Deciding when/if to buy SH4

Mystic · 07-27-07, 09:13 AM

1) I regrettably passed on SH3 because of Starforce. I understand that SF was not used on SH4 ... however, I recall some early reports of similar problems (with DVD-RW drives and such) with the new copy protection on SH4, right after the game's release, and so I stopped paying much attention thereafter. Now that a lot of time has elapsed, is there a consensus on SH4 and its propensity (or lack thereof) to not run properly or even screw up computers because of copy protection? (After SH3 I continue to be extremely wary of Ubisoft in this regard.)

2) The system I would run SH4 on if I were to get it today is an Athlon 64 3000+ (which runs at 2GHz), 1GB of RAM and a Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB videocard. The recommended specs for the game don't seem to differentiate between clock rates on the Intel and the AMD chips, so even though the Athlon 64 3000+ is roughly performance equivalent to a 3Ghz Pentium 4, I don't know if it just barely meets the game's minimum specs, or the recommended ones. I'm also concerned that the video card might be at the "bare minimum" level as well. Any thoughts? Should I look into upgrading my system before attempting to run SH4?

3) I still see a lot of complaints about SH4 needing more patching, and not having been completed to the same degree as SH3. Well, not having played SH3, the newest comparable sim I have is SH2. How does SH4 after patch 1.3 compare to SH2 in terms of completeness, AI quality, bugs, etc.?

07-27-07, 09:13 AM	#1
Mystic Watch Join Date: Sep 2001 Posts: 20 Downloads: 1 Uploads: 0	Deciding when/if to buy SH4 1) I regrettably passed on SH3 because of Starforce. I understand that SF was not used on SH4 ... however, I recall some early reports of similar problems (with DVD-RW drives and such) with the new copy protection on SH4, right after the game's release, and so I stopped paying much attention thereafter. Now that a lot of time has elapsed, is there a consensus on SH4 and its propensity (or lack thereof) to not run properly or even screw up computers because of copy protection? (After SH3 I continue to be extremely wary of Ubisoft in this regard.) 2) The system I would run SH4 on if I were to get it today is an Athlon 64 3000+ (which runs at 2GHz), 1GB of RAM and a Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB videocard. The recommended specs for the game don't seem to differentiate between clock rates on the Intel and the AMD chips, so even though the Athlon 64 3000+ is roughly performance equivalent to a 3Ghz Pentium 4, I don't know if it just barely meets the game's minimum specs, or the recommended ones. I'm also concerned that the video card might be at the "bare minimum" level as well. Any thoughts? Should I look into upgrading my system before attempting to run SH4? 3) I still see a lot of complaints about SH4 needing more patching, and not having been completed to the same degree as SH3. Well, not having played SH3, the newest comparable sim I have is SH2. How does SH4 after patch 1.3 compare to SH2 in terms of completeness, AI quality, bugs, etc.?