Simplify your laptop buying
- Average user rating: 3.0 stars out of 42 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
-
10 out of 11 people found this review helpful
1.0 stars
"Laptop Users BEWARE!!!!!"
Pros: Historically a great line of games
Cons: Many people can't get it to run correctly...including me
Summary: One look at the technical support forum at http://forums.civfanatics.com/forumdisplay.php?f=159 should give you a clue as to what you're in for.
I'm one of the many in this forum that have complained of crashes, BSOD's, choppy video, the "cheshire cat" (explained later).
If you own a laptop with an NVIDIA or ATI graphics card, you will be most at risk. There are numerous references to 3rd party video drivers you can attempt on your system. I've spent about 12 hours trying to get this to work.
Once you encounter these problems, you've obviously opened up the CD's, therefore you're going to have trouble when you go to ask for your money back.
People at the forums are screaming for an immediate service pack. The word I heard is that a beta of the service pack was submitted on Monday 11/21 and will be out "soon".
I'm a big Civilization fan. I waited so long for this release only to be disappointed. I love the originals so much, I was willing to try for 12 hours to get it to work.
I'm not giving up on the game until the service pack comes out. Then I'll cross my fingers. Chances are, I'll have to find another computer to play the game on.
Issues specific to my system are:
1) Cheshire Cat: The pictures of the leaders only show their teeth, eyebrows, hat, and tie....no face.
2) Midnight map: The main map is totally black so you can't view terrain..you can see resources and cities, but no terrain.
3) Game frequently freezes when starting it up.
4) Experimenting with display drivers result in BSOD's (blue screens of death).
5) Game will start up, look like it's about to run, then shut down with no error message.
I'd wait until the service pack comes out, and monitor the board reference above to see if people are any happier.
-marc michaels
macedonia, ohioUpdated
After installing service pack 1.09, everything seems to be in order...at least for me.
The tech board seems to have calmed down a bit, but you can still see that many people continue to have problems with the software.
The process of waiting for the service pack was a fun one. Firaxis briefly released, then recalled, version 1.08. Those of us who couldn't play version 1.00 at all, were able to find bootleg copies of 1.08, which helped us begin playing. 1.09 came out within the next day or two though.
My game still crashes, but only after hours of play. The game autosaves frequently, so I don't lose much if it crashes. The times I DO play now are even more addicting than previous versions.
Civilization IV (PC):
%20user%20review%20and%20rating%20-%20CNET%20Reviews&srcUrl=http://reviews.cnet.com/pc-games/civilization-iv-pc/4864-9696_7-31447850-2.html){kind=small}