Toby's journal

Check out this bloke's reviews: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/zeropunctuation
(Thanks to Simeon for the heads-up)

So, I'm feeling really quite ill today. Ugh.
I went out and bought some nice cheese from Borough Market though, which cheered me up slightly, although the pouring rain didn't.
Anticipating staying at home feeling ill for some time, I bought a new computer game to play (Neverwinter Nights 2). However, I've been spending the last two hours just trying to get the damn thing to work. It installs fine, but then tries to auto-update, which after downloading for 20 minutes, tells me it received a corrupted file, and quits. Run it again, same problem. *sigh*

Having downloaded the file about 5 or 6 times now (at 115 Mbyte a throw!), I receive identical files each time (according to diff and md5sum), yet am always told it's corrupted by the updater.

This is having distinct echoes of the last EA patch to Battlefield 2142, which was a complete clusterfuck, and took me days to manually hack until it would work. These are meant to be games, played for enjoyment. I shouldn't be having to beat them over the head so much just to get them to work.

I know that writing and debugging software is hard. I do it for a living.. However, the quality of games at version 1.00 is UTTERLY FUCKING APPALLING, and the patches often seem to make things worse rather than better -- if you can even get them to apply.

[Edit: By using Linux's "unshield" utility to extract things manually, plus someone's 3rd party patch util for NWN2, I've managed to get things work. Took a bit over 5 hours!]