Dead to Players?

Hip Games, the North American publisher of the PC port of Namco Hometek's Dead to Rights, has confirmed that there is a problem with the game as shipped in the US, which seems to be common to a specific video card, the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro (which murmurs beneath the surface of the very machine I'm tapping this into), and has announced plans to release a patch soon to address the issue.

The problem, as documented by concerned GameSpot folks yesterday is a showstopper which crops up during the unavoidable and mostly scripted tutorial section at the start of the game. For those who haven't played it, this level takes place on a building site and one of the protagonist Jack Slate's tutorials has him toss a gas canister into the air and then shoot it as it flies toward his enemies. The problem in the PC version seems to be that Jack no longer picks up the canister in the non-interactive sequence prior to the "shoot the canister to continue" sort of prompt. From here it's impossible to continue.

With the PC version of Dead to Rights due out in Europe before long from publisher Light & Shadow Productions, it seems likely that the bug won't cause any problems for anybody who's been holding out to play the game on the PC. And for those without a clue in the world what we're discussing, check out our reviews of the Xbox and Cube/PS2 versions.