After more than a decade, I bought a new computer game. I unpacked it. I installed it. The game didn’t start. I was able to fix the game, but the IT support at EA Games is permanently kaputt.
Installing games (on anything really) on a Mac is very different to the Windows experience. For the vast majority of applications it simply means copying the application from the DVD to the computer. The reason for this is that Apple’s operating system has a very different design to Windows. Or more precisely, Apple’s operating system has a design.
After installing the game I discovered that I could do nothing with it, because the operating system insisted that the application was not “supported by the architecture”. After double checking the game’s system requirements I was satisfied that my computer was indeed enough to meet the needs of the game. A bit puzzled by the computer’s stubborn refusal to even consider starting the game, I contacted IT support at EA Games. I described the issue and soon got a reply. All I had to do is turn off all other applications. Then force quit all other processes. Now, how this was supposed to help I had no idea. What was more puzzling is just how I was supposed to kill the OS process whilst still using the OS. This game was becoming mysterious. It only runs on a computer that doesn’t run anything else, including the operating system.
Since this “expert” help wasn’t doing much to help I started to look into the issue myself. In the meantime I emailed back saying that the suggested solution did not solve the problem. I discovered that the problem lies with the way the game was ported from Windows. The Windows file system is not case sensitive, and whoever ported the game to OS X didn’t bother being consistent on that front either. OS X however does have the ability to tell the upper case letters from lower case letters. And the reason why the game didn’t work was simply the fact that the names of some of the configuration files did not follow OS X capitalisation conventions. My short term solution was simply to run the game from an external hard-drive which was formatted with a case-insensitive file system. In the long term I will have to give my internal drive the same case-oblivious nature.
But EA Games had more “helpful” suggestions. They suggested to make sure that the OS is up to date. They also suggested that if I have an unsupported computer architecture to unplug all external devices. Yes, the game won’t start because the speakers are plugged in. Finally I also needed to make sure all the permissions were set properly. Interestingly, none of these suggestions had anything to do with the symptoms I described to them.
I have decided not to inform EA Games about the nature of the actual problem. The reason being is that they are obviously not very interested in customer service. Sending me random suggestions hardly constitutes IT support.
There was just one more thing. The game also has a patch that needed to be installed. I tried installing it and of course failed. After some inspection of the patch I discovered that the patch is trying to “fix” files that are not actually included with the game. One line in the script was trying to delete a Thumbs.db file from one of the folders. Apparently someone forgot to get rid off it when the game was ported. The actual problem though is that someone did get rid off it at some stage, and forgot to note it down. Very difficult to delete a non existing file.
A few days after all this I got an email request to fill in a survey about the EA Games Customer Support. I will leave it to your imagination, as to what my response was.
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