A Rant Against Companies Who Make Games
                   that Won't Run and Blame
                         the Punters!

                      From Carolyn Brown

Two of my all-time favourite strategy games were Caesar III and
Pharaoh, so imagine my delight when I learned that Impressions
Games were producing a sequel, this time based on the myth and
legend of Ancient Greece, and called 'Zeus, Master of Olympus'. I
played the demo and thoroughly enjoyed it, and was really looking
forward to the release date.

I pre-ordered the game, and it arrived on a Saturday - couldn't be
better, I thought. I'd have the whole weekend to immerse myself.
Anyway, I duly installed it without any problems, meanwhile avidly
reading the impressive manual. Time to get playing - click the
icon - game starts loading - then - Zilch! It hangs. Several
uninstalls and reinstalls later I realise the sensible thing to do
is to check out the official technical website, where I find well
over a thousand posts, most of them concerning the same problem -
the game refuses to start.

I should mention that my system was well above the minimum
requirements, so I did not anticipate any problems. Anyway, I
noticed that everyone seemed to be getting the same advice from
the overworked and frustrated technical support team. It started
out with making sure the drive was defragged and that the swap
file was large enough, also to make sure that all Windows programs
were closed before starting. No worries there. They would then
tell people to make sure that they had the latest drivers for
their hardware. This struck me as odd, because many of the
disgruntled would-be players had systems far superior to mine, and
much newer, some only a few weeks old, yet they were all told to
get new drivers. OK, fair enough. I made sure mine were up to date
as far as I could. Then the advice became really interesting.
Everyone was advised to turn off DMA, disable joysticks, reduce
caching, disable 3D sound, uninstall DirectX 8 if you had it, and
even, would you believe, download a new bios for their
motherboard!

Can you imagine giving advice like that to, say, a teenage kid
using his Dad's computer, and desperate to play the game?  He'd
most likely end up wrecking the computer. I certainly don't feel
competent enough to download and install a new bios.

The advice went from bad to worse - get new firmware for your
CD/DVD ROM, get a new CD ROM drive, disable DVD playing software -
it went on and on. All this, just to play a game! One chap was
upset enough to complain that he didn't know anything about
computers and didn't expect to have to jump through hoops just to
play, and he was curtly told to get someone who did know and stop
wasting everyone's time! (I should mention that was the exception,
and the support team were as helpful and friendly as they could be
considering they were fighting a losing battle).

Well, I was not the only person to return what I consider to be
this flawed software, and I was lucky to get my money back. A
check on the technical website now reveals well over two thousand
posts, most of them with the same complaint - it won't run. Many
of the more knowledgeable people seem to think the fault lies in
the game's copy protection system, but Impressions won't have it.
I wouldn't mind so much if Impressions weren't stubbornly refusing
to admit they produced something less than wonderful and
continuing to blame the problem on people's computers. Well, I
have to say that I will be thinking long and hard before I ever
buy another Impressions game, which is a shame considering the
pleasure they have given me in the past.











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