dacs.doc electric

HOW 'BOUT a nice game that pigs on install and uninstall and crashes your machine endlessly in between? Sound like fun? My son recently bought such a game, called "Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear," published by Red Storm. The goal is to foil the efforts of terrorists who are trying to build nuclear bombs. The rating is Teen 13+ because of violence. The main reason my son wanted the game, he said, was because it is a first-person shooter game, whatever that means. All of the other games are either different kinds of strategy games or games featuring racecars or flight simulators.

The requirements on the box said you needed 200MB hard drive space and 64MB recommended memory. It also recommended a Voodoo videocard. My computer has a Viper card, which caused some problems, as I will explain later, because Rainbow Six didn't want to work with it.

I usually install the games my kids buy; otherwise they may just put anything anywhere on the machine, and I like to have the stuff on my computer organized. I suspected the game was flawed when I did the first install, which did not work. The game has three different installation options: compact, full, and typical. The compact installs the core game files only. According to Red Storm, missions take much longer to load under that installation. The full version loads all files, including videos. A typical install has everything but the video. Since the full install did not work, I tried a typical install. To my horror, that option used more than 600MB of hard disk space. My kids played the game for a while, but before too long the computer froze up.

According to my kids, the Rogue Spear story is set in the year 2001, in a world where Western Democracies are fighting back terrorist organizations globally. It takes place in Eastern Europe, Africa, Russia, and the Balkans. The attraction of the game is that you are a first-person shooter. There are 16 missions to accomplish. First you choose two weapons, a grenade, a flash bang, extra clips, binoculars, and a heart monitor to sense people even through cement walls. I'm still quoting my kids who say that the best part of the game is being a sniper, who wields a weapon something like binoculars but is actually a scope which can be zoomed to shoot people a mile away. I was told the game is hard because once a terrorist sees you s/he shoots at the hostage. So you have to run right into the middle of the action and shoot the terrorist.

The kids never went very far into playing that game because it kept freezing up the computer. After the computer was rebooted fifty times over a couple of days I told the kids that I was going to return the game. I just have no patience with games that don't perform the way they should, especially at a cost of $40. I decided to uninstall it, but my uninstaller was not even able to do the trick. The uninstall function of Rogue Spear left some elements behind. I ended up reformatting the drive on which the game was installed to get a clean drive. When I returned the game, the salesclerk told me that I should leave the CD game in the drive when playing. Did he think a minute that I was playing it myself? But not all is lost, Rogue Spear recently came out in Nintendo 64 and I don't have to worry about rebooting the TV.