09.08.06

Ubi fails to supoprt x64 again

Posted in General at 10:29 am by jw

I took a lapse of common sense and went out to get a new joystick, which I’d been looking at for over a year now trying to figure out if I really did want it or not.  Turns out I really did want it, and while I was at Best Buy I decided I’d pick up a new flight sim at the same time, to test out the joystick with.  Looking through the selection, which consisted of about 3 titles I didn’t already have, I quickly grabbed Blazing Angels as it looked like it had the most recent video engine of anything up there (I’m really looking forward to FlightSim X) to bring home.  Figuring that Ubi has gotten past their love affair with the nasty copy protection hackware called StarForce, things should be ok on my x64 system.

Well… I was wrong.  Installed the game fine and it even started up fine (but required a reboot to install whatever their latest copy protection idiocy is).  Went to play the first mission and it just hung on the loading screen viagra tablets india.  A quick trip to their support boards located some patches, which I dutifully applied to no avail.  Then I noticed that there were a number of posts with other people complaining of the same thing, with no comment by Ubi and apparently no resolution.  This was almost a mirror of the nightmare I had with Splinter Cell:Chaos Theory (which works nicely now thanks to a cracking group that removed the StarForce junk preventing me from playing a game I legally bought), and I decided I wasn’t going to put up with it.

Best Buy were great – I’d prepared for a big showdown on trying to return open software but they happily accepted it when I explained it didn’t work on my x64 system and they exchanged it for a game that did (Microsoft’s Combat Flight Sim 3).  I’ll definitely buy from Best Buy again.  I might even buy Ubi games and return them if they continue to ignore their customers and ship faulty games, just to make it look bad on their balance sheet.

Permalink