A Twitchy And Repulsive Individual

I really only have myself to blame... I should read the forums of games I intend to buy before I actually go and buy them!

I'm talking, unfortunately, about Test Drive Unlimited. What sounds like a fun idea to start with... race around 1000 miles of Hawaiian roads, unlocking new vehicles and earning the money to buy them. Included in the list of vehicles are a vast number of classic old and new desirable cars and bikes.

Unfortunately, what sounds good on paper isn't much good if you then go and mess up the technology behind it. Playing single player appears to be mostly ok... the game looks great and, despite the slightly twitchy cars, is fun to play (we're not talking Driv3r kind of twitchy after all). Unfortunately, playing online appears to be a different matter entirely.

I seem to be one of the many players that can't even seem to connect to the servers. The forums are awash with tales of which ports people have tried unblocking, what routers they have tried and even what information they have monitored leaving their PC in a vain attempt to find a magic cure. For the rest, online play appears to be a touchy subject... some can get into the online server, but don't see anyone; others see the occasional player but as soon as they try to race them, they all get disconnected... I've not seen many posts by people who have actually connected and raced without issue!

Atari and Eden Games do not appear to be saying much on the subject. A patch has been promised for several months now that will fix a number of issues (no specifics as yet) and will add a couple of new cars to the mix as a sweetener! Seeing just how many unhappy posts there are though, how long they've waited and just how little information has been provided by Atari I can't help thinking that it's going to take more than just a sweetener to make this taste ok... or maybe just having a working game would be enough? Only time will tell...

Mind you, Atari releasing something that is technically impressive but then failing to back it up... can't help feeling a little deja vu (try looking up the late history of Atari hardware: Lynx, Jaguar, TT). Some have suggested that Atari were returning to greatness... I'm not convinced, and I've always been a fan of Atari, but it looks more like it's just a twitchy corpse to me.