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No Patch for Dead Rising Fans
1up is reporting that Capcom has put the kibosh on a patch for Dead Rising, frustrating fans who have complained about the games's almost unreadable text on Standard Definition screens. From the article: "So, the question is, will there ever be a patch? Unfortunately, that's a no. 'Due to the amount of text and the size of the patch necessary to change the text, a patch isn't possible for this issue,' said the company. 'We had asked the team if it was even possible but ... due to the scope of what a patch would need to cover, it wasn't possible.' As it stands, no patch is coming for Dead Rising players -- but maybe they'll change their mind if you yell loud enough."
Write your own patch. You can also improve the gameplay. Make new levels/mods, etc. Wouldn't it be nice if we had tools that could make this easier?
How we know is more important than what we know.
In these our modern times, when people need to get something done, they resort to the big guns: internet petitions.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
... when games become obsolete and irrelevent after about 3 months on the market. Aside from that, the text isn't vital to the gameplay itself. You can still finish the game just fine without it.
Now if it were one of those 80+ hour RPGs, it could be an important factor. But thats pretty much a niche market here in the US.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Fans: This game we bought needs to be fixed!
Publisher: Let me check if we can do that (pretends to be calling some programmer, faint sound of dialtone still audible through whole conversation). Ahh, we're sorry, that simply is not possible at this time. (besides, you already bought it, suckers!! *evil publisher squeal laugh*)
On another note..
Someone explain to me how changing out a font or two constitutes a large patch without there first being some ridiculous method of storing said text in the first place? Like maybe storing every dialog box as a separate JPEG...
TLF
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
Bugs of this magnitude simply aren't acceptable in the console world. A game with this major of a bug would never have gotten released by a real console company like Nintendo, Sony, or Sega. Shame on you Microsoft, the console market is not the pc gaming market. Console gamers demand and expect a high level of consistent quality from their games.
This probably just means that they are working on the next Dead Rising game, which is functionally identical to the first one, except for the fact that you can actually read the inappropriately Gothic-serif fonts.
If they don't do an official patch, then there will be homebrew patches. Something tells me that somewhere along the line, there'll be something all too sexual regarding zombies, and that's a lawsuit I don't wish to read about.
Who's still against the Wii only supporting Standard definition?
*HD TV owners put their hands up*
Yeah, well... *mutters*
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
Capcom don't want to make a patch to fix this. They wan't you to fix it by buying a HD TV. In this way, they can make even more de facto "HD-only" games, and hence justify higher game cost by claiming; "Most 360 gamers have/want " HD!!! (TM)", and it is more expensive for them to make HD games for whatever reason.
May the Maths Be with you!
...It's high definition!
It's the wave of the future!
Standard def is old and broken, nobody cares about it anymore!
...I got nothing.
People should make more of a stand on this. But I feel until the masses become affected that companies will just be able to get away with shafting their customers. How many people will be either forced to upgrade to HD, or even driven away from the company forever? I'd call for a boycott, but the game looks good, plus it would be too small to have an effect. Corporations need to learn that it's us who keep them alive.
www.jiggedyjoo.com
...Rayman DS. Much of the game is in shades of dark brown on black. Completely unplayable. It's as if it was never play tested on a real DS, just on an emulator with a super bright display. Of course they couldn't release a patch for a card - but at least a fix eventually appeared in the form of the DS Lite. People really need to test the final product on consumer grade hardware because these are unbelievably obvious bugs.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I had the same problem with Ghost Recon, so its not just Capcom. Fortunately I now have an HD set and the problem has gone away (and on Dead rising too). But I would be gutted too if I found a £50 game (not that I paid for it) that was unplayable because no one bothered to test on SD.
I thought more people on Slashdot of all places would have an HD TV. If you have a SDTV why even pick up a 360 in the first place? I thought I would skip the 360 and just get a Wii but I ended up buying a 50" DLP TV. After a couple days of playing Xbox on it I really wanted to see what HD games would look like. 360 looks great on the TV but I end up spending most of my time playing Geometry Wars and Marble Blast. When I'm not playing Oblivion anyways (which makes me happy I bought both an HDTV and a 360 since it runs like a slug on my computer).
Short version : Video games don't use wordwrap.
Long version : Its a hold-over from the 8-bit and 16-bit days, back when text would sometimes take up more memory than the game itself. You commonly hear this problem during fan translations of SNES games. When translated into English, the text would run out of the text box and, in the worst case, off the screen where it was completely unreadable.
to
Or seriously something similar to that. They complain they have tons of text to go through, but what does the amount of text have to do with the size of the font? Cereal Capcom, what a cop out.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Ok, I admit I have never coded a game. But I do have a bit of experience coding business apps (vb, c#, php, etc). Now how is it that the text included in the game doesn't have a size property? In almost every language (that I've seen) when text is output to the screen you have an option for the size in which the text is shown, which leads me to believe it's not the code required or the patch size.
o x-Live-Activity-for-week-of-September-4-2006.aspx) so why would they want to shell out money to their coders to produce a patch when they can work on developing their next product (like maybe getting Lost Planet out the door)?
It likely comes down to simple finances. Capcom has a product, which is selling very well (http://www.majornelson.com/archive/2006/09/09/Xb
Keep in mind, anyone who has bought the game, and can't read it, only has 2 options:
1) put up with the problem (like I do)
2) Sell it for a fraction of the price as most places won't allow exchanges once the case is open.
