This And That: Wednesday News Roundup

The official website for Far Cry today carries a statement from Ubisoft producer Matthieu Boulard on the status of the game's next patch. "Patch 1.2 is in its final stage of production: a nasty scoreboard bug and a CD key security issue remain to be fixed, but otherwise a huge list of improvement/fixes have been implemented and tested successfully," he says. We're now localizing all the readme files, and the final candidate will be tested extensively later this week to make sure it is really solid - we don't want to rush in the last few days after such a long development time." In other words, expect to hear more very soon.

Supersonic Software/Empire Interactive's Micro Machines-esque racing title Mashed which we rather liked when we reviewed it recently, has been patched to version 1.1. Obviously this only applies to owners of the PC version of the game, and interestingly the lone bug it claims to fix doesn't strike us as terribly significant - problems with the taunt function are now, apparently, resolved. For Windows 98 and Millennium users, that is. Presumably this means that latter day operating system users don't even have to worry about it. Still, rather than ignore it, we thought we'd draw attention to the first "1.1" patch we've seen in ages that only has to worry about a minor fix for a minority of its target audience. Perhaps Supersonic will prove us wrong by delivering a truckload of changes in the coming days, but for now it's fairly encouraging to see. For those of you using Win ME/98 who do need the patch, here it is.