Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to Nafcom’s World Of Computer Games Rants & Ramblings!
Featuring today: A low-priced game from Russia in corperation with Berlin, Germany.
Starring: Gaijinent Entertainment, Frogster Interactive Pictures & 1C.
The game has been in the in the IT press (e.g. Chip) over here getting postive words for its incredible fun and entertaining mixture of girls, management and arcade racing.
The reason why I got my hands on this is, that I had 42 € left on the account of a mail trader because of a warranty replacement, and so I wanted to get as much games as possible for this money, so the games had to be cheap. And since the press was so positive about this game, I thought: “Why not?!”.
In the following linkes I will tell you a lot about everything but the game! Yes, this is possible! It’s amazing how much you can do wrong in one single product called Adrenalin which was just released over here on August, 14th!
The first negative impression was, that the packaging is crap. It’s a DVD jewel case wrapped in a paper cover. So far so good, the game comes on 2 CDs, however, there is only 1 holding for 1 CD, so the 2nd CD flew around like Flubber!
A wonder it didn’t get damged! Also in the manual there is mentioned a prize winning game where you can win a meal and a book or audio cassette with Kelly Trump, however the deadline mentined is end of June! Great! ;).
On CD1 you can rude “The manual is included on this CD!”. There is no manual on CD 1, the manual is on CD 2, but no, don’t fire up your printer! Because the PDF file is an equal copy of the same crappy manual enclosed in the jewel case! There is also a PDF file on it pointing out a different technical support email and phone number than written on their consumer homepage – Support section (German only).
The next hurdle is the installation.
If you use Windows XP Pro X64 or the Omega ATI drivers, then you have bad luck, because the StarForce protection does not support it and the game not the Omega ATI Drivers!
The StarForce support is also pretty bad, because they just told me the error message means I have got a non-licensed copy of the game, but infact the read errors are so bad by the copy protection, that in 1 drive the StarForce checker cannot find the CD, in the other drive the Setup routine says the CD has damages.
So, it was a whole crap of work, over 3h and a useless reply from support.
Also weird is, that Frogster writes that joysticks and steering wheels & force feedback are not supported, but infact C1 writes on the English site of Adrenalin the following:
“Features: Joystick and force-feedback steering wheels support“!
Do I have to understand this?
Also steeting wheel “support” is even pretty bad, it’s so inaccurate and so sensitive, it’s only hardly possible to steer correctly, it’s like playing on drugs!
So, that is why Frogster denies its support, because the developers messed it up!
Then there is also the problem with that grey picture. Which due to the cd being very unreadable and the setup routine asks for the 2nd CD while it still reads from the 1. CD!, the intro.ogg file is getting damaged during setup
Deleting it manually and running setup again fixes it.
After over 3h with problems I had not much motivation yesterday to play it a lot…
UPDATE: I have received an email from Frogster saying that they will discuss the force feedback & steering-wheel issue with C1 I will keep you posted! 🙂
(Good support, and this on a Sunday)!
Technorati Tags: 64bit, Adrenalin
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