Consoles

[jonbuck]

Around here the best selection of PC games is in a CompUSA. I went browsing this morning, intent on spending a gift card I got for Christmas, when I realized: There are no games out there that interest me that do not require a monthly fee to play. They also require a significant time investment to get to the point where the game becomes more

Comments

[viqsi]

Civ4's become infamous for those graphical problems. It's entirely possible, though, that current patches have fixed them. I'd need to know what your system's specs are before I could say "yea" or "nay" to that, tho.

(Don't mind me, just attempting to spread the obsession...)

[jonbuck]

I only got this computer a few months ago. I have a full gig of ram, an AMD Athlon 64 3000 CPU, and a GeForce 6600GT video card. None of my other games exhibit this problem, and I played them just to make sure after Civ IV caused the graphical problems.

The weirdest thing about them is that once I finally exited the game, I'd see two duplicate desktops at the top half of the screen, and the bottom half would be all garbage. The mouse looked normal, and with a little squinting I was able to restart via the Task Manager.

[viqsi]

Mm. Yeah, that's one of the configurations that was mysteriously either All OK or Screwed Up - most folks were Just Fine, but other folks had Major Isues. From what I understand, 1.52 made the probability of problems much less likely, but there's still kind of a risk factor.

Then again, my laptop's setup (Pentium M 725 (1.6GHz), Mobility Radeon 9000, 1.25GB RAM) was in the same sort of "randomness zone", and I usually get screwed on this stuff, and yet 1.52 worked just fine.

If you're interested in trying, I'd just suggest the following:
* definitely install the version of DirectX (9.0c) that's included, even if you already have that version; apparently that had an impact for some folks, and
* download and install the 1.52 patch before ever even starting Civ4 for the first time - it apparently caches a few things on first run, and that caused problems for some people.
Doing that made it work just fine for me.

The demo, btw, is utterly useless for evaluation of tech issues. (As most demos are, IMO.)