Fearful downloads Options

[DanMaggot]

I'm currently downloading a patch for FEAR to take me up to the 107 required for the mp compatibility with the release of the mp free download. Due to a truly remarkable feat of misfortune it's pretty much taken me a lot of hours over the weekend to do this and I'm now grabbing a patch of just 40mbs from Sierra's site (at a paltry 12kps!)

I downloaded the full 107 patch yesterday using Xfire only to find once I'd got it that it was the US version and wouldn't work with mine.
Right, I knew I had some cover disk patches for the game, I'd try one of them.
It turns out that as I'd had no probs with the game I'd never patched it and whilst lots of sites did the 1.5 patch, comparitively few did the 1.1 or 1.2 patch and my cover disks were for 1.4 to 1.5 and 1.5 to 1.6.

Gamershell are usually pretty good for patches, I'd go there. Sure enough I found a Full 1.5 uk patch.
Which along with cover disks is how I got to 1.6 and am now crawling on my belly through an incredibly slow Sierra download and looking at another 1/2 hour to grab 23mbs.

Now that's a long moan I know, but really, the patches should be labelled clearly and if Sierra wants to sell it's games in the UK then it should damn well put up a dedicated fast server for it's patches.

To be entirely fair to them it's true that they're releasing this mp game free (at a whopping 1.5gb download)
and their patches, unlike the usual pure repairs of shoddy coding are in fact including a number of mp maps etc, but even so. I'm a bit miffed.

And on the matter of large downloads.....has anyone else noticed an increase in over 1gb demos etc? For pete's sake, are the majority out there on 8mb connections?!