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User Name dave_d
Member Since 2001-12-08
Total number of Feedback Posts: 12
Total number of comments: 3
Last 10 Feedback Posts by dave_d [ Search for All ]
SketchFighter 4000 Alpha 1.0.0 (Mac OS X)
Kudos to the author, artist(s) and music creators of this game. It's amazing to go from the heavy graphics FPS games to this, and to like this game better. Very imaginative and original. Great job! [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 1 of 1 users found this helpful
Friday, February 02 2007 @ 10:38 PM PST
Civilization IV 1.61rb (Mac OS X)
This patch removed my game sounds almost completely, and made existing graphics issues (screen colors freaking out, going black, etc...) even worse. I see nothing in this patch that improves performance or any other aspect of the game. I'm about to re-install so the game is fairly playable again. Great game, very poorly tested patch. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 1 of 1 users found this helpful
Wednesday, January 31 2007 @ 05:58 AM PST
MacDialer 1.6.9 (Mac OS X)
It's always nice to install software that actually does something when you double-click the application icon. This application will not even pretend to open. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 2 of 2 users found this helpful
Thursday, August 26 2004 @ 10:02 PM PDT
Call of Duty 1.4 (Mac OS X)
Never crashed on me once, nice gameplay, good variety, good graphics. Very realistic, at least to someone like me who has never really been in a war time situation. I thoroughly enjoyed this game. The only thing I would change is to add more missions. I finished it in just a couple of days. [alert admin]
Tuesday, August 17 2004 @ 02:30 PM PDT
Return to Castle Wolfenstein 1.4.1 (Mac OS 9, Mac OS X)
This game is not fun. The music is really annoying, the graphics are so-so, the gameplay is not engaging, and the occult is used to artificially lend creepiness to the game, a cheap gimmick that's getting really old in the game world. [alert admin]
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Thursday, August 05 2004 @ 08:15 PM PDT
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness 1.0.1 (Mac OS X)
This game is not very much fun. I loved playing the original Tomb Raider, but no real improvements have been made since then, in my opinion. Here are the reasons I quit playing this game about 1/4 of the way through. It's boring and not very fun, and here's why: 1. Tomb Raider was great at the time, but you have to keep up with the times and the competition, and I don't think the makers of this game have done that. The graphics are not that great compared with the current FPS games on the market, and Lara can't interact with nearly enough items in the game to make it interesting. Running around town and climbing on things are not as exciting as they were 10 years ago when you couldn't do those things in any other games. 2. There were several spots in the first few chapters where I got stuck in dialogs and had no way to get out of them. In one case, I had the combination to a keypad. I hit the action button, and I couldn't access my inventory to get the combination. Worst part was that I also couldn't get out of the keypad screen! I had to look up the combination in a walkthrough on the internet to get past it. 3. Several times the game locked up and I had to force restart my Mac to get out of it -- very bad manners indeed. I'm on a dual 2.0 G5 with a Radeon 9600, so there's no performance reason that I should have encountered in a game like this with marginally complex graphics. 4. The new dialog feature where you can talk to NPC's sounds neat, but it's actually a real pain. You have to sit through their whole dialog even if you don't care what they're saying. If you've already talked to them it and then have gone back to a saved position, you're going to hear their whole story again. Some dialogs have little mini-movies that are very boring, like watching 2 guys fight after making a wager on them. That particular scene seemed like it was about 45 seconds to a minute long, and was nothing. The 2 boxers just kind of jumped around, punching each other a couple of times, then one went down. No sound, no excitement, just me sitting there bored until one of them goes down. I would have at least liked to hit the space bar or something and get out of it. In that particular scene, there's also a 50-50 chance of losing the wager, in which case you have to go back to a save game and watch the whole boring dialog and fight again. That's not fun. 5. Lara jitters a lot in the game. The graphics shudder and look bad when she makes a jump into a wall or some other thing the programmers don't want you to do. This happened in the original Tomb Raider, but should have been improved by now. 6. Lara can jump incredible distances, longer than any real person. That's fine, it's a fantasy game anyway. But why can't she jump over a 3 foot barrier, or onto a small rock? I don't care if it's realistic, just make it consistent! 