PC game boxes

BlitzKrieg

Currently in a supreme state of anger....



so begin the rant



PC game boxes need to be alot more specific in what type of cards will work with the game because at the moment they are far too general. I bought a game today from Game on Grafton Street and it said 3d card: 32mb. Now i know i have a **** card but i know its more then 32mb so i was confident the game would work. (its called Universal Combat and my graphics card is a geforce 4 MX) returning home (in tipperary) i find that the game will not work nmatter what i do because MX does not support pixal shaders. On the games website they have this circled as one of the most important things to know when buying the game but on the games box there's a tiny whimper that the game would work *better* with it.

I understand there are alot of graphics cards out there but if something as vital as this is needed and there are cards on the market that dont have it then the box should warn against it. The best box i ever saw is the one for either Far Cry or Breed which actually names all the cards that wont work with the game which was helpfull for me.

In all fairness i need a new card but i cant afford to do that right now and that doesnt excuse the fact that something this vital should be ignored. To make matters worse i cannot return the game because Game's 10 day return does not apply to PC software under any circumstances (this hit home when while i was in there a man was told he cant return manhunt because it doesnt run on his computer, but he can trade it in for a crappy price.)


if they cant change it to warn consumers of these sort of problems they should put graphics cards into a universal standard system so that really powerfull ones are standard 2004 and the numbers go down from there and game boxes can simply say on back standard 2002 or higher.

or some system like that would be better then the current casual lack of information.

DiscoStu

Its not that, its simply that Derek Smart hates you.

RobertFoster

and here was me thinking someone is finally ranting about the DVD cases...they just aren't as nice as the old cardboard style goddamnit!

I too got stung when I tried to play PoP with my MX card...but this did say it on the back of the box...in really small writing...

CivilServant

Hear hear! Old atari st games boxes were nice and big. I bought Terminator2 that had a free t-shirt inside. That's value. Now things feel cheapened by all the games appearing in dvd cases. The manuals have also gotten smaller.

Bought civ3 with the cardboard box and it had a nice chunky manual packaged inside. Apparently over in the US, cardboard box style games are still available. Someone should start a petition, we want cardboard boxes!

SirLemonhead

I still have all my big game boxes

*looks across at Monkey Island 2*

tba

Yea those card list things would be handy, of course you are still vunerable to the dreaded, "game not working for some obscure reason" like back when I got AVP 2 for my brand spanking new PC and it wouldn't run on it even though it ran on a worse machine (badly) damn PC's there like women, cant live with them... cant live without em.

ps. cardboard boxs are crap, so are the cases take out the cd and store it in a sleeve, giving me more room for my mouse

-oRnein9-

Originally posted by MasterOfSolos
I still have all my big game boxes

*looks across at Monkey Island 2*

Yeap me tooo, half-life, baulders gate, aoe.

Deadwing

Cardboard boxes rocked. I had about 4 tetering towers of stacked game boxes under my atari st's desk at one stage *L* I remember getting all kinds of free shit in those boxes, posters, badges, all kinds of crazy crap. Back in the glory days when developers cared about us

Retr0gamer

And some evil companies put the manuals in pdf format on the disc so that you can't read it on the train\bus home.:(

Boro

It is a problem these days with game boxes. Most of them have a sticker on them asking you to ring some premium rate number in england or something, in order to check if your game will work with your computer.

What happened to Blitzkrieg is not an isolated incident though, publishers really just dont seem to care anymore.

The change to DVD boxes is great for the shops and anyone that ships them, but me as a consumer, I much prefer the old cardboard boxes. I used to have a big stack of them for my Amiga - it was great. You felt a sort of pride or a feeling of ownership - actually having something concrete for your cash.

Even when i first got my pc, the games came in cardboard boxes - although they were normally empty bar the cd case.

Anyone remember Frontier (Elite 2) on the Amiga? Came in a big box with a manual that must have taken an entire tree to make! You just dont see that anymore. The last decent boxed game i got was the Baldurs Gate 2 box, which had a map in it and several chunky manuals.

I hate DVD boxes for my games and i really hate getting a tiny slip of paper with them and having these pdf manuals on the disc. Part of the fun is reading the manual on the way home.

When i was in teh states last, i walked into a couple of game shops. Wall to wall, BIG BOXES. It was great, like entering a shop from 5 years ago in ireland. All the current games had big cardboard boxes, and loads of special gear that went with them. A lot of games had 'special editions' that had even more free stuff.

Ahh... the nostalgia

Deadwing

Yeah..and back in the day all you needed to know was wether the game needed 1mb of ram or 512k to run. I was so disappointed street fighter 2 needed a whopping 1mb

silverside

Go into Game again and inform them that you are returning the game using your rights under consumer legislation.

Mention the sale of goods act and that the goods are not
"as described"
as they fail to work on your PC which does match the listed requirements.

It would be different if the box asked for e.g. Windows XP or a 32-bit colour depth which you didnt have. But since you do have a "32mb 3D graphics card" as listed on the box, the game can be returned.

You might want to print out relevant advice pages from oasis.ie or consumer affairs websites and bring them with you, then ask for the manager and calmly demand a refund.

jonski

The most important word there is 'calmly' , but I agree , you bought it having read the req. spec . which you had .


as for the cases , I thought ye were going to rant about the fact that sometimes it is soooo hard to get the disc out , to the point where sometimes you think it's going to break , it's the ones with the solid centre . I think Toca RD was one of them . Grrrrrrrrrrrrr!

