![]() Returns have got to hurt the most for software companies, but they're usually insulated from returns by simply refusing to accept them. Unless the company gets negative feedback about it, the next game company won't put the time into quality control either. Someone didn't spend the time on quality assurance, and it shows. ![]() What the gaming industry needs is more reviews like the above. got in the habit of writing bad reviews, the PR people won't send them advance games any more. You won't see reviews like this one in regular gaming publications, which depend upon pre-releases of games - that review was written before Myst III was officially released, and if a gaming pub. (My source for most user reports are the forums at ). I'm now afraid to uninstall the game, since many people have reported the complete destruction of their Windows system upon uninstallation of Myst III. Probably the retailer will throw a fit about taking back an opened box, although, hey, isn't Safedisc supposed to prevent people copying the discs and returning the game, and since the company admits that their game won't run, there would be no point to keeping a copy of the game anyway. Ubisoft has been stringing customers along about a promised patch for the video problem (no patch is planned for the fact that many of their customers can't use the game due to Safedisc - that's a "feature") - the expected date for the M3 patch (named due to the error message) has slipped four times now, the latest being another week into the future. On a huge number of machines, perhaps a third of all desktops and an even larger percentage of notebooks, all of which nominally support the requirements listed on the box, Myst III simply won't run. Most crippling of all, if you have an Intel, S3 or SiS video card or video chipset, your game won't run at all (similar problems have also been reported with several other video chipsets, such as ATI Rage cards). Many people have also reported problems with choppy/broken video - this problem occurs on numerous different setups and even very fast machines. ![]() Nor could you play the game if your CD-ROM was lettered higher than H: - after all, no one has a drive higher than H:, right? (Ubisoft has released a patch for this problem.) Nor could you play the game in hardware mode if your card doesn't support 32-bit color, even though the game box prominently proclaims support for 16-bit. The Safedisc copy protection caused problems with dozens of models of CD-ROM drives - players' CD-ROMs weren't compatible with the purposeful errors caused by SafeDisc, and so they weren't able to play the game at all. To be more specific, Ubisoft shipped a game with a massive number of crippling bugs. The reason for the above ratings is that as far as I can tell, they shipped a set of drink coasters rather than a set of CDs with an actual game on them. ![]() So here's my evaluation of the game itself: No instruction manual, no installation guide, nothing to get you into the spirit of Myst, no handy journal to write down your thoughts, just a CD case rattling around inside a box that is about 10 times larger, by volume, than necessary to hold the case. Here's what you get when you order Myst III: I've now had the game for two weeks, and my review is below. I've been a fan of the Myst series since its inception, so we pre-ordered Myst III shortly before its release a few weeks ago.
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