Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

A few weeks ago, we wrote up a post-mortem for Pandemic Studios, and the work they had done.  In that same article, we talked about whether The Saboteur would be releasing as a top notch product, or something that would just be shoveled on to store shelves, hoping to make whatever it can for EA.

Well, it looks like it is the latter of the selections, because since its release on the 4th of December in Europe, The Saboteur has had nothing short of major issues with ATI video cards on PCs.  Nomerous posts in the official forums talk of crashes right after starting up the game.  All have a similar thread in common – Windows Vista or Windows 7 machines with ATI video cards inside.  What is more troubling about the issue is the fact that EA still released The Saboteur to US audiences, without having a solid fix in place.

Right now, the sad thing is that the fix will end up making the game run like a pile of garbage, as the quick fix is to set your CPU affinity to one and run the game.  Yes, you read that right, they want users to turn off all the extra CPU’s in their case to run the game correctly.  So a game that recommends you use a dual core CPU, can’t use multiple CPU cores when combined with an ATI system.  Ironically, when you load The Saboteur on PC, it starts with a huge splash screen stating the game is powerd by ATI, or something to that effect.

Listen I know that their are multiple computer configurations out there, and their will be issues with playing computer games, but this just seems ridiculous.  The fact that 90% of ATI users are screwed out of playing this optimally without some fix from either ATI, Windows or EA.  It could even be a combination of thingstwith all three entities, but when you know the product will not be playable on 50% of the computers out there, why would you even send it to release.

It is unfortunate, because the gaming community was really behind The Saboteur 100%  The changed up setting and other new ideas really made the game look sharp.  Now, 50% of the gaming populace can’t even look at the game.  Let’s hope the guys at EA step up to the plate and fix the issue quickly.