rainbow-six-vegas-2 posts

Team Rainbow is all patched up and ready to fight for your right to gamble, again. Yesterday Ubisoft released a beefy 90Mb patch for Rainbow Six Vegas 2 which addresses numerous bugs, while adding new features to the popular tactical-shooter.

Most notably addressed in the 1.02 patch is putting a stop to the notorious Crashdump generation problem found in the original patch that horded up as much as 1GB of hard drive space during game crashes.

Added to Vegas 2 with 1.02 are speech recognition features as well as KillCam and SwapTeam options for the SADS (Stand Along Dedicated Server). Other bug fixes included in the patch promise to end game crashes while using customizable weapons and minimizing XP losses during server crashes.

The full list of additions and fixes can be found after the jump.

Download the Rainbow Six Vegas 2 1.02 Patch from Big Download!

So little has changed in recent months -- The Sims 2 and World of Warcraft still completely dominate PC game sales. Sure, now and then something usurps them for a short time, but they always come back. The top 10 PC games in the NPD sales report released this past week:

1. The Sims 2 Kitchen & Bath Interior Design Stuff Expansion Pack
2. The Sims 2 Double Deluxe
3. The Sims 2 FreeTime Expansion Pack
4. World Of Warcraft: Battle Chest
5. World Of Warcraft
6. Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
7. Sins Of A Solar Empire
8. World Of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Expansion Pack
9. Assassin's Creed: Director's Cut Edition
10. Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas 2

That makes four years that The Sims 2 and World of Warcraft have been fairly consistently pwning the industry. The only other PC exclusive on the list is Ironclad/Stardock's runaway 4X RTS hit Sins of a Solar Empire. The others -- Call of Duty 4, Assassin's Creed, and Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 -- are multi-platform titles. WoW's position is no surprise, given the NPD's research with regards to online game revenues. The Sims 2's domination of the charts, however, speaks to a vast, silent market of gamers to whom hardcore games like Rainbow Six don't appeal.

The quarterly time period where publicly traded game publishers reveal their latest financial numbers has begun yet again. Ubisoft reported that revenues for their last quarter (which ended March 21) came in at 217 million euros ($340.5 million), a 10 percent increase from the same period a year before. The sales success of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2 and Assassin's Creed for the Xbox 360 and PS3 were the main reasons for the rise. The PC versions of both games were released to stores this month and Assassin's Creed has already topped the PC sales charts in the US.

For once, the publisher didn't announce any delays in upcoming game titles, something that the company had a habit of doing in the last few financial press releases. That hopefully means that previously delayed titles like Brothers In Arms: Hell's Highway, Splinter Cell Conviction and especially Far Cry 2 will be released sometime this year.

Apparently it doesn't always pay to play in Vegas. At least not if you're playing Rainbow Six Vegas 2 for the PC. When the game crashes (likely due to far too much Vegas styled fun and frivolity) the resulting memory dump can horde up as much as 1,000 megs (1 gig) of hard drive space. That's a whole lot of dumpage. That's Mafia-style dumpage.

The official R6V2 forums are alive with the sound of wailing and gnashing of teeth over the problem. As of this blogging, the forum admins are aware of the problem and have passed along the info to the developers, but a fix has not been forthcoming yet. They of course ask for your kind and benevolent forgiveness. And really... why not? You don't want to go and piss off a bunch of highly trained para-military sorts now do you? Ya, didn't think so.

Well that didn't take very long did it? Ubisoft's just released PC version of their latest tactical shooter Rainbow Six Vegas 2 now has a "day one" patch that's available for download ("day one" patches seem to be more and more prevalent in the game industry nowadays). The 50 MB download can be grabbed at Ubisoft's web site.

You can check out the list of changes in the patch ahead of time via this Ubisoft message board post. The big added feature in the 1.01 patch is voice chat support, something that will likely please a boatload of multiplayer gamers. There are a number of bugs that have also been addressed in the patch including some better support with ATI Crossfire PC rigs and some hang time bugs with "certain graphics hardware". Let's hope that this patch will deal with the majority of post-release issues in the game.