The PC version of Vanquish suffers from an unusual, but not unique, bug that scales incoming damage with framerate: The higher your framerate, the harder you get clobbered by the bad guys. And since an awful lot of PCs out there are capable of easily running the game at higher rates than the 30 fps of the original console releases, that's a real problem.
The good news is that Sega has released a patch to correct the problem. The bad news is that it hasn't gone through the usual testing process, so it may not behave entirely as expected. "It’s a holiday here in the UK, but we wanted to get a patch out to you as quickly as possible, so we have made publicly available our beta patch," Sega said. "Please note that this patch has not been QA checked, so install at your own risk!"
To do that, right-click on Vanquish in you Steam library, select "Properties," and then the "Betas" tab. Enter the password "PatchBetaTest" in the appropriate field, which will make "public_patch" accessible in the drop-down menu. Select it, close the Properties menu, and cross your fingers.
Assuming it doesn't set your PC on fire (and there's no indication of problems in the Steam comments), the patch will address the following issues:
- 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 update also adds two new command line options: "-monitor 2" (or any number in a multi-monitor setup) to enable full-screen play on any display, and "-window," which will force the game to start in windowed mode.
