I'm slowly "getting out" of computer games these days, in favor of console games. Quite often, it's just too much of a hassle to get a game to work. Case in point is Battlefield 2, which I had just purchased recently, and then resold about 3 days later because I couldn't get it to run on my computer.

The first obstacle that hit me was the CD key. The installer says to enter the CD key, which appears in a "white box on the bottom left corner of the back of the CD/DVD case". I looked, and there was no CD key there.

I had to ask an EA employee, and he told me that the CD key is actually printed on the back of the manual. He says the reason for the message is that there are two versions of the box, and one of them has the CD key printed on the back of the CD case, and the other doesn't. Fine, then don't tell me where the CD key is in the installer; no information is better than wrong information.

Once I had the game installed, I tried to run it. It wouldn't, because it detected "CD/DVD Emulation software installed". I've seen this message before, so I know what it's referring to: "CloneCD", my CD burning software, which I've legally purchased. This message really pisses me off; I have the legal right to purchase CloneCD if I want to, and if I've purchased it, I have the legal right to have it installed on my computer if I want to. I've also legally purchased this copy of Battlefield 2. So it's really annoying that their "illegal-activity-detection" algorithm gives false positives like this. Anyway, I've since learned the workaround for this, but what you're supposed to do isn't obvious from the error message. Uninstalling CloneCD will make the message go away, and so why don't they just make it explicit with "You can't run this game if you have CloneCD installed. Just an arbitrary rule we made. Sorry."? I mean, it's still a false positive, but at least now you know what you have to do to get the game working, as opposed to having to call their technical support and being put on hold for god knows how long. If you want to know how to fix it, just google the error message; lots of other people have had this problem too.

Anyway, so I fix the CloneCD issue, and now when I run the game, it changes the resolution, as if it's getting ready to run, but then immediately quits. No error message or anything. What the fuck? So whenever a game is buggy, the first thing I do is search for a patch. There is indeed a patch out for Battlefield 2, so I download it and run it.

Immediately after running the patch, I get "patch failed". That's it. No explanation. Again, what the fuck? So I google around, and it turns out that the patching program itself is broken, and lots of people have been having this problem. Here's the workaround:

You gotta run the patcher, and then, while it's running, you have to force-quit the patcher. What happens is that the program you downloaded is actually a self-extracting compression utility. You run it so that it extracts the real patcher, but you have to force quit it, because when the program finishes, it deletes all the files it extracted. Anyway, so once you've got the extracted files, you have to run the patching program manually, specifying the full path to your Battefield 2 installation (the patcher was failing because it couldn't find where the game was installed).

So now I've got it patched, and hopefully everything will work, right? Wrong. I get the exact same problem; the game changes resolution and immediately quits with no error message or explanation. So next I tried updating my video card drivers (which was a hassle in itself, but this isn't EA's fault, so I won't get into that here) and try running the game again. Still no good.

So I do more googling with the term "Battlefield 2 won't start" and eventually find some info on how to run the game in windowed mode where you can get more information about what went wrong (I guess a lot of people have been having this problem too). You just put the "+fullscreen 0" command line argument to make it run in windowed mode. I do this, and now I get an error message, which is a big improvement, because now I have some vague idea of what went wrong. The error message is:

Debug assertion failed!

Version: 1.1.2484.0 Build date:2005-7-9 22:52

Module: RendDX9

File: c:\dice\projects\BF2Branches\BF2JunePatch\ Code\BF2\RendDX9\Effect.cpp

Line: 173

Text: Failed to set technique DrawShadowMapNV in effect Shaders/BundleMesh technique not found.

Current profile:

It looks like the meat of the error message is "Failed to set technique DrawShadowMapNV", so I punch that into Google, and I find the EA UK message board, in which an EA employee basically says "If you have a GeForce 4 videocard, you're fucked.":

Battlefield 2 requires Pixel Shader 1.4 technology and unfortunately this is not supported by GeForce 4 video cards.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused.

- IdoddrellEA

In case you haven't figured it out, I have a GeForce 4 videocard. The GeForce 4 Ti4600, to be precise. Now this isn't the fastest videocard around anymore, but it was the fastest when I bought it, and it still kicks a lot of butt these days. After having spent $600 on my Ti4600, I don't wanna go out and buy another $400-$500 on a new videocard, especially since my Ti4600 runs all my other games just fine thank you very much. Someone had the audacity to post:

My god, of all things, to bitch about your old shitty TI-4200...

Move on...

A new card will cost you $100 BUCKS, not $250. If you want one of the best out now, yeah, $250's.

- aceprowler

Well, if you head over to Tom's Hardware, you can check out the benchmarks for graphics cards. Consider the Unreal Tournament 2004 benchmark, for example. My card, the Ti4600, runs UT2K4 at 99.5 frames per second. Now let's check out the GeForce FX5700, which you can get for about $95-$110 USD according to NewEgg.com. Oh my, it only gets 85.0 frames per second. If I spent $100 on a new videocard as aceprowler suggests, I'd actually be downgrading my machine, not upgrading it. That's what I mean when I say my 4 year old Ti4600 still kicks some butt (which explains why it cost $600 4 years ago — it still beats $100 cards 4 years later.)

Well, what card is worth buying then? If I'm gonna spend over $100 anyway, I don't want an improvement of merely 1% or 2%. I'd like at the very least, a 30% improvement, or around 130 fps on the UT2K3 benchmark. Well, according to this chart, the Radeon X700 gets 134 fps. How much does that go for? $300 CAD.

Anyway, it's really disappointing that EA and Dice (the publisher and developer respectively) decided to just cut out this entire segment of the market (the segment of GeForce 4 owners). If it were just that tiny little thing, I'd sell the game, but not feel too bitter about EA/Dice's products. However, they made me jump through all sorts of hoops to figure out what the problem was. Recall that at each step of the way, whenever an obstacle was thrown my way, the error messages were either completely unhelpful, or there were no error messages at all. I mean, I couldn't even patch the game without looking online for a hack to get the patch to work, and that's just unacceptable.