Okay, we admit it: we play video games on our Mac, once in a while. And we treated ourselves to a new game, since purchasing a brand new Mac Pro with an nVidia 8800 GT video card. Obviously, we justified that purchase by kidding ourselves that we just wanted to test and benchmark the performance of a game.
The game we chose? 2142 Battlefield, a cheesy, low-rent port of the popular PC title.
To say that we regret making this purchase is an understatement. A big one.
The game worked fine for a couple of sessions, and then it decided to not work anymore. Attempting to play or start the application is useless: it crashes to the Mac desktop.
Now, there are probably like a zillion people reading this at the moment who know exactly how to fix this issue, probably by doing some weird gymnastics with plist files or in the preferences directory, or by sending satellites to the Moon, or something like that. But our beef is mostly of a philosophical nature. See, we’ve never had this problem before on any of our Macs. We’ve never had a program work twice, and then fail or crash.
Yes, we are confident that there is some kind of fix, and if we took the time and energy to contact the folks at EA (the company that markets this junk), we are certain that they’d have some resolution, probably in the form of a canned text statement.
But again, that’s not the point. Time is money, babe. And we have very little of either. And with what little we have, we are not inclined to want to ring up the nutbags at video game companies.
But what about the user experience when the game was working? Fine. Great. Whatever. Framerate: Good. Graphics: Good. Storyline: Yawn. Oh, and there’s one other thing that really annoys us: There appears to be a need for users to log in to a server, or connect to something via the Internet during the game. And here is a kooky coincidence: the user is shown billboards and ads during the game. So, it stands to reason that the marketing pukes have finally had their say, and begun to figure out new, deeply sinister ways of monetizing friggin’ everything. Apparently, nothing is sacred.
Our verdict: This game is an inferior product that doesn’t work. And when it does work, it’s boring and given to advertising. Run away.
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[...] So, in goes a copy of 2142 Battlefield, which promptly began crashing and performing in a way inconsistent with what any sane person would characterize as “quality”. Read more about this fiasco, over here. [...]
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