What's behind the patch - part 1 - introduction

You never had patches for the ZX SPECTRUM software. There never were patches for any console. The AMIGA and the ST never had a patch scene... but you have patches for most of the PC releases. Patches are a PC thing, that is growing, month after month. Why?

The easy answer it the deadlines that programmers now have to deal with. The deadline is always too short, and the pressure to release a product is such, that whatever code is available, it hits the market, many times without proper testing... Releases end up buggy, but making money. That is all that matters...

Patches will come latter, to fix what should have never been wrong...

But is it the only answer? No, not really. There is something much more obscure that developers won't ever admit...

H&D goes on

After downloading the Hidden & Dangerous [H&D] 1.2 patch, for the USA release, I noticed that the game wouldn't run from the CDROM backup I play from... What an annoyance, the CDROM protections! Go ahead and download this file, that must be unzipped and chosen to replace your current h&d.exe [~900 K zip file].

I downloaded patch 1.2, in order to solve the "german superman" problem, that arose yesterday. Did it fix it? Nope. What does it fix? Well, I think it only solves the "sudden death" and the "floating soldier" bugs. Download times still are reasonably high and the invisible german only died, because he went out of ammo after killing one of my soldiers @ c3m5. That was my first loss, and all because of a game bug!

C3m6 is your final Germany adventure, and quite a hard one to play on a regular computer. By the end of the mission, there will be nearly 100 enemy units on screen, including tanks... this means that each command you input, will take ages to be answered; in other words, there will be moments when you will NOT be in control of your men.

Today's H&D downloads are:

- the end of c3m5 - just drive the tank out to c3m6.

- the end of c3m6 - go ahead and check the MANY, many bodies, lying on the ground. Then take off on the airplane. Beware where you throw yourself at water...