Here we go again!  It's another lawsuit against EA, the Evil Empire of video game publishers.  Though EA apologized and offered to upgrade the number of Spore's installs to 5, the people have already spoken.  It seems that history is repeating itself and the will of the gaming community is drawing the line between how much consumers will put up with.  Here is a link to the class-action lawsuit. 

Electronic Arts, a leading maker of computer games, defrauds consumers through its "Spore" game, which "completely wipes their hard drive" and replaces it with an undisclosed program that prevents the computer from operating under some circumstances and disrupts hardware operations, a class action claims in Federal Court. 

The class claims that "Spore," a virtual reality simulation game, contains "a second, undisclosed program" called SecuROM, a "form of Digital Rights Management (DRM) for computer games."

Consumers are not warned about the program, which is installed without notice and cannot be uninstalled, even if they uninstall Spore, the complaint states. The secret SecuROM program is "secretly installed to the command and control center of the computer (Ring 0, or the Kernel), and surreptitiously operated, overseeing function and operation on the computer, preventing the computer from operating under certain circumstances and/or disrupting hardware operations," the complaint states.

Good luck, EA.

Spore has only been out since September 1st, but it's already becoming the most pirated game ever.  Gamers are enraged by the DRM issues created by EA - even if you purchased the game legally, you can only install it up to three times.  While the move was supposed to deter piracy and encourage retail sales of the game, it has done the opposite.  Pirates are justified by their own ethics, and gamers who would normally purchase the game are falling to the dark side.  Comments and message boards around the internet are trying to rally a movement - some are even downloading the game several times just to inflate statistics.

But in the words of Geordi La Forge on Reading Rainbow, you don't have to take my word for it.  Lots of people around the net have something to say, citing mediocre reception, karmic justice for EA, and of course the promise of unlimited installs that piracy has in their reasons for making Spore the most pirated game ever. 

"It’s the most disappointing title I’ve played since Black & White, it’s a collection of poor minigames to start with, a space game that’s neither hard core enough for most gamers or simple enough for the average The Sims player and some nice creator tools and er, that’s it." -comment from videogaming247

"I pirated this game because 1 - I'm a broke-ass teen and 2 - out of spite." -comment from Digg

"Spore is one of the first games that deserves to be pirated by even those who can afford it, and would have bought it legitimately, like me. EA just created a whole new breed of pirates. Nice going!" -comment from Digg

"The only people who change DRM are those who BUY the product?????

Yeah freaking' right! My ass they do. By complying with their wishes, people send the signal that they don't care if the DRM is bullshit But if you want to believe what you say, go right ahead. EA will just laugh as they take your money while sticking a rod up your ass. They don't give a crap about anything any of their customers say, unless they realize it will HURT SALES.

When they find out DRM is driving people TOWARDS piracy or just plain out not buying the game, THEN they'll listen to your complaints. NOT the other way around. It takes money to make them move - forward, backward, sideways, you name it." -comment from thepiratebay

"You know all this talk from pirates about DRM is well founded.  We can sit here all day long and say that everyone needs to just buy the game, but the problem is that game companies are making owning PC games more and more of a burden by weighing down the product with unnecessary bullshit. Period.
  There is NO need to have this game be authenticated and given an install counter for f%&*s sakes, that's ridiculous. DRM *is* bullshit. Companies cannot have it both ways.

If they want my money, they better be prepared to give me the goddamn game not a rental version with the power to be revoked instantaneously on their whim.  I felt the same way about iTunes and not being able to move audio files at will.

Things will be pirated anyway just because we are cheap and paying $60 for a game is ridiculous in the first place. I remember when new games were like $40 tops. And they were good games! When I "pirate" games, I do so because I have a hunch that the game is not up to par and would be a waste of money anyways like most new games are.

When companies start making worthwhile games, piracy will drop considerably I think.  Until then, screw em. " -comment from thepiratebay

The Backlash

- Spore is averaging 1.5 stars out of 5 on Amazon.com due to over 2,000 votes at one star.  Is EA listening yet?
- People are making Spore creatures to creatively and artistically show their feelings.  At least the penis monsters have slowed down.

