Brief Hands-On Report--MoHAA Breakthough Expansion Pack

We are addicted to playing the 3-D game Medal of Honor Allied Assault (MoHAA) and the Spearhead expansion pack so we've been eagerly waiting for the Breakthrough expansion pack to come to the Mac from Aspyr. We got our copy last week and finally got it installed on our dual 2.0-GHz on Saturday but not without some difficulty and disappointment.

We couldn't get the installer to work at first. We tried re-installing the basic MoHAA, which is required for the Breakthrough expansion pack, and installing it on another Mac. No dice. The installer would run but skip rapidly to the end. It gave no error message but Breakthrough was not installed. So we broke down and read the manual--the first note is that MoHAA must be updated to v1.14 to apply the Breakthrough update. After doing this, Breakthrough installed but it seems to us that Aspyr could have anticipated this problem since Spearhead plays fine without the MoHAA update so many people, like us, wouldn't even know there was a MoHAA update. It would have been nice to have included the update on the Breakthrough CD.

The Breakthrough CD has to be in your optical drive inorder to launch Breakthrough just like the Spearhead expansion pack. This is a huge nuisance but it's Aspyr's way of fighting piracy.

Launching Breakthrough brought up a dialog box asking for the CD key (serial number). The dialog box says it's on the CD case but it wasn't on ours. There's no CD key for MoHAA or Spearhead either. If we dismiss the dialog box without entering a CD key by clicking "cancel," we can play in single player mode but not on most servers providing on line multiplayer mode. In most cases, the servers returned an invalid CD key error message but curiously a few let us on.

On Sunday, after we sent messages to Aspyr's support about this, Aspyr posted this note on their Breakthrough support page:

1178: Medal of Honor: Breakthrough: Missing serial number.

Issue: The white sticker with the serial number is not on the back of the CD jewel case.

Discussion: Some of the boxes of Medal of Honor have been shipped out without a serial number. If your copy doesn't have a serial number, please contact Aspyr support for assistance at support@aspyr.com. In the meantime, when the game asks for the serial number, press the Cancel button and you will be able to fully play the single player game. Serial numbers are only used for multiplayer.

We emailed Aspyr Support but we've not received a reply as of publication time.

Among the few team deathmatch multiplayer servers we were able to get on, most were running the Palermo map or Monte Battaglia map. The latter had several places where we could walk through the map's edge and get lost "behind" the scene.

So far we are disappointed with the install and CD key glitches and the quality of one of the maps we've played on line. Hopefully, Aspyr will fix these problems soon.