Seeing as I missed the first Star Wars MMO, and how crappy people had said it had become, I am kinda looking forward to Bioware’s take. Granted, there’s too many MMOs right now. But it’s Star Wars!
Will it or won’t it screw up? Anybody wanna bet with me?
I do agree with what Phillip DeFranco has said. If this turns out to awesome, I’m going to get a new rig just to play it.
Fallout 3 is my next hotly anticipated RPG and it has already been released in the US. There are even midnight launches for it! So why oh why is Singapore always behind on game launches? Is it because we are not a blip on the radar? Or maybe piracy is so rampant in the region that publishers don’t give a hoot anymore?
However, another dude has a different theory: crappy distributor!
Sigh. Maybe I should just pirate it and buy it later when it’s out. I would probably even let myself be conned and get the Collector’s Edition too.
Two of my favourite blogs were gushing about World Of Goo in their respective posts, so I just had to check it out. Thus I decided to brave through FilePlanet for a demo and joined a download queue. But my impatience got the better of me, so I just googled around for a suitable mirror. 5 seconds later, I managed to get it from some funky site which google found for me; 5 minutes later, it was on my harddrive; 5 hours later, I remembered I got it on my harddrive and proceeded to install to try it out.
The Goos are damn cute, the ambient music is nice, the graphics are top-notch, and the physics effects are great! Perfect game, no? But alas, I wasn’t really that into the game. I think the demo allowed one to play the first chapter, but after 4 levels, I was already starting to get bored. It was fun figuring it out for a while or making your tower into funny little shapes until you run out of living goo balls, having which you just hit the restart button. The signs were also very humourously done, never failing to get a chuckle from me. I also liked the SimCity-ish startup texts; was half-expecting it to say “Reticulating Splines” for a minute there.
The gameplay seems to be just grabbing a living goo, mousing over where’s the furthest place you can place it, and then dropping it there, where it will presumably die (no more eyes.. 
) and become part of the tower or bridge (depending whether it’s vertical or horizontal). I assume that on the levels get harder and more challenging on the next few chapters, but I have yet to buy it to try it out. Heck, I still haven’t completed the demo yet.
World Of Goo costs US$20, for both the PC and WiiWare versions. Sure, it’s a nice price and I have also bought Kudos 2 and Trials 2 at the same price point (Trials 2 has since reduced its price). However, for now, US$20 translates to SG$30 (if I use a generic US$1 = SG$1.50 exchange rate), and 30 bucks for me just feels a tad too high.
But really, I’m probably feeling that way because I’m a bit tight on cash right now. If I got some spare cash, I wouldn’t mind paying such an amount for a nice polished puzzle game, especially one that I can secretly install on my office laptop. One big plus point for me is that I am a huge fan of indie games that dare to push and challenge boundaries such as this. I would also love to support DRM-free games as much as possible! Not to mention, talented developers such as them should be supported and encouraged. Who knows, they could bring about the next gaming revolution.
I absolutely love freeform games. Which explains the boxes of Simcity 3000, Simcity 4 Deluxe, The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind GOTY, The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, Railroad Tycoon 2 Gold, etc, etc, littering my room. This is the main reason Far Cry 2 suckered me in.
I am not a first-person kinda guy. I get motion sickness a lot whenever I try any FPS. Plus, I am not a graphics freak. I do love having the latest hardware, and I do like seeing all these fancy textures and lighting in my games, but it is definitely not a requisite for me to play a game. “Good graphics do not a good game make” – believed always, I have.
However, surprisingly, I have tried out a few FPS’es that don’t make me sick in any way, only after extended play sessions, like an hour or two. Serious Sam 1, Commandos 4 and the original Far Cry don’t sicken me the way CoD4, BioShock, FEAR or Return To Castle Wolfenstein did. Since the original Far Cry is in the “FPS that I can play” list, I am hoping that I can play Far Cry 2 too.
The open world really intrigues me. Also, seeing trailers of the game impressed me in the way the game is handled. There’s no alternate screen for the map, you actually hold the map in your hand. When you heal, there is no magic flash on the screen. You’ll actually see your alter-ego doing something, like injecting himself with drugs or sticking a knife in your body to get the “bad blood” out a la. Rambo. Ok, granted the former has been done lots of times, but the latter is quite cool to have. I guess it’s all for realism. Which somehow strikes me as odd, because I play games to escape from reality.
