Thanks to the blitz mentality -- no matter how bad something is, if it happens often enough you eventually stop noticing -- patches and so-called "point releases" haven't been getting much coverage here lately. But the Daikatana v1.1 patch deserves a special mention...

Not having played the game myself, I can only go on what other people have said. So if the general concensus from gamers and critics is correct, and ION Storm's flagship release is a clumsy, annoying mess of a game, then this patch at least keeps up with tradition.

First, some stats to put things in perspective: The final Quake 2 point release, including the full Capture The Flag, is 13.2Mb. The latest Unreal Tournament patch, including the rewritten level editor, plus the "bonus pack" with eleven new levels, adds up to 19.9Mb. The latest Half-Life upgrade, including the full Team Fortress Classic, is 37.5Mb. So that's a rough guide for how much 'extra' stuff you should get for your download.

The Daikatana patch weighs in at a staggering 44.3Mb. That's for bug fixes and virtually NO new content. ION Storm even warns that "it could take up to half an hour to apply the patch", and there is the now-expected advice that after installing, "your savegames will NOT work".

There are over 30 bug fixes and "new features", and almost every one of them can safely be classed as another victory for sloppy quality control, ie: Sidekick spawning has been fixed, solving a problem that meant "you couldn't finish the game". Demo recording and playback now "works", which I assume means it didn't before. And it's not often that a patch needs to say: "All map bugs have been fixed."

Other fixes include deathmatch crashes, a texture problem on Voodoo cards, and these two classics: "Fixed memory leaks", and "You cannot save on moving platforms anymore (which caused a bug)". Remember that Quake 2 had a problem with saving on moving platforms? That bug was fixed by... fixing it. The Daikatana solution is pathetic by comparison -- a lazy workaround, like those web sites that block Netscape because they only work in MSIE. (But hey, I've done that myself many years ago, so maybe I should get down off my high horse?)

To be fair, there are several good things about the patch, the most obvious ones being that you can now save whenever you want (apart from on moving platforms, of course), and there's a new deathmatch mode called "Instagib". But when you look at the overall package, you're still downloading over 40Mb to fix problems that could and should have been addressed before the game was released. Daikatana doesn't exactly have the excuse of being rushed, does it?

Finally, for anyone who thinks a 40Mb+ patch with a half-hour install time is pushing things a bit, the boys at ION Storm put forward this recommendation: "You can view the readme while the patch is installing." Either they missed the sarcastic smiley off the end of that, or they were being serious...