Our fellow gamers over at Warcry Networks  are giving away free 10-day keys to the Warhammer Online Beta.  I'm not much of an MMORPGer but I hear it's better than WoW.  It's free so you have nothing to lose except maybe some extra spam in your inbox  (so I would reccomend using a secondary email address).  Grab it HERE .

In light of gameh0lic's article of Nintendo milking all their franchises I felt that we should take a look at the biggest dairy farmer of them all, Relic Entertainment's Dawn of War (or better known simply as DoW, kinda like another cash cow: WoW).  As a huge fan of the RTS genre I try to play every major RTS that my grubby hands can get on. One game that has continued to elude my grasp is DoW.  The reason simply is because of the ridiculous initial investment required to play the "full game."  Call it whatever you want: episodic content, expansion packs, semi-sequels... this tactic of selling bite sized morsels of gameplay is milking at its finest.  And why not milk?  You combine a vast gameworld with a rabid fanbase and get gallons of vitamin-D organic. I guess it all started with the MMO's (as do many other trends which are detrimental to society). The granddaddy of them all, EverQuest started releasing expansion packs to quell the ubernerds who hit the level cap in a matter of weeks.  To see the cool new items and lands you had to buy the expansion and then another expansion... and so on.  Sony Online Entertainment now had two streams of revenue: the monthly service fees AND the profits from expansion sales, why would they want to stop?  MMO-ers are the biggest crack addicts of them all.  No matter the price, playing becomes service with inelastic demand. It is quite easy to see how this is an awesome formula for the bigwigs up top.

Not completely related, but 4 cities and 4 classes were also cut from the Warhammer MMO .

Call of Duty 4? Buttery smooth... Supreme Commander? Done!... Bioshock? No problem!.. AMD's new R700 based Radeon 4850 slices through every game like Ryu's Dragon Sword doing an Izuma Drop through a mob of demon samurais.  Well, every game besides Crysis; but Crysis kills EVERY video card out there. It even made Hitler cry, so it doesn't count. As some of you may know, I recently picked up one of these new fangled cards for my gaming rig and I honestly didn't believe the benchmarks out there that placed this $199 card at the upper echelons of the hardware ladder. Well imagine my surprise as I fired up Rainbow Six Vegas 2 at an eye-popping 1920x1200 resolution (all settings cranked on HIGH) and saw nothing but silky smooth video that outclassed my Xbox360.

While nVidia has decided to take the high road by stuffing more transistors into their latest GPU than Rosie O'Donnell at a chinese buffet, AMD decided to go with a more mainstream approach: Create a highly efficient, highly scaleable mid-range chip and then scale it up for high-end applications.  The result is a video card line that is both powerful and affordable. I applaud these efforts in the wake of increasing prices for everything from video cards to gasoline.  I feared that PC Gaming was on the decline thanks to ever increasing hardware costs in light of more powerful consoles. The 4850 has effectively reversed this trend as you can now build a 4850 based PC for around $500 that is graphically superior to the 360 and PS3.  In fact I am replaying Mass Effect and Call of Duty 4 on my updated PC since it looks so much better than I remember on my 360, It's almost like a whole new game. In that sense, the Radeon 4850 is like Chuck Norris. He is truly an enigma in that he is the epitome of awesome but can be hired for pennies compared to an actor like Tom Cruise. Anything he touches is automatically badass! So if you want your gaming rig to roundhouse kick all your games into a bloody pulp, grab a 4850 (I hear they are going for under $190 on newegg.com )... Hell, grab two 4850's... that's like 2 Siamese Twin Chuck Norris'... What is more awesome than 2 Siamese Twin Chuck Norris'?

AMD and nVidia each have just introduced their latest next generation GPUs.  The two companies are taking totally different approaches to improving graphical performance.  This comes at a crucial time when GPUs are increasingly becoming the bottleneck for latest games (see Crysis).  AMD/ATI's R700 series GPU takes a more traditional approach by improving their older design and simply making it parallel by adding duplicate cores much like a modern multi-core CPU.  On the other hand, nVidia's Geforce 200 GPU is a completely redesigned monster with 192-240 stream processors packed into a single die.

