Renegade Ooops

A couple of weeks ago, I purchased a few games from the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale in the Steam store. It's been a while since I'd been on Steam, so I thought it was about time to fire it up and at least let Steam and Team Fortress 2 updates run their course. Amongst the games I purchased, I bought a 4 pass version of Renegade Ops, which I gifted to a couple of friends that I play TF2 and Alien Swarm with.

I had previously played Renegade Ops a little when I was at the Eurogamer Expo back in September, but my game time was cut short when the demo locked up and crashed. In hidsight, I should have perhaps taken that as a sign to avoid this game. Don't get me wrong. I would never buy a game I've previously played and didn't enjoy, but personally I think it's developer Sega needs a take long hard look at itself when it comes to non-gameplay elements to this title.

So I downloaded & installed the game before firing it up. After 20 seconds, nothing. I double-checked that I pressed the 'lanuch game' button, and Steam brought up 'The Game is Launching' pop-up box, but that quickly disappeared and I'm still staring at my Games Library. The next 90 minutes are spent trawling through Steam Support pages and forums to trying to find a solution. In one last action before giving up, I check for the game's systems requirements and I soon discover the cause. It's not Windows XP compatible. Seriously?!?!?! It can support the bastard child of the Windows family, Vista, but not an OS that I would imagine is still the used by the majority of PC users? I cannot believe that neither Sega or Steam thought that perhaps something as a simple error message stating XP non-compatibility should have been needed instead of having to waste my time to diagnose the problem myself. Whilst I'm partially at fault for assuming that a game that should be able to run a first generation Xbox 360  could also be played on a 3 year old XP machine, it is lazy coding from Sega to not accommodate for such simple error messaging. Thanks for wasting my time! I could have been using that that time playing in the Counter Strike: Global Offensive beta, but more on that for another time.