This is my very first blog entry ever; its more a rant than a blog. Basically Three AAA games I've purchased recently have not worked on my computer. I've got a home built rig with an i7 2600K 3.5GHz cpu, 2 Gainward Geforce 580 Phantoms with a combined gRAM of 6GB, 16 GB of memory and a Sound Blaster X-Fi sound card. All my drivers are up to date, and my operating system is Win 7 Ultimate 64 bit which is installed to an SSD.
The Three games in question, all of which I pre-ordered and where possible purchased the deluxe versions are as follows:
Need for Speed: Most Wanted (via Origin) cost £39.99/$60
Call of Duty: Black Ops II Digital Deluxe Edition cost nearly £50/$75
Hitman: Absolution Professional Edition cost £39.99/$60
I've spent days trying to get Need for Speed to run. It's been out for over 4 weeks now and all I can get is past the initial intro screen, then it hangs while loading. I've even left it on all night in the hope that it would start up.
Call of Duty: Black Ops was released nine days ago on PC, I've spent the last nine days trawling the Steam forums trying every fix that's been described, from installing the latest Beta drivers for my NVIDIA cards, reinstalling the game and verifying the content, defragging, re-installing all the essential drivers, making sure the onboard audio was turned off (apparently the game crashes if you have a card and onboard audio running concurrently) and even lowering the clock speeds of both graphic cards using MSI's Afterburner, and even disabling one of the cards. When I installed the beta driver the game worked for 20 minutes. I'd been working on it for over two days at the time and by the time i got it to work it was 4am in the morning. So, after 20 minutes despite the game looking fabulous I was in danger of getting a keyboard imprint on my forehead, I closed the game down. On booting up the following day, the problem re-emerged and I've not been able to get it to work since. You can hear the sound and when I click on the task bars icon the game opens up to full screen momentarily then goes back to the desktop.
Finally I was really looking forwards to playing the latest Hitman game. It's been just over six years since the last game was released late Spring 2006. I pre-ordered the game months ago and really enjoyed the sniper level they released to the community earlier this summer. So you can imagine my disappointment when I booted up the game today. The screen flickered black to grey and back to black, with the
occasional flutter, then I got my first ever BSOD since using Win 7. That's got to be something wrong with the game as I've made sure everything is up to date. I suppose it could possibly be the latest Beta driver which was rushed out to cure a problem with NVIDIA cards when Black ops II was released.
I'm sure you can imagine my frustration. I can
usually figure out what the problem is and get a game to work within a
few hours, but the games I've mentioned above have confounded me
for days.
I'm off to bed, its already well after 4am. Will I bother to check Hitman again in the morning, probably, but too be honest I'm getting really fed up seeing as the greater part of the last four weeks have been trying to sort three AAA games that should have worked on release.
Peace to all
Whiterabbit-uk aka Stephen