The game also seems to be hardware-friendly. A post on VR-Zone describes that someone managed to max out the settings, and he is only running a 9600GT. Of course, this all depends on what resolution he played at, and if his forum signature is accurate at the time.
So which part of my soul does it want if I were to play this game? The DRM looks interesting.
- You have 5 activations on 3 separate PCs.
- Uninstalling the game “refunds” an activation. This process is called “revoke”, so as long as you complete proper uninstall you will be able to install the game an unlimited number of times on 3 systems.
- You can upgrade your computer as many time as you want (using our revoke system)
- Ubisoft is committed to the support of our games, and additional activations can be provided.
- Ubisoft is committed to the long term support of our games: you’ll always be able to play Far Cry 2.
Hmm, sounds very fishy, doesn’t it? I wonder what “3 separate PCs” mean. On the surface, people will really think that it’s all 3 physically different PCs. But software isn’t that smart. It simply means that if you change your graphics card or CPU or motherboard or RAM or possibly even a hard drive, or a combination or any of these, it will mean that you have a separate PC already! So “3 separate PCs” can also mean your same PC upgraded thrice. Funky!
And the revoke feature only works if you “complete proper uninstall”. So you can wave goodbye to one install if your windows suddenly got a BSOD, disabling you from booting into the windows partition, and you have to reformat. Good luck trying to revoke that install from customer support and proving your case.
Just how long is “long term”? If they really want me to play Far Cry 2 always, why not a simpler DRM or even no DRM at all? Sigh…
All this sounds very disappointing to the trying-to-reform pirate. I have a nice income now: I can afford 1-2 games each month. (Yes, I define my income levels by the number of games I can buy per month.) Yet publishers like this simply try to push me away, time and again. First, Mass Effect. Then Spore. Then this! I am super super happy that Fallout 3 will only have a simple CD check, and I will be immediately getting that game first in 2 days time.
Hmm, maybe I can buy it, then download a crack. Or just buy it, not install it at all and just use a pirated cloned ISO off my favourite torrent site. While I mull over this, I think I’ll just play Colin McRae 2005 for now. I just bought it off Good Old Games, a game distribution site that actually advertises “DRM free” as a core feature in their games. Brings tears to my eyes.
Sources:
Ok, first off, I’m not much of political guy. All my knowledge of US politics is from watching recent episodes of Saturday Night Live. I don’t really follow the political situation in my own country too.
However, news footage like this really gives me the jitters. Even a stupid bum like me knows that what some voters call Obama isn’t true at all. I’m glad Al-Jazeera did not censor certain words in there. You just have to hear it for yourself to believe it.
No wonder Bush can get voted into office again the previous time.
Source: SNL: Sarah Palin guests on mrbrown.com.
Steal This Comic
Whatever you do, it will not be 100% legal anyway. So why bother taking the long way round?
EA’s CEO, Mr. John Riccitiello, recently gave an interview with Gamasutra, and surprisingly he said:
I personally hate DRM,” EA CEO John Riccitiello tells Gamasutra.
Am I the only one who thinks that is a huge steaming pile of horse manure?
“I don’t like the whole concept; it can be a little bit cumbersome. But I don’t like locks on my door, and I don’t like to use keys in my car… I’d like to live in a world where there are no passports. Unfortunately, we don’t – and I think the vast majority of people voted with their wallets and went out and bought Spore.”
Bad analogy. Locks on your door & keys in your car serves one purpose: to protect you and your investment. This is more akin to installing anti-virus on your PC. Sure you can remove them, but removing them dissolves you of the protection that they offer and require you to be more vigilant. DRM on software does nothing for the user. Instead, it benefits the publisher and gives no freedom to the user what he wants to do with the software that he purchsed. So it is more akin to the company who built the house holding the key to the lock and unlocks it for you each time you want to enter the house. What if Honda were the ones who hold the keys to your car?
I have to admit that the game’s concept is very intriguing and I would so very much love to go out and buy it. That’s why a lot of people went out and bought it. But just think how much more would have gone out and bought it if there is no DRM?
