SH4: Huge Dissappointment

[Spearfish]

Hello,

This is my first post and I'm sorry in advance if it's not in the correct place, or has already been covered. But I just had to air my frustration with SH4.

I, like many of you have been waiting with baited breath for the better part of a year to get SH4. Based on the screenshots seen, it looked as if SH4 would truly surpass even the amazing SH3.

So, I paid my £25 and eagerly awaited SH4's arrival through my letterbox. Once it had arrived I wasted no time in installing it onto my PC.

Well, hmmm... first impressions were not good, not good at all. I had read about audio glitches in a recent review, but thought that they would be very minor and would not affect game play. After playing - or trying to for a short time the problems were just too distracting. So, I trawled around the Net for a patch and sure enough I found the 1.1 patch and thought "Great! everything will now be sorted." ... wrong! After downloading and installing the 200mb patch in some ways things were worse!

Audio glitches were still present, with audio sometimes even cutting out altogether. There's a ridiculous sounding voice that sounds a little like a young girl with a twang of New Jersey in his accent. They've now apparently corrected the depth readings which were in meters in the original release (although how this managed to get through in the first place amazes me). However, confirmations of commands are often repeated twice, Setting the rudder to the amidships position now results in the confirmation "Rudder." - And that's it! Rudder what?

Then I tried leveling off after my first dive by hitting the "A" key. Well, this just completely crashed the game!

I could go on and on, but I will spare all of you. Suffice to say that I simply cannot believe that something - even a patched something! - could be released into the commercial market with the kind of fundamental flaws that SH4 has! Any complex piece of software will have bugs, I know, I am a developer myself and have been for the past 20 years. I know that if I released something with such basic and obvious bugs as SH4 I would be fired!

No one can say that this was tested properly. I mean, pressing the "A" key causing the whole thing to go belly up is not something difficult or abstract to find in testing.

Oh, I almost forgot. It seems that after the patching process my engine commands have been screwed up. Pressing 1 now yields "Ahead one-third" and going up a level by pressing 2 now gives "Ahead slow". Just another example of sloppy and unprofessional approach.

At this moment in time it's going to take a significant patch - or rewrite to resolve these issues properly and until such time SH4 will be firmly "left on the shelf" by me. I dread to think that I also may have spent over £150 to upgrade my RAM and graphics card for this title.

This game has massive potential and it's a shame that it was released like this. I am looking forward to be able to play this game in the future, but for now, I will be quite content playing Sh3.

Thanks for reading.