CAA: Christian Anime Alliance

So I decided to try out a new action RPG for my PC the other day.

EB Games are having a mid-year sale, and I saw Silverfall for 10 bucks.

10 bucks, can't go wrong, right?

Wrong. I tried 3 times, couldn't even get past the installation screen, it just kept freezing my PC.

I had tried the demo before and didn't have any problems playing it, so I didn't expect this is how my installation attempts would turn out. Finally I quit trying, returned the game, paid another 40 dollars extra at EB Games, and got Titan Quest: Gold Edition.

It looks like a really awesome game (graphics-wise), and the promise of vast areas to explore was just what I was looking for in an action RPG. I installed the game without any problems, found out I had the latest version too with the Gold Edition, so no patch required.

Things were looking up! I ran the game, the introduction video was so beautiful, but around 20 seconds into it, the game crashed and I got back into Windows.

So I thought it might have been lack of resources on my PC (though I have 1GB of RAM - the recommended system specs). I rebooted my PC, ran the game again, same thing. Crashed 20 seconds into the game.

I then went and downloaded the latest driver for my ATI Radeon card. I also went and downloaded the latest version of DirectX from Microsoft's website. Ran the game, same problem. 20 seconds, crash.

Then I tried running the game again, this time turning off all my background applications (anti-spyware, anti-virus, firewall, etc.). Same problem, 20 seconds, then crash.

I then and looked on the various gaming forums, discovered that quite a lot of people with ATI graphics cards were having similar issues, only they were at least able to play 4 or 5 minutes of it before it crashed. Apparently people with nVidia cards had no problems. The suggested solution for people with ATI cards was to download the latest drivers for their cards (which I did).

I then e-mailed THQ's support, they replied fairly quickly, asked me to send over my dxdiag information, which I did. Currently awaiting their reply, hopefully it will be fixed - because I just wanna be able to play this game.

So before I have managed to play Titan Quest, I have already had to do my own "titan quest".

At it's core, Titan Quest is quite possibly one of the best games in it's genre, and if it weren't for some major glaring flaws, it probably would be THE best.

For whatever reason, Titan Quest REFUSES to take full advantage of available system memory. It never seems to utilize more than approximately 350 MB of my system memory, and it causes EXTREMELY noticable performance issues, despite having 1.2 GB of free memory available that the game COULD use if it would simply DO IT.

This also leads to MASSIVE issues for non-server players in multiplayer LAN play, as entering a region that isn't loaded into memory on the server-side player's machine ends up being a 2-4 minute ordeal as you first have to wait for the server to load the area, and THEN your client begins loading the area.


Despite many glaring flaws, however, I do believe Titan Quest is one of the best games of it's kind, and I have wasted many many many hours on it.

Ah titan quest. I bought it but have yet to actually get around to playing it. We should all play together !