I believe ATI's approach will be more scalable due to its parallel nature.  The low end RV710 with a single chip should be fairly efficient while packing enough punch to counter the older but effective 8800/9600 series Geforce cards.  I predict the RV710 and RV730 to be popular for laptop applications.  On the high end, I believe the Geforce 200 design will prevail simply because parallel processing is still not as efficent as it could be to benefit the R700 design with multiple chips.  Furthermore, nVidia's proprietary CUDA technology along with their recent aquisition of PhysX will allow the GF200 to be extremely efficient on multiple fronts, not just graphics.  This is all speculation for now until we see some benchmarks but I'm hoping that AMD/ATI steals the show this time around as they have been on the losing side on both the CPU and GPU fronts (against Intel's Core CPUs and nVidias 8XXX series GPUs). 

Healthy competition always benefits the gamer!

Crysis is almost making me cry.   Crytek's montly update on Crysis doesn't look promising for the pretty looking FPS.  As their latest decisions indicate, the developers don't seem to think too highly of the game's future.  Hell, they don't even sound remotely excited about their current industry niche.

From the Crysis monthly update:

At this time, there almost certainly will not be a patch 1.3 delivered for Crysis. We are aware that this news will disappoint many of you, and we would like to apologize profusely. There is a good reason for this and we hope you understand when you hear more about the reasons why in the very, very near future. Please realize this was an extremely difficult decision, but please do know that we are listening to your comments and are making more consistent community support a high priority.

Crytek will also be halting development on their promised dedicated Linux server for the game. 

We are sorry to say that the current development progress is not satisfying enough, as we have a hard time getting the code to a state where it is stable and playable.

Thus we made the decision to put the development on hold for now. We are definitely not happy with the current quality and stability of the server and we are far away from having a stable version which could be sent out to the community for alpha/beta testing.

If you ask me, Crytek looks like they're totally neglecting the fans that have stuck with them and endured with Crysis.  With Crytek's whining and whoa-is-me attitude, they certainly aren't doing themselves any favors by screwing over their community.  Good developers know that they have to satisfy their audience and perhaps more importantly, retain their trust.  Crytek complains about PC piracy hurting their sales.  But did they make sure they released a polished product (Crysis is still buggy) with enough resources (like a dedicated server) to ensure its success?  It's always easier to blame something or someone else for your problems, isn't it?  Crytek, by disappointing your fanbase, blaming it the PC industry, and basically airing out your ineptitude on your blog, you deserve all the criticism that's coming your way.  Do the right thing and give your fans patch 1.3 and a server to play on.  If you're counting on Crysis 2 to be your golden egg, then all the fans you lost with this debacle will make sure it's big goose egg.

My suggestion is this:  take a page out of Blizzard's book.  While StarCraft wasn't the perfect RTS from the beginning, patch after patch made sure the game got better and better.  Blizzard focused on making battle.net a great place to find opponents and they made sure the game had everything it needed for success.  Blizzard built on trust with their users, and each game after StarCraft has benefitted from this momentum (see WarCraft 3 and WoW).  

I'm really hoping Crytek can turn this thing around - it's not too late, after all.  Hopefully this lacksidasical attitude won't poison the rest of the PC industry, as we all know it could use every developer it can get.  I'm not above spitting out cliches to Crytek right now, so fellas, in times of crisis, only the resilient will prevail!

I hate dating sims.  I think they're pointless and lame.  Except Sprung for the DS, which, if played through as both male and female protagonists, will exponentially increase your chances of getting laid with voluptuous blondes by teaching you the intricacies of the dalliance (great scripting in that game, I promise).  Anyway, one of the few things lamer than dating sims is Naruto, the very thing that pre-teen boys are into before they discover masturbation.  Pasty white socially-awkward otaku types also like this crap because watching animes about pubescent ninjas helps them get Asian girls.  Due to my fervent dislike of Naruto and dating sims in general, you can bet I got real P.O.'ed when I saw this Naruto Dating Sim on gamesforwork.com...

 And if you're playing Naruto Dating Sim flash games while you're on the clock, may all your co-workers find out how much of a fruitcake you are.