Battleangel

I got the game. I installed the game. I fired up the game. It was jerky as hell.

Put simply there seems to be something wrong with the way that menus and text are drawn (and this game has got menus all over the place so it’s not like you can ever escape the problem). My best guess is that the jerkoffs at DigitalAnvil did the dev. on nVidia hardware and forgot that ATI has been the market leader for half a year now. This is probably also the reason for the “graphics hardware not recognized”-or-whatever warning that pop up when you load the game.
I also experienced some slight form of general gfx stuttering but I have to close a couple of programs and do a clean boot before I can evaluate this further. As for the game itself, well, it seems cool, even if it isn’t Star Trek level depth exactly. More like an arcade-sci-fi-space-opera-shooter.

Edit: Maybe I should have read the readme …

Performance Issue with ATI Radeon text display
Freelancer can experience performance slow downs when a large amount of text is printed or updated on screen. The work around for this issue is to back off your Windows hardware acceleration settings by one notch in Settings\Control Panel\Display\Settings\Advanced. Once in this menu, you will either see Performance tab or Troubleshoot tab. Future ATI drivers may fix this problem, as they are aware of this issue.

Still. I think it’s kind if sloppy. Many developers would have produced a fix themselves, since this is a bug that affects so many users out there. Ok, great .. now I can get lost in the Freelancer universe and lose tens of hours that I could have spent saving the real world. Cruise engines powering up …