I bought Lost Planet: Extreme Condition via Steam on the weekend. The game is 3rd person, which goes against my jump-jump-strafe-shoot-die-respawn 1st person philosophy, but heck the game just looks awesome and I did have a go of the demo on the Xbox 360 a few months back.
I may be wrong about the following figures, I estimated them from a Steam dialog that popped up about how much disk space is necessary for the game ... Anyways, after purchasing the game, the pre-req dialog said it needed 7GB of free disk space; so I freed up about 16GB and clicked OK. I've got 10MB Cable by Virgin and was seeing the bandwidth D/L coming down at around 960K consistently, 2 and half hours later it was downloaded and ready to run! I think it really pulled down about 3.5 to 4GB, but I didn't look at the downloaded resource files, and Steam did not mention or act like it was expanding the installation.
Fired the game up, and boom instant error dialog appears, giving no real hint as to why it failed to start. A quick browse through the Steam and game vendors forums, and I noticed a LOT of people having exactly the same problem.
Here's why:
The pre-reqs for the game pretty much state the minimal hardware is a 64bit processor, which is first for me to see. I've always had hardware that has been way above the minimum spec of the games released over the last 3 years, so this was a bit of a shock, and warning of things to come. I have an AMD XP3200 32bit CPU, and this is the first time I’ve come across a game that won't play on my system, as it was written using the SSE chip extensions instead of, or in addition to 3DNOW or MMX !!!! That is just truly insane that they haven't recompiled the game-code to support 3DNOW and MMX!
No point in complaining to anyone, put simply I don't have a processor with SSE support. It did state (but no reason why) that minimum spec is 64bit, so it's my fault really. But it's fair to assume a user would take that with a pinch of salt thinking that they can run everything else just fine at almost maximum settings, that this game shouldn't really be any different even though it states ideally to run on Vista and a minimum of a 64bit processor. Not a single word on the purchasing page such as warning "SSE Extensions support required", or "We've decided not to bother supporting MMX and 3DNOW", it would be reasonable to expect some kind of warning considering that Steams game catalogue has no such issues, with this game being (I believe) the first to break that rule.
It's just amazing how no information was put out by valve\steam notifying it's users who use MMX\3DNOW chips (check the Steam Hardware Survey page!!!) that this just won't work on their platform.
I usually just grumble almost silently when a game falls flat on it's ass because of the version of DirectX, version of the Video Card drivers, or direction of the wind at that particular time. But this has to be the most blatant disregard for the user-base i've ever seen from a game publisher (CAPCOM).
I guess sit back and either wait for a patch, or upgrade my hardware!
To be honest, game looks so sexy with DX10 features, and i've been running this gaming platform for over 2 and a half years now so she is due an upgrade. Just I was waiting for the hardware market to mature in to 64bit and stabilise (in terms of revisions and drivers) before jumping. Looks like I might as well start speccing up the next Gaming "Uber Beast"!
Note to self: Run for the hills!!! SSE2 supplants MMX, and was only taken up by AMD in the Opteron and AMD64 processors in 2003. Guess i'm too RETRO for my own good, and so obviously out of touch with Hardware since I last spec'd up a gaming system :![Surprise [:O]](/emoticons/emotion-3.gif)