Vanquish patch fixes framerate damage bug

A weird bug in Platinum's bumsliding shooter Vanquish [official site], which made players take more damage if their game ran at a higher framerate, is now fixed. As some handy GIFs demonstrated on Friday, players running Vanquish at 60 frames per second would get hurt more than those at 30fps. Porting house Little Stone Software and publishers Sega acknowledged the issue on Sunday, released a beta version of a fix on Monday, then, after testing, made it official last night. Would've been better if they had caught the bug during development but hey, Vanquish is a good game so play it.

The patch fixed a few other bits and pieces too. Sega say:

• Fixed an issue with invincibility frame timing (which sometimes allowed the player to get hit more frequently at higher frame rates).
• Fixed an issue with health regeneration at higher frame rates.
• Fixed an issue when resetting to default on the options menu.
• Fixed an issue with video cutscenes skipping early for some players.
• Fixed an animation issue when sliding backwards and aiming using keyboard and mouse.
• Adjusted cutscene audio volume.

The patch also adds two more command line functions:

• -monitor 2 (or any number in a multi-monitor setup)

This will allow users to select which monitor to treat as the primary device, which will allow full screen exclusive to work on that display.

• -window

This will force the game to boot into windowed mode (which should help some players if the game is defaulting to an unsupported resolution)

I am glad that our Alec likes Vanquish on PC. I played it on Xbox 360 back in 2010 and wasn't sure how a thoroughly modern man would receive the game. It's still good in the same ways and still bleh in the same ways, is Wot Alec Thinks.

"There are far too many terrible cutscenes and entirely pointless sections while you stomp along trapped in a scanning mode that has no purpose, but when Vanquish has its mind on the fight, it's a combination of breathless intensity and pure thrill-power. Ping-ponging from enemy to enemy with your weapon of choice, creating a path through a bullet-hell place thanks to the power of slow-motion bumslides."

I mean, yeah, it has those boring bits too. But rocketsliding around shooting things in slo-mo is great.