September 17, 2004

Oh THIS Is Why I Didn't Play PC Games For Three Years

So this week was SUPPOSED to be a pretty big week in video gaming for me. I'm not what you'd call the most diligent law student ever, but I'm not THAT lazy, so given the amount of actual work I should be doing let's just say that it took a pretty pretty big promise of gaming bliss for me to decide to spend significant time slacking. First, we had the release of The Sims 2 and Fable on Wednesday. Then there was the first big content expansion in City of Heroes on Thurday including a major in-game event, which basically means cool out of the norm stuff happens like an alien invasion throughout the game world.

Despite getting my games Wednesday I wasn't actually able to play them that night, but I had the whole weekend planned out. Thursday night comes and I load up City of Heroes. On top of lots of traffic because, of course, everyone and his mother has logged on for the event, the new content seems to not agree with my video card drivers. Usually I'd update my drivers, except that there aren't any new ones! So after getting booted from the game three or for times, in which every character is green and the world has a green tint by the way, I decide to update Windows to see if that will help, which takes forever.

By the time I'm done I figure it's too late to get any significant CoH time in, so I install Sims 2. Turns out the copy protection on the game HATES pirating so much that the game won't run if you have burning programs installed on your computer the game won't play. You don't even want to know what happens if you have a parrot or peg leg. I think the game shoots a laser into your brain. Anyway, the official solution from EA is "Go fuck yourself, and get rid of your legitimate burning programs". Eventually some hack or workaround will be made by fans, but this is so fucking rediculous. I'm not going to say that I've never violated any copyrights on my computer, but I use my buring software for legitimate purposes ALL THE DAMN TIME. I'm expecting an Electronic Arts person at my door tomorrow to kick me in the balls just to fuck with me.

At least I have Fable, which works flawlessly, even if it's not the near orgasm enducing experience the previews may have led me to believe. This turned into a much longer rant than I intended, so I'm going to stop here and go get shit faced.

4 comments:

Noumena said...

EA, as one of the largest game companies, seems to be one of the most paranoid. SimCity 4 had some very high levels of copy protection which prevented me from making an (entirely legal; I bought the game) image of the disc -- until I found new burning and counter-antipiracy software. I guess they've tried to go one better.

What're you going to do? Return Sims 2, and wait for them to release a version people can install?

MosBen said...

Well, the return policies at pretty much every place that sells games these days is that they don't accept returns for games that have been opened. I'm pretty sure if I fought with them about it I could make it happen since the product doesn't work properly, but I don't have the time or drive for something that inane. And ultimately I WANT to play this game, so I'll probably just wait until eith EA fixes it (unlikely), or the internet community creates a no-cd hack (likely already happened I just don't know where to find it).

Noumena said...

Last fall I bought some game (I forget what) at Best Buy. The game predated Windows XP by about six months (no, I don't know why BB still had it in stock) and wouldn't run on my computer. I went back, told the people at the service desk that it wouldn't run