So, I got Temple of Elemental Evil today. For the uninitiated, that’s a game for the PC. It’s based on an old D&D adventure titled, unsurprisingly, The Temple of Elemental Evil.
I got this game because Troika is an excellent game developer; their first game, Arcanum, was brilliant.
I was worried about it because it was published by Infogrames, who, to dodge the crappy reputation they’ve earned, recently bought the rights to the “Atari” name.
I was right to be worried. The game is unplayable, quite literally; it will not start on my machine, and it appears that a goodly number of people (10? 20?) have serious problems getting it to install or run, at all. That’s because of the incredibly-bad SecuROM copy-protection scheme; a scheme which appears to be a big barrier to successful playing of legitimately purchased games, but the warez sites have all had cracks up for ages.
The amazing thing is the sheer density of weird bugs which you’d think would have been caught in beta testing - and indeed, some evidence suggests that they were caught, but Atari doesn’t want to bother putting out a patch.
But… if they fix the horrific mouse movement problems, and the crashes and crashes and crashes, and all the magic spells that become permanent and undispellable for no obvious reason… It’ll be a great game. The combat engine is exactly what you’d want if you were going to play 3.5E D&D on a computer. It’s really good, and all the finicky stuff is there.
In other words, it’s a Troika game; good attention to detail. I just hope that Atari is willing to make a patch happen, because this game desparately needs it. I really hope Troika finds better publishers in the future.
Comments [archived]
From: cynthia
Date: 2009-03-05 00:05:18 -0600
do You have the patch to make it install I can’t get it to install it keeps comming up with a data2.cab error please help me I would like to play this game.