Saturday, September 27, 2008

Mercenaries 2: Shoulda, woulda, coulda

If I could have used one word to describe Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, it would have been fun. It should have been balls-to-the-wall fun. Everything about it should have been, would have been, could have been fantastic. But I may never know because the game continually crashes on me.

A friend brought me a copy of the game from Singapore which I needed for my Singapore-bought Xbox360; I brought it along with me when I relocated here. It was in turn hooked up to a brand new TV which I bought here. So I had a NTSC-J game inside a NTSC-J machine hooked up to a PAL TV. Everything worked beautifully with a bunch of my other games, including the ones I got off Xbox Live.

Mercs 2 started off brillantly: Lots of room to explore, lots of explosions, lots of cars and tanks and airstrikes and bombs and people running wild, with guns blazing and shouting and screaming and indignant pointing. So you know, FUN. I was having a ball of a time when the game froze on me, right around one quarter into the game. So I turned off my machine, give it a reboot and started the game up again. And about 5-10mins into the game, it hangs again. So reboot, start-up, and it hangs again. And again and again and again and again. I cannot get the game to run any much further than 5-10mins after each time I reboot.

I deleted my initial save game, started from scratch again and the same thing happens. Right around the same point, the game freezes and refuses to run. And each reboot ends in the same result.

I've updated the game, deleted possible corrupted save files, left the machine to cool before I run it again. I don't think it's a hardware problem, neither is it a problem with the NTSC-J game/console with PAL TV combo. I've called EA tech support but that's not much help at all. The problem persists and I don't know how else to resolve it. And it's frustrating as hell.

Mercs 2 shoulda, woulda, coulda been great. But at this rate, I wouldn't really know.

3 comments:

Ozvortex said...

That sucks when stuff like that happens. Hey, have you checked out the "Oh no you didn't!" theme song for Mercs 2 on YouTube? Very cool/funny song. They used the short version for the TV commercial. The long version's worth listening to for the lyrics.
Cheers, Wayne.

Ken Lee said...

I've seen links to the video before, but no, I haven't watched it myself. I keep an eye out for it.

How's your 360? Everything working fine now after your encounter with the Red Ring?

Ozvortex said...

My 360 is back to 100% now, thank goodness.

Here is a link to the Merc 2 commercial http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcJyCdbC08c (watch in high quality)

and the full song and lyrics
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TcYm653mrE