Feel the Rage

With Rage's release, there's been some amount of controversy. I've yet to play the game and, if reports are anything to go by, I doubt I'll get it at any point in the future, so this is all second hand. As is a lot of my more serious, non-review stuff.

By all accounts, is a functional enough shooter, if a tad boring at times. The problem seems to be, at least for the PC version, that it's a wee bit... broken. Lots of words have been thrown about, including things like 'shitty' and 'console' and 'port,' among other things, but let's examine the exact problems for now. Some of these could be put down as individual problems, but, given the vast quantity of reports coming in about this stuff, there's a lot of reasons to doubt that.

Firstly, and this one if kind of minor, the mouse sensitivity is apparently fucked up. The menu speed is, apparently (I'll be using that word and various synonyms a lot, for insurance) a lot faster than the actual game speed, to the point that people either have to play with low mouse sensitivity to be able to handle the various menus with ease, or precisely the opposite. The game also has a tendency to crash alot. Um, apparently.

There are also, seemingly, a lot of graphical problems. Like the lack of any detailed graphics options. And, by detailed, I don't just mean 'adjust your resolution using sliders,' there is literally nothing beyond gamma, resolution and anti-aliasing. That's a disturbing lack, and, in all honesty, I'm starting to see some validity to the consoleitis comments. Something like this would struggle to slide for a tiny indie title, never mind what is a triple-A title by a fairly major studio. If I remember correctly, one of the major players in id has, in the recent past, made some statements about how Rage would be a revolution in gaming, which makes this lack of attention particularly egregious. There is a texture streaming thing that apparently makes up for this shittiness, but it, apparently, works rather badly, with delays and textures taking too long to pop in.

Apparently the game has so many bugs and glitches that it can be nigh-unplayable. Framerate issues, random crashes, broken audio, bugged character models,the Russian roulette involved in loading a game - the list goes on for a depressingly long time. The developers have released a bunch of (*coughdayonecough*) patches to try and fix the issue. That's another one to check off my list, then, and without any money lost. Huzzah!