Posts Tagged ‘drm’

Treating consumers with contempt costs you

Saturday, July 17th, 2010

Three quick notes for publishers from the your-dickheadetry-will-cost-you file:

  • New strategy game RUSE is free to try this weekend on Steam, as a method of building interest in the title. Unfortunately, the full game remains Ubi-crippled with Ubisoft’s gamer-hating “log you off if the connection is lost in the middle of a single-player game” DRM (even if you’re running it through Steam) so, I have absolutely no idea whether the full game is any good or not because I’m not going to bother downloading even a trial of it. (And I’m not alone.)

  • I was going to give new comedy RPG DeathSpank a go, and went to download it on 360 before realising that there’s no way it’ll fit on my crowded 20GB hard drive. Naturally, I have thus far resisted paying Microsoft’s frankly obscene prices for a drive upgrade, and will thus be downloading the demo and possibly buying the game on PS3, where Sony will get the sweet sweet cash and not Microsoft.
  • Would’ve bought the PC version of Battlefield Bad Company 2 on the recent Steam sale, if Australians weren’t being forced to pay 40% more than every other country. Well done, EA and local distributors – you’ve done yourselves out of another sale. Likewise 2K with its even more obscene 270% markup on the PC version of Borderlands.

I’m just one man, slowly making up for his weakness in buying the MW2 map packs.

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DRM and other factors in Game Reviews

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

After my recent article on Silent Hunter 5 and Ubisoft’s fascist, broken DRM system, a large number of comments kept me unsure just what to do with regard to buying the game or not. Sure, I wanted to check it out – see how it panned out as a game, and see just how it compared to earlier Silent Hunter titles, but I also began to slide into the category that seemingly almost all the commenters is in. I just didn’t want to throw down cash for a title that I wouldn’t even properly be able to enjoy with Australia’s net connectivity being what it sometimes is.

In the end, the question became moot, as I was given a copy to review for GameArena. It went up the other day – you can give it a read here. If you don’t want to read the whole thing, here’s the gist – my last paragraph:

In all, the game seems to alternate between a wonderful, engrossing experience and a frustrating, incomplete one – and while we can hope that upcoming patches fix many of these (often niggling, sometimes major) problems, for the moment, Silent Hunter 5 remains a interesting but partially-broken game.

But reviewing Silent Hunter 5 presented me with a series of problems. Do I bring up the DRM? Is it reasonable to? What about the general state of the game? If a game is already being patched to remove some of the problems found in it at launch, should this factor in to a review?

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Silent Hunter’s Past, Future and DRM

Sunday, February 21st, 2010

The year was 2005, and World War 2 submarine simulators were dead. The much-anticipated Silent Hunter 2 had come out four years before, and not only did it look like it’d have a good influx of realism, graphics that (at the time) really looked like they were going to be phenominal, but it also did something brand new – the ability to link up multiplayer with Destroyer Command. For the first time, bubbleheads would be able to really show skimmers that really, they were only still afloat because a submarine hadn’t found them yet.

But the game barely worked on release, suffered from lack of a dynamic campaign (a staple of the genre for years) and any number of other issues. Years later, modding crews had fixed up everything they could – even creating a technically impressive series of missions to give the impression of a dynamic campaign, and bring back the “my ship, my story, my war” experience that people missed from Aces of the Deep and the original Silent Hunter.

And then Silent Hunter III came along. The franchise had been handed over to Ubisoft Romania, and what they did blew everybody out of the water. Not only was the realism much improved, but the interior of the control room was 3D-modelled, as were the crew, who sat at their stations and played with dials. Never before had being depth-charged been so vivid and terrifying in a video game.

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