Scratch Acid

The old cardboard boxes used to smell lovely too...

sam_hain

Silverside and BlitzKrieg hate to break this to you but Game currently have a policy where they will no longer return PC games under there 10 day money back policy. But of course if you go in and start ranting about consumer laws to them they will 75-99% of the time give in cuz they (we) are morons

BlitzKrieg

I know about the 10 day policy i watched it in process as i bought the game as the man beside me complained about manhunt not working (and he was calm) and they told him in future to check the specs before buying. It was at that moment that i read the specs VERY carefully and thought to myself 32 bit card yep my gforce 4 may be **** for upcoming giants like half life 2 but its def better then a 32 bit card. Makes me regret not going the extre 15 euros for ground control 2....*cries*



If i complained to Game i feel its really not their fault, i mean they put the game on the shelve being told that whats written on the back is whats needed.




On the big boxes...i loved them too, i remember when i bought alpha centauri...now that game knew how to show itself off. HUGE manual, big poster with the science tree and the weapons tree on the other side, the big box unfolds to give info on all the factions. I loved it.



On a similar note, i always respected Lucas Art for their approach to their games, the little launch table that allows gamers to make all the adjustments before actually loading the game (grpahics, controls etc) it also had a system for scanning your computer and telling you if you can run the game and how well you. I loved this cause it told me if the problem was my specs or a patch i needed for the area of problems (turned out for x wing alliance i needed new drivers not a new card...aww my crappy voodoo 3 how i hated thee)

RobertFoster

Originally posted by sam_hain
75-99%

wait a minute...is that your favourite percentage?

Sand

Blitz if your PC matched or exceed the requirements on the box, but it required more than that to run then you shouldnt feel ashamed about asking for your money back. Game might have done nothing wrong but neither did you.

Game dont care about your problems till you demand your money back, and the game manufacturers dont care that they lie/omit information on their requirements until stores like Game stop taking their products because customers are complaining about the lies on the requirements.

As for boxes, DVD cases all the way...small, compact, easy to store and very resistant to damage. This whole box collecting fetish is disturbing, along with the whole pipe and slippers "back in the good ol days" nostalgia.

sam_hain

wait a minute...is that your favourite percentage?

No it's my favorite range of percentage. 75% is more than half sure and 99% allows me to be wrong but still hold some face.

Captain Trips

Originally posted by Sand

As for boxes, DVD cases all the way...small, compact, easy to store and very resistant to damage. This whole box collecting fetish is disturbing, along with the whole pipe and slippers "back in the good ol days" nostalgia.

AH it's not all misplaced. I just got IL2-Forgotten Battles, having not purchased a flight sim since EF2000 I think, and before that, most of the Microprose sims on AMiga. All had nice manuals, lots of stuff to read and so on.

Now, you get a miniscule manual printed in 6 languages and the CD/DVD containing the *real* manual. To make matters worse this does cheapen the product in my mind - at least in days of yore spending 30 quid on a game you could say well the pirates don't get this, but these days it's as negligible as music media. The content is everything so the solid product becomes less attractive.

Hmmmmm.

article6

Originally posted by BlitzKrieg
On the big boxes...i loved them too, i remember when i bought alpha centauri...now that game knew how to show itself off. HUGE manual, big poster with the science tree and the weapons tree on the other side, the big box unfolds to give info on all the factions. I loved it.

Oh, now I'm disappointed. I bought it 2 years ago on budget, and the manual came in the aforementioned .pdf format. I'd love a big bulky manual for such a big game!

On the other hand, I do think the smaller cases are a good idea - better for the environment, easier to carry, smaller for game shops to stock, and some of them even have a proper manual still in physical form. Now my only gripes are the price of games and the way shops stack game boxes face-in-front rather than spine-in-front á lá bookshops.

Stephen

Yeah, DVD cases are best - all the cardboard boxes do is clutter up space. Why do people need all the extra crap like manuals that you don't need to read anyway, unless the game is something like a flight sim that uses 100 keys?

eyerer

i didn't like the cardboard boxes, huge space taken up with a cd-rom box and an oversized manual
usually i'd take the cd-rom box out and place it in my rack and throw the box into a hidden corner
wouldn't mind seeing more games posters though, i've never gotten one with a game purchase

i'm not that fond of dvd cases though, they're too big for a disc that size, though they do allow for a decent sized manual

pdf manuals are good for a backup, but i want a printed copy too

there's not nearly enough technical information available for PCs regarding software or hardware
if there are 32mb cards that dont work, in that context, they should be specifically mentioned
for shame

and GAME's abandonment of the 10day return is a sham, it was the only good thing about them (as well as quick shipping)
other places are nearly always cheaper

Absolam

I like the DVD boxes spacewise, but there is something about having a nice big printed manual..

Is1ldur

Scratch Acid wrote:

The old cardboard boxes used to smell lovely too...

Does that not worry anyone else....?

Ciaran500

Not really. Someone like this worries me more http://www.rdearnley.supanet.com/homepage.html

RobertFoster

Ciaran500 wrote:

Not really. Someone like this worries me more http://www.rdearnley.supanet.com/homepage.html

what are you even searching for when you come across sites like that?!