7. Bad guys often come out of doors that Lara cannot open. This is annoying. They also sometimes just appear out of thin air. Again, this was acceptable 10 years ago when the original TR came out, but the best games are now much more realistic and I think you really can't get away with it nowadays. 8. Look mode in Angel of Darkness is just as terrible as it has always been in TR. Sometimes Lara can look around, sometimes not. Her looking is very limited, and slow! If I look around in real life, I can do it at least twice as fast as Lara can in the game. I don't want to spend so much time looking around, and having to turn Lara all around to see my surroundings. I want to see what I need to see and get on with it, and I want to look when I want to look, not when it's convenient for the programmers to let me look. 9. Another look issue: I can see Lara's back and even the backs of her eyeballs (?!?) when I look sometimes. This is not cool. It's also a major annoyance to see the other side of a wall, or some obstacle behind or above Lara when attempting to look. Again, this is no better, perhaps worse, than it was in the original TR. I feel like somebody is trying to coast on an old idea, and not improving it to try to meet today's challenges 9. Lara's targetting abilities are a pain, and not at all realistic. If I'm walking around holding a gun, it doesn't automatically raise and point at someone just because they're a bad person. I'd prefer to have a target on my screen like in Doom and other FPS games, and manually turn around, target them and shoot who I want to shoot. I don't want Lara turning around to aim at things. Just indicate to me that I'm getting shot at like in real life, and I'll turn around and find my opponent and shoot him myself. Just hitting the fire button is boring, and not at all realistic. 10. More ammo, please! Even though Lara self-targets, I ran out of ammo several times, leaving me at the mercy of the guys across a big area with guns. Not fun. 11. It takes way too long for some non-controllable actions to occur in this game, and others . If I get arrested, don't show some 5-10 second mini-movie of me getting arrested, just get on with it. Also, don't just let me die and quickly say "Game Over". The game is not over. You know I want to continue, so just kill me and give me my load options quickly. QuickLoad is great, but if you kill me so quickly that I don't have time to hit the QuickLoad F-key, what good is it? Then I have to wait to go to a load screen and do it the long way. 12. Lara does things slowly. I really don't care about waiting forever for her to shimmy somewhere or climb a long vine. This is a waste of time, and just seems like compensation for a game that should have more scenes and action in it. Yes, it's neat that she can climb pipes and vines, but it takes forever. If she's such a super-jock, get the vine-climbing out of the way, and get on to some intrigue and action. Well, that's all I have, I guess. I know I've been rather hard on this game, but I think the developers have gotten very lazy, and that bugs me. Again, I feel like they're just milking what used to be a really great game, and haven't invested in new technologies and ideas in order to make it the cutting-edge game it originally was. I don't want to play a 10-year old game with a year's worth of improvements. I want to play a new, state-of-the-art game, and would be most happy to pay twice the money to do so. This game, though, isn't worth the $30 I paid for it. I'm selling it, and have no interest in getting through the rest of it before I do so. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 2 of 2 users found this helpful
Thursday, August 05 2004 @ 07:40 PM PDT
Halo 1.0.5 (Mac OS X)
I bought a gamepad to use with Halo, and found after I got home with the game that Halo doesn't support a gamepad on the Mac. This stinks. Slightly less annoying: I bought a Dual 2GB G5 and a 23" Cinema display so I could do things like playing games in high-res, but Halo only supports up to 1280x960. I'm disappointed. This game would be a lot more fun if it were not crippled in these ways. I hate to say it, but due to these limitations, this game was a lot more fun on my buddy's XBox. [alert admin]
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Saturday, July 17 2004 @ 06:12 PM PDT
Northland 1.0.1 (Mac OS 9, Mac OS X)
I've been playing the Northland demo for a little while now, and I've noticed some shortcomings: 1. I can't adjust the sound volume. I don't see any way to control the sound levels. 2. I have a 1920x1200 screen, and I'm forced into 800x600 mode, or into 1024 or 1100 mode with lots of black on my screen. I bought the big screen so I could see lots of things on my screen, and wish I could change the resolution to match my screen. This is a major drawback to me. 3. Northwind's AI is not the greatest: -- Builders won't go across town to get supplies they need\ -- People get lost in the middle of town and messages come up saying I need to build signposts? I could understand this outside of town, but not among highly populated areas. -- Carriers won't walk more than about 20 paces from warehouses to pick up materials, and gatherers won't bring them close enough for carriers to pick them up. Carriers should walk as far as necessary to get materials that my own gatherers have gathered, or the gatherers should bring them to the nearest warehouse. 