Magazines survive off advertising revenue. The people advertising are the same software and hardware suppliers they review. As a result they're more than prone to give artificially high ratings.

I am waiting for the patch before I play any more. I am glad to see it, now I am aware based on reading both official site forums and this forum that this list is not final. I hope these 2 things are fixed:

- chronometer not working
- crashes to desktop when using stadimeter

What I hate is having to pay money to be a beta tester, again! When was the last time you bought a game that didn't need a patch right away? What's up with this? I feel like such a sucker, again.

I guess game developers can't trust thier beta testers not to leak the game so they let the community do it for them.

Very nice. :D

Jeff, just wanted to say I appreciate your reviews in that new-named rag. Been a CGW subscriber since the mid-80s, and of Computer Games for about five years. CGW has always prided themselves on only reviewing finished, shhipped games in the state the customer recieves them at the register. In the past year I can recall one (1) follow-up review after a major patch, and it was very short (1/4 page maybe.) Don't recall the title. I have seen, as you say you'll do, many reviews mention that a patch is promised, but what else can you say?

Others here have made valid business arguments that a launch is a complex animal--and it is, I've done them in packaged goods--but there is a trade-off in looking inside the firm for good logistics and revenue behaviors at the expense of product quality. To expect consumer demand to be equivalent with a broken game versus a finished game is to misunderstand basic microeconomics.

The trick, it seems to me, the sweet spot, is to post-pone those logistic and marketing decisions late enough in the cycle that product quality is a bit more of a sure thing than we're seeing here. It's hard. But there are trade-offs either way. As the saying goes you can pay me now, with penalty charges to pressing plants and shippers, etc., or you can pay me later, with lost demand as word-of-mouth spreads that the game is unfinished. Either way no free lunch.

Keep doing reviews as you do and I'll keep buying the mag.

That has not been my experience with the magazine Jeff writes for. They have been around more than 25 years, far longer than most (any, now?) of the publishers and developers they review. And, with "Windows" in their title now, I think they have some fairly deep-pocketed advertisers available.

Can't say I didn't see this one coming. Very few games that ubisoft puts out run reasonably well right from the box. I half expected a patch in the SH IV website download area before the game was released. Yes, bugs are to be expected. But, not to the degree that I have seen come from Ubi's games...

Would it have been too much to delay the game's release, say 3-6 months and present a well polished fine-tuned game. Or is it better to release the game to bad reviews and irritated players, then grab the bailing wire, duct-tape, and chewing gum and go to work.

I mean 200MB, that's not a patch, that's a chunk of the game that was missing...
I pity the poor slobs that buy this game and still have dial-up.


Ahh hell, I'm still pissed my copy hasn't arrived yet

I can't believe some people were expecting a perfect product from the get go. With the tight development cycle that the devs had to work with, bugs and unfinished content are to be expected.
SH3 was exactly the same. Even though they agreed to spend more time on the development implementing new features, there were many unfinished bits that never saw action in any patch.
In that respect they have already done better than with SH3. Some of you are acting shocked at the fact that SH4 release is buggy, when you should have seen it coming.

I also can't believe some people choose to see the release of a patch negatively. This kind of whining is completely unconstructive, as it won't change anything. The game has been released and we have to live with that, complaining that the release was buggy won't make it any better. What's done is done. The patch will make it better and that is a good thing.

That said, I'm not complaing about complainers in general. Whines and complaints are great when they highlight the bugs that we want to see fixed, as many have already done. The devs have already started fixing things, so let's see this positively.

I can toast to that. :up:

Father you can have VSYNC ON !! just check my post :

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=108134

hope it helps...

:arrgh!:

That worked for me, Fercyful.

Thanks! :arrgh!:

That didn't happen with SH3 so why assume it will happen with SH4? The SH3 retail copies around today are still 1.0.

PC Gamer, definitely (Doom 3 review anyone?)....CGW (Games For Windows) not so much.

Yeah thanks that works, got pointed to that tip elsewhere as well. Why it's not a menu option doesn't make sense.

Now only AA and proper high res are left, Considering that SH3 could at least do higher res via some hack it's beyond me why SH4 can't out of the box.
Until then no SH4 for me, and nope not after Oblivion quality graphics here, just graphics that are at least the going standard for games nowadays.

Patch should be live tomorrow, with two distinct patches.
A 154 meg german language patch, to change the voices from english to german for all the deutchlanders out there, and a 117 meg patch to actually fix the game up to 1.1