Ok so I broke and got Command and Conquer The First Decade, despite the fact that I have them all already including Sole "What the Hell is that?" Survivor and the Collectors Edition of Red Alert 2 (Has a DVD with DVD Quality versions of the Cut Scenes) and the soundtrack for a total of 4 discs. But I was lured by the new Bonus Disc and having 12 of the 13 CC's on one DVD. So I am installing it and I look at the back of the booklet. That's right folks! 7 CD KEYS!!!!!! At first I thought ok there's one for the set (The top one) I guess the others are if you install them separately. NOPE! You have to input EACH AND EVERYONE!!!!!!! Goddamnit EA couple that with the complete ommition of any Westwood logos on the box (Aside from the ones on the pictures of the original boxes) and no mention of Westwood in the book, hell I'm surprised they didn't just dub over the name in the documentary or remove it from the old games. Hell in some old E3 pics they photoshopped out the Virgin Games logo from the booth that CnC was being shown at, and Virgin Games was Westwood and Command and Conquer's original Publisher. Oh well How's the baseball license treating you EA?
I highly dislike most of EA's business practices. But damn, it's hard to stay away from quite alot of their games. (Except the sports games, those are easy to stay away from)
Well, this is how I pretty much feel about EA . I like some of the games they publish, but I don't agree with their practices.
After the debacle with Battlefront II, I decided the PC gaming industry is all but dead. The companies treat us like second class people, or criminals. I'm not spending a dime on them anymore.
Holy Shit. Even one CD-Key is a pain in the ass that can be circumvented by a skilled pirate, but 7 is insane. If you can have one key for a game with multiple discs, you shouldn't need 7 for a single disc game, each one the obsene length of the modern key. I'll still get it eventually as I have loved the little bit of C&C that I have played but never owned any of them, but this is insane.
Yeah, C&C Generals was a fucking TRAINWRECK when they first released it. I remember having to debug and patch that thing up one side and down the other until I could get the game to play in any stable way. ...and that was the first game that EA released after buying Westwood. Coincidentially, I've had this same "patch-until-operational" experience with every other EA game I've bought. Sims comes to mind, mostly because Maxis games always installed so smoothly for me before...and then, when they became part of EA, I had to patch and repair and debug shit to get them to run. Not a big fan of EA, either.
Many people, including myself, have had to experience a frusteratingly amount of problems. The biggest one is when the game freezes. Not only does the game freeze, but it locks up the entire system. There are also various other bugs such as getting booted for no reason, the spawn freeze bug, the crash to desktop bug, easy exploited wall hacks, and so on. I sent the game back to Lucasarts President Jim Ward, with a letter of disappointment. It's funny, I sent it back a week before the patch was released. I kept track of the situation and discovered the patch caused even MORE problems for people. I didn't laugh at them, but I did feel relieved that I didn't put myself through that.
What really struck me about post-buyout Maxis games was that they all sucked balls, not that they needed allot of patching.
I've been playing SW: Battlefront 2 quite religiously on my PC with none of those problems since launch. I've never once had a system lockup, and the only time I've had it freeze was when a server I was playing on would reboot between maps. As for the exploited hacks....name me 1 PC FPS that doesn't have these problems? Hell, people even find ways around Punkbuster before they patch and fix.
I don't ever recall Quake 3 Arena having the kind of piss poor programming with exploitable hacks the way BF2 does. I remember a couple with Counter-Strike, but those weren't so bloody easy to exploit.
I can link you to about a half dozen sites for Quake 3 hacks and exploits. And probably double that for Counterstrike.
Regardless, I played those games for literally hours and hours at a time. I never found myself constantly killed by someone hiding inside a wall. I certainly was never booted for no reason(there was always a reason, ha!), and I never had problems respawning.
