I am one of the suckers that bought into the Test Drive 4 fiasco. I
can only hope that their patch which should be released 1/17/98 will
help all TD4 users.
But, allow me to vent again...
For releasing this onto an unsuspecting public and expecting us to
shell out $50 and still end up feeling like a beta tester, it makes me
feel that, to roughly quote the late comedian Sam Kinison, I hope
those Accolade bastards slide under a gas truck and taste their own
***!!!
I'm certainly not a gamer, but if I had known this game was version
1.0 and has apparently only been out of the gates for only a matter of
weeks, I would have never wasted the money on this clunker.
My main irritation is the factors of (1) Lack of control, (2) hard
drive overhead requirements and (3) chasing down updated "Certified"
Direct X drivers from manufacturers. Sure, I'm not a gamer and I
started playing this "simulation" (what a friggin' laugh) with an old,
cheap Gravis joystick with dust clogging up the mechanism, but the
lack of control was unbelievable to the point of questioning my own
unrefined eye-hand coordination.
So I go out and buy a cheap CH Gamepad to see if it helps any, and it
does help the control issue quite a bit than my old joystick, but not
as much as a steering wheel rig might (I guess). I won't delve into
the steering wheel issue simply because I think the "affordable"
wheels are too cheaply made and anything built sturdier is
way-overpriced.
And as far as the hard drive requirements, my view is "This monster
comes on a CD and it still eats up 220 megs (minimum) hard drive
space?"
I have trouble thinking that these people have such a bloated game
that it has to pirate space off my hard drive in order to run code
from the CD!! And don't let the 220 meg requirement fool you, because
this gargantuan thing still needs "temporary space" and you had better
have (based on my experiences so far) at least 100 megs of free hard
drive *over* their 220 meg requirement.
I say this because of this: I've installed this thing on a C:
partition sized at 1 gig. This partition is quite full and the free
space creeps under 30 megs regularly, but I free it back up to 200
megs free just as regularly.
Now, when I fire up TD4 and play a while, I have had the game suddenly
stop, and I'm plunged back into Win95 desktop where I have to run the
game again.
A quick check in Explorer usually shows my drive space has dropped to
the "below 1-2 megs range". I wait on my drive to whir and purge
itself of these rogue "temp files" and then restart the game. (And as
much as I've had to restart this thing, I wish Accolade had all those
manufacturer trademarks rammed up their ***-asses, as well as that
"Loading" screen with the Vette rear shot.)
On the DirectX complaint, I am irritated that my machine, which is not
even one year old, is suddenly deemed "unqualified" to run TD4. Then,
I have to chase down updated drivers. Sure, if you've bought
name-brand components this task is easy, but what about the user on a
tight budget who may have opted for more affordable components with
lesser support? How easy might their "driver chase" be?
I guess I've ***ed more than enough about this thing. As I wrote
the other week in a posting, flame if you wish, but every one of you
have bought something that you wish you could have saved your money on
if only you had been warned earlier.
I leave hoping that the patch Accolade is notifying us about will work
and at least marginally improve this thing so that I at least feel
that my $50 was not pissed away in vain.
WS