Project Gotham 4 Audio Problems
This year I upgraded my Xbox360’s hard-drive. I decided to get one of the big ones so I could transfer games to it and cut down on load times and hopefully, spare the DVD drive from an early death due to all the thrashing. I loaded up a bunch of games and everything was good.
Then a funny thing happened. The n3wbs and I started playing Project Gotham Racing 4 again. This is a series that we’ve played since the first version on the original Xbox. I spent an unhealthy amount of time in a friend’s basement playing Project Gotham 1 in head-to-head racing. We got pretty good at it. We still miss San Francisco which was never included in any of the subsequent games and made for some pretty insane racing. PGR2 was probably the game we played the most as a group. Not Halo. Not Gears of War. Project Gotham 2. We have our own lexicon of terms for racing. Some of the less-colorful ones include, “crop-outing” and “toro”.
I recently made some changes to my room, moving my gear around for better viewing position. So when we started playing PGR4 after a year’s hiatus, I was shocked to discover some strange audio glitches coming out of my speakers. Engine noises had drop-outs. Music would skip. It was the strangest thing. I checked other sound sources at the speakers and listened hard for anomalies. I checked cabling to make sure I hadn’t screwed something up during the reorganization. I tweaked sound settings in the game. I put up with it.
Then I checked the Interwebs. Sure enough, a bit of googling turned up some hits about PGR4 Audio Problems. Weirdly, it’s a result of installing to the hard-drive. Why this should be makes absolutely no sense. It has to be playing the sounds from memory (assuming the engine noises aren’t discretely modeled audio simulations which would be very surprising and worthy of at least several papers) and it has to load them from a disk. It shouldn’t matter where they’re coming from. The only reason I can think of is that using the hard-drive is putting extra load on the processor or I/O buss and that’s causing the glitching. Still sounds rubbish, doesn’t it?
At any rate, I’d like to see MS release a patch for this, but since Bizarre Creations have pretty-much stopped caring about the PGR series (*snif*) that’s very unlikely. I’ll have to suffer and play it from the DVD.
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