This is a post by a friend of mine that goes by Frydlichen. I’m sorry I ca’t give out an blogs, because he doesn’t have any. Comment if you like it and I’ll see if he can do more.
I recently purchased Mirror’s Edge off of Steam, having been interested in playing it for a while now. Just a few weeks before I had (and I’m sorry to say this) tried to pirate the game so I could see whether or not it was going to be worth buying or even playing for that matter. Everything went smoothly throughout the installation and patching and I thought I was in the clear with getting the game to work. I was wrong. In the most vital phase of playing a video game (getting it to start), failed; miserably. I searched everywhere for solutions and even found a few others who had the same problem as I, which somewhat consoled me. I tried everything: running the game in almost every compatability mode I knew of, changing .ini files, etc. Yet nothing seemed to work and I was forced to let the incident slip from my memory. Yet a few weeks later, on this very day on which I am posting this, I ran across a few gameplay videos. I couldn’t resist anymore, and I bought it. I had, in my naviety, presumed that all non-pirated games were bound to work better than pirated ones and I thought for sure I would be able to play after the downlaod was complete. I was wrong… again. God forbid, I experienced THE SAME EXACT problem as I had with the illegal version. I was fuming, not only because it didn’t work, but because I knew that there was no way I could ever solve this problem until a patch came out.
This leads me to the point I’m trying to make. Why is it that, although developers usually get a longer time to develop a game for the PC than they do for the consoles, performance optimization or general usability is significantly lower in PC versions of a cross-platform game than the console versions. This figure might be a bit exaggerated, I admit; there are countless top-notch games such as Fallout 3 or Far Cry 2 that extremely polished and exceed anything the consoles were able to offer. Yet for games like Mirror’s Edge and GTA IV, support has been abymal. The winter season has been sort of a let down in terms of the quality of the games I have purchased. First, Dead Space which ran great but didn’t have the graphical option every game should have: anti-aliasing support. Second: GTA IV, the one game I seemed to have gotten to work faster than anyone else, yet still managed to hog my 8 gigs of RAM for no good reason. Third: Mirror’s Edge, a game I don’t doubt is quality but has for me personally been a pain to try to get working. All I’m saying is, developers, please show me some love… OR A WAY TO GET THIS FREAKING GAME TO WORK.