“I think that, in general, a year and a half ago EA was pretty well hated — and I think for good reasons,” he says. “Today, you’d be hard pressed to go to a forum and not see a lot of people defending EA and its products.”
I’ve read and seen Blizzard fanboys. But I didn’t know there are EA fanboys! (I just had to put this in.)
“There are different ways to do DRM; the most successful is what WoW does. They just charge you by the month,” Riccitiello says, noting that the subscription model means that even those who pirate the software itself can’t play without paying.
How can he compare an online game, as opposed to a single player game? WoW is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, or MMORPG, for short. The game thrives on the social aspect in a persistent world, which of course requires a user to have an account to play. WoW also doesn’t skimp on the client. In fact, one of the most fabulous things about WoW is that I can simply copy the folder WoW resides in into a portable harddrive and copy it onto a different machine, double click on WoW.exe and start playing. It’s that simple! As for the monthly subscription model, I see it as simply the cost of maintaining a persistent world, which happens to be part of the game, not a form of protection against piracy.
Funnily enough, Spore is a game that also has an online component. The user has to log on to EA’s server so that Spore can populate the user’s world with other user-generated content, making no two worlds alike. So why does it need SecuROM and the install limit in the first place? Why can’t it be as accessible as WoW? I have bought WoW, twice in fact, which means Blizzard has gotten their fair share of my money.
A user was also burned by EA’s lies EA’s licensing agreement. Is this a company that should be supported?
“Everyone gets that we need some level of protection, or we’re going to be in business for free,” Riccitiello says. But he sees a lack of understanding among “a minority of people that orchestrated a great PR program. They picked the highest-profile game they could find,” he says. “I respect them for the success of their movement.”
“‘I’m guessing that half of them were pirates, and the other half were people caught up in something that they didn’t understand,” he says. “If I’d had a chance to have a conversation with them, they’d have gotten it.”
So by his statement, Stardock is probably not making any money at all and will go under very, very soon. But surprisingly, their previous two games, Galactic Civilizations 2 and Sins Of A Solar Empire, which came without ANY protection whatsoever, went into the top ten sales charts for PC games. By the way, Sins Of A Solar Empire, a game made on a fraction of a budget, went on to sell more than 500,000 copies.
Also, why would pirates be lamenting on the DRM? They got away scot-free didn’t they? No install limit to contend with. No online activation needed. Spore is the number one most pirated game of all time. EA’s response? Downplay it, of course! Strangely, EA also insinuated that a pirated copy isn’t a lost sale. Wait, isn’t that what all industry bigwigs are saying in the first place?
If DRM did not prevent piracy as EA seem to suggest, what does it accomplish?
I think that the installation limitation will definitely kill off second hand sales of the game. Would you buy a copy if the original owner had used up one or two installs? Why would anyone take such a huge gamble? Let’s say a person buys a used copy with only 1 installation left for $10. Then, he realised that a graphics card upgrade will increase his enjoyment of the game more. Aha! But he can’t! If he did, his PC will be detected as a new PC, and there is no more activations left. Who wants to bet with me that EA’s customer support will be awesome enough to promptly issue him a new key 10 minutes after getting through to an officer?
We have seen what will happen once the 3-install limit is up. The first advice they give you: buy another copy! So instead of directing users to call customer support, some of those who breached this, will go out and buy another copy instead. It’s just like spam. If a fraction of those who got it responded, it is good enough for them.
So, final rhetorical question: does DRM serve to hinder piracy or boost sales?
Source: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20655
The ones before were just prequels. This is the part where everything begins.
*play trumpeting music*
I had a glitch and messed up some stuff. Ok, messed up a lot of stuff. Reminds me of the time when I deleted the compressed file on my 386 which is actually the container for my harddrive. I never really recovered from that, since I didn’t know how to reinstall operating systems at the time. “HIMEM.SYS” is somehow always missing each time I boot up. There was no google at the time to look that up.
Now, I stand somewhere around blatant ignorance, utter stupidity and the ability to mess things up just for the fun of it. Taking a leaf out of indexed:
Let’s just hope this time round, I can spawn generations of sequels.
PS: if you had typed http://www.relek1corner.org, you will come here instead. That was the domain that I changed, messed with wordpress settings and made recoverable but troublesome errors.