Either way, Capcom's grabbed the cash from the original sale, so what do they care?
Bottom Line, Capcom has put time/money ahead of Customer Satisfaction, sadly I'm not surprised.
The biggest insult keeps getting overlooked by EVERYONE on this. Capcom has refused to patch the game.... that's a slap in the face. The kick in the teeth comes from the fact that the SAME DAY that they announced they have absolutely no intentions of supporting the game.... they're throwing another $3million at the advertising budget to market the game. As long as DR keeps going out the doors, they don't give a crap.
TV Ad Buys Doubled to $6 Million to Increase National Exposure for Acclaimed Zombie Game
Actually, you relating CSS work to an engineering problem regarding TV displays just shows how poorly you understand what's going on. Writing CSS is "coding" in this sense in the same sense that Feng Shui is structural engineering.
When a CSS coder writes out their positioning and formatting directives, they can rely on another piece of software - a browser or operating system - to implement text wrapping and scrolling in a relatively predictable, standard manner. If the needs change from place to place, they don't have to worry about how repositioning or resizing one part of the text may impact the rest of it, because the browser or OS will simply accomodate it by recalculating where it needs to wrap long lines, and providing for additional or less scrolling area.
Funny thing about TVs... they can't really understand the difference between "text" and "graphics" the way a piece of computer software can, so writing text out from a video game to a TV properly is, in fact, no different than trying to position unwrappable graphics.
At least we can demand and get patches.
I bought Dead Rising for the 360 and its text is utterly unreadable.
This definitely calls for a letter writing campaign. This'll be the first AND last Capcom game my wife and I buy, and we will let them know that.
Unfortunately this is capitalist America and in this economy, corporations never listen to their customers anymore.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Funny thing about computer monitors, they can't really understand the difference between "text" and "graphics" either. Fortunately that sort of thing isn't handled by the monitor. The software should've been designed so that some kind of "text-display" function would be used, separating the text from the code required to display it. That way, wrapping functions could be added & changed as-necessary to accomodate different displays. Hard-coding line-wraps and other such things is just silly.
The game is a piece of software, a web browser is a piece of software (that happens to have solved the problem at hand quite nicely). It's actually a pretty good analogy. The game-artists should be at about the level of CSS-designers, they shouldn't have to be concerned so much with the internal workings of the engine.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
'Due to the amount of text and the size of the patch necessary to change the text, a patch isn't possible for this issue,' said the company.
That's what you get when have a zombie designer and zombie testers instead of hiring real people to think through what they're doing.
couldnt read the text on my normal tv, could only read it on my 56" high definition tv, but i don't like to play games on that one. i prefer to let my family use that one while i play games on my own television. so i couldnt tell what was going on so i returned my copy of dead rising and got hitman blood money instead.
if they'd patched it I would have probably went and got dead rising again.
Just yesterday the console gurus were telling us how PC Games require expensive upgrades and consoles do not. This is too funny.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Don't you think gamers might be more likely to fall into a category which has a higher percentage of HD TV's in their household?
Your "overall" statistics includes my grandparents who will never even care what HD is, and lots of folks who don't early adopt as well. Gamers are probably not in the same percentile as the general population.
There lies, damned lies and then there are statistics...
Why not take it back to the shop and get a refund or something else instead and in that way tell Capcom to shove their shitty attitude? Surely it's not the only megagame on the 360?
Not sure if similar laws exist everywhere, but in the UK the Sale of Goods Act should cover this.
:)
If the product is "not fit for its intended purpose" the store has to refund you. (Not the publisher, the store you bought it from)
I suppose "fit for its intended purpose" may be a bit vague in this case; I've played Dead Rising on a non-HD projector (6ft high image) and haven't had any problems reading the text. I wish they'd recorded dialogue for the characters in the game you rescue/interact with though, it's not always convenient to read whilst millions of zombies are closing you down
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If Capcom made this screw-up on a console where HD wasn't even an option, what excuse would they use then? "Uh, we optimized this game for a resolution that is impossible to attain". I highly doubt they would have shipped the product with a mistake like that if the game were for, say, the GC.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
For the love of god, please get them to fix that.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Actually, Typing of the Dead was ported to the PC - I have a copy of it. It's an extremely fun game to play. The character models were redone to have a huge duracell battery connected to a dreamcast and a keyboard that sticks out in front. Very cute.
It is probably one of the few "M" rated "Educational" titles out there. If you see it, buy it - it's very good.
If you feel strongly about this, don't bother mailing capcom, don't bother writing here and don't bother signing internet petitions.
If you really want to hurt Capcom, hit up all of the retailer sites that allow you to post reviews on the products for sale. Write a polite review stating that you like / dislike the game and explain the issue with SDTV and that capcom wont fix it. Rate the game as appropriate to your feelings. Save your review somewhere and simply copy / paste it into every store you can find. When you've finished doing that, go to some of the review sites like gamespot and you can do the same.
Of course, one person doing it wont make a difference. But a bunch of people will start to move averages and will probably get noticed.
People that believe in their opinions don't post AC.
Then how about a spray? I need something to keep those pesky Dead Rising fans off me.
they could just buy me an HDTV. I would call it good.
Well after they fire the person that responsible for testing the game.
Buy a VGA cable, connect your 360 to your monitor, and shut up. If you didn't want to play your games in HD, you shouldn't have wasted $400 on an XBox 360, you fools.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"