Re: Games Discussion Thread
Allright, since roadkill suggested(?) AVA (Alliance of Valiant Arms), I decided to give it a try. The game itself is fine, apart from a wierd FPS drop that happens randomly (apparently it was caused by a recent update) it runs rather smooth, not the best graphics but passable, and the gameplay can be rather fun with a large number of modes and maps.
However, because this is a game run by ijji, it suffers the inherent problems of such games. Firstly, you need to download thier launching program Reactor, some kind of wanna-be-steam program that is the only way you can run the game and hogs your system resources. Second it uses a anti-cheat program called gameguard.
This is where the real problem lies (for me at least). Apparently neither avast or XP like gameguard, so I can't turn my antivirus on or it corrupts gameguard's files. Once the files are corrupt their non-xp-friendlieness won't allow them to be automatically fixed by the server the way they are supposed to be.
So now I've got a game that took 3-4 hours to install and update that won't work. I decide to try a fresh install, so I go in the controll panel and uninstall both AVA and Reactor to no avail, the uninstall process did nothing. So I have to go in and manually delete the folders, not a big deal, but then I have to go and delete all the registry entries as well

definately not happy. Once that is done, I re-install and wait another 3 hours for the game to update (and why couldn't the setup file contain these updates? what morons) 'this time I'll copy the update files from the backup folder before I uninstall!' is what I thought, but they were deleted when I tested the game

Long story short I eventually turned my antivirus on again and the game didn't work so I deleted and washed my hands of it.
Perhaps it is just a lack of compatability for XP users, or it is just poor coding, but all the shit surrounding this solid game makes it unplayable for me.
AVA 8/10
IJJI 0/10