4. There should be an idle worker keyboard shortcut. In fact, there should be lots more keyboard shortcuts than there are for citizen management, as well as "go to last event", and other commonly desired actions. When you get a hundred or so citizens, it starts to get too hard to find workers who are trained as something other than civilians, but are standing around. 5. Carriers, or at least someone, should be able to pick things up off of the ground, such as weapons and raw materials. It's a pain to have a gold bar or a nice longbow lying on the ground, and it seems you can't pick it up. 6. Carriers and merchants should be allowed to service areas instead of single locations or routes. Otherwise, you have to have a carrier and a merchant for every production building in the game, which is very painful to manage. If you could circle an area for carriers to cover, and if you could select more than 2 locations for merchants to cover, life would be much easier. 7. You should be able to select groups of people more easily when you hit F7 to manage your groups. For example, try telling 20 women to have children. What a pain! You should be able to choose 10 of them, tell them to have boys, and choose the other 10 and tell them to have girls. Scrolling down past the first 5 women every time you want the 6th and higher in the list to have kids is a major pain. Same goes for all of the lists (homeless, builders, carriers, etc.) This is *almost* a top-notch civ-builder game on the order of Age of Empires. It's not as slick looking and detailed, but it's a lot of fun to play up to a certain population. It would be a lot more fun if it were easier to manage the details of the game. I won't be buying the game in its current state, because it's just too hard to do everything after you get about 50-100 citizens. I also agree with another poster in this forum who said there should be more automation. There really is too much micro-management, especially when you build a large city with lots of citizens. If the AI were just a little smarter, and if city management were about 20% easier, I'd be adding this game to my collection. I'll check back in a while to see if a new version has been released, one that addresses some of these issues. [alert admin]
Thursday, June 24 2004 @ 07:11 AM PDT
Connectix Virtual PC 5.0.4 (Mac OS 9, Mac OS X)
Unusably slow under Panther. Causes a process called "kernel_task" to take up about 40% of CPU. I will not upgrade until I hear that speed has increased by several hundred percent. While it's incredible that this software can emulate Windows, it's a pity that it's too slow to use for anything practical. Even opening an Explorer window to surf the web takes minutes. Opening a contextual window on the desktop takes 15-20 seconds. Not usable, not even releasable. It was okay under OS9, but totally useless under Panther. This should be a free beta until the developers figure out how to make it fast enough to use to even load a web page. [alert admin]
Wednesday, January 14 2004 @ 11:56 PM PST
TaskEdit 1.0 (Mac OS X)
Nothing wrong here (using Jaguar)
This application works fine for me (under 10.2.8). I did the same thing "makalu" did, creating a new collection and renaming it, and didn't experience a crash or a freeze or anything negative. I don't think I have a need for a task manager application; this application was mentioned on a mailing list, so I thought I'd check it out. Still, it's quite stable for me. I ran through all of the buttons and options I could find, and had no problems. The application looks nice. Regarding Java, I wouldn't have noticed by the interface that it was Java. The interface looks very Mac-ish, and operations are plenty snappy. My conclusions: Nice application, very well done. I think that someone who's looking for this functionality should be pleased with its look, feel and performance. [alert admin]
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Friday, November 14 2003 @ 02:54 PM PST
Last 10 Comments by dave_d [ Search for All ]
You've gotten years of use out of this product and you give it 1 star because you've found something you like better? Nice. I have to say your review gets 1 star as well.
Original feedback item : Read More
Friday, September 28 2007 @ 05:11 AM PDT
You've gotten years of use out of this product and you give it 1 star? Nice. I have to say your review gets 1 star as well.
Original feedback item : Read More
Friday, September 28 2007 @ 05:11 AM PDT
I don't know about "complete idiots", but the same thing did happen to me. I got the game home and could not play it at all until I emailed the developers for a code. Not fun. They got back with me quickly with a new code, but I would just as soon not have had to go through that. At least send codes on stickers to the retailers so people who…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Thursday, August 05 2004 @ 07:49 PM PDT
