Gaming Annoyances 101: The Industry Factor

Not only do you have to go online to authenticate this offline game (see the irony yet?), you’ll also have to make sure you log on every ten days so that EA can make sure you aren’t doing illegal stuff with your copy. Unbelievable but true. Not only are they assuming that all their buyers have Internet access; they’re actually forcing them to log on every ten days for like ever.

I hope EA realizes that no matter what they do, this game is going to be cracked by certain warez groups and it will land up on torrents, making the pirates laugh all the way to their PCs while legit owners slit their wrists for actually "buying" an EA game. I guess they haven’t learned a lesson from Starforce yet.

Major props to The Angry Pixel for bringing this to our attention.

UPDATE: We just got word via coolpcguy (who scored this bit from yougamers.com), one of our readers who informed us that EA's dropping their ridiculous copy protection system for both Mass Effect and Spore after being flamed profusely by irate gamers.

Thanks for the update mate and here's hoping publishers never underestimate the power of us gamers.

Piss-Poor PC Ports
Porting a game across all platforms isn’t a bad idea since it means more people can access this game, but when it’s done sloppily just for the sake of milking a franchise it borders on being pathetic. When I talk about bad ports, the first name that invariably pops into my mind is French developer Ubiosft who as you all know tasted massive doses of success through PC gaming with franchises like Splinter Cell, Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon etc. But in recent times all they’ve done for the PC community is bestow them with horribly sloppy ports, the worst of which was Splinter Cell Double Agent.

Besides being technically sloppy, most console games when ported to the PC suffer from crappy controls, as a result of which people are forced to play the game with their controller. And if I'm going to be playing with a controller, why would I go through the headache of playing the game on my PC in the first place? For better textures? A higher resolution? I really don’t think that’s worth the headache of installing the game, updating it with the latest patches, updating drivers and so on.

Why this obvious discrimination, I ask? Why do PC gamers have to bear the brunt of mediocre ports, even though they’re paying as much for the game as their console counterparts? Doesn’t that fact alone warranty the need for some sort of quality control among developers? With the way things are going it’s no wonder PC gaming is in the dire straits it is in today!