all over once more, I did the training course in about 20 seconds which seemed to please the instructor, so I continued without repeating the darn thing. Next, I’m greeted by a BSOD showing ATI-something.dll as the source. Great, reboot, launch game again, Campaign, Resume, play on.

Went through the ship mission, lots of scripted action, feels even more like a movie than Call of Duty 2, but the gameplay looks rather poor. Finished the mission, jumped into the helicopter, BSOD, reboot.

Watched in 1st person as the president of some small country being driven through a town by terrorists, lots of unarmed people being shot on the way through, then I’m shot in the face, BSOD, reboot.

Second mission, helped some rebels, stormed a town, rescued some informant, BSOD, reboot.

Third mission, stormed another town in search for terrorist leader who was broadcasting propaganda speeches, stormed his building, he wasn’t there, stormed some more town, some TV station, turns out the speech was recorded, mission end, BSOD, reboot.

Launched COD4, Campaign, Resume… wait, where’s the Resume button? Uh-oh. My savegame was gone with the last BSOD. So now I can enjoy starting right at the *beep* training course again.

Oh, well, come to think about it, that Timeshift icon on my desktop suddenly looks so much more appealing. Maybe I’ll play it through once more instead… and if I wanted to, I could play it from the beginning to the end in one big session without any hangs, crashes-to-desktops or BSODs