[CP5670]

Speaking of Double Agent -- I never finished it. I had just gotten to the point where you have to make landmines for an upcoming mission, and what happened was... I think what happened was that all my savegames were all corrupted. Either by patching the game, or it simply happened on its own. They were there, but I couldn't continue off of them; a error would appear saying they were somehow corrupted and/or somehow incompatible.

I tried playing the game recently, but apparently, the game has started BSOD'ing computers. That's what happened to me, and a lot of other people are reporting it. I played it back when I had an 8800 GTX, running a 260 GTX now.

By the way, one thing I don't get: Chaos Theory has better graphics than Conviction; it looks better, so why on Earth does Conviction run so terrible? I'm just puzzled as to how they could have failed so miserably that you need the latest 480 GTX just for a PLAYABLE framerate. It's all very confusing!  

It took some serious patience to get through DA simply because of the bugs. The patch might have broken the savegames in your case. It should be installed before starting the game.

The engine performance doesn't make any sense. DA used the same engine as CT and the graphics were at best equal to CT, but it somehow ran at around 1/3 of the framerate. I think Conviction is still the same engine with minor additions, and everyone says the performance has now tanked a lot further beyond DA.

[Jeff Vader]

The engine performance doesn't make any sense. DA used the same engine as CT and the graphics were at best equal to CT, but it somehow ran at around 1/3 of the framerate. I think Conviction is still the same engine with minor additions, and everyone says the performance has now tanked a lot further beyond DA.

Well, the PC/worse version of DA was made by Ubisoft Shanghai, who also made Pandora Tomorrow. And from a completely personal point of view, PT had considerably worse engine performance compared to the first SC for no apparent reason. Of course the graphics were somewhat better, but I would have expected that if I could run SC at 1280x1024 with the other settings being at "Medium", I shouldn't be forced to play PT at 800x600 with "Low" settings and still experience some performance drops. Though maybe I demanded the impossible. Of course, this all happened on my old, old desktop and PT wouldn't run on my laptop that would have outperformed the desktop any day, thank you very much. I wouldn't be surprised if they managed to goof up the engine while making DA. Though that doesn't necessarily explain what's up with Conviction.

While at it, I didn't like PT. I mean sure, it had its moments (like that train mission), but
- it didn't have Don Jordan as Lambert
- it didn't have Claudia Besso as Grimsdottir
- the voices in general (especially any generic bad guys) sounded horrible, in terms of both voice acting and sound quality
- there were stupid mission design solutions (like that blasted lightning/go-blind thing towards the end)
- Sam Fisher in a jungle? I mean, dude!

[CP5670]

I do remember PT running poorly back in the day (and looking worse too, especially the highly pixellated nightvision view), but the difference was not nearly as stark as it was with CT and DA. The game itself was still very good and the gameplay and plot felt like genuine SC stuff, which cannot be said about the stuff after CT. I didn't notice the change in the voice actors.

I think developers in general simply put more effort into PC ports back then than they do today, and they were also more willing to try new things with gameplay and not just make everything appeal to casual gamers.

[Lukeskywalkie]

While at it, I didn't like PT. I mean sure, it had its moments (like that train mission), but
- it didn't have Don Jordan as Lambert
- it didn't have Claudia Besso as Grimsdottir
- the voices in general (especially any generic bad guys) sounded horrible, in terms of both voice acting and sound quality
- there were stupid mission design solutions (like that blasted lightning/go-blind thing towards the end)
- Sam Fisher in a jungle? I mean, dude!

Your Critique of PT is spot on - there's a scene, near the 2nd or 3rd level, that has some guard dialogue, "did they catch the french man?" "what do you mean, french man, we're all frenchmen!" "I mean the french french man."  The thing is, all three lines are delivered in the most boring midwestern accent, and by the same voice actor.  It was embarrassing. 

That said, I did like the overall story and characters, even if encountering them in-game was invariably a snooze.  definitely had some highlights, and I'll play it again soon, but yeah, some seriously low production values with the voice work (except for Dennis Haysbert as lambert - that guy ain't cheap.  I kinda pretended it was Haysbert anyway...odd that they switched actors back and forth.  Didn't notice that Grim was a different voice, I'll have to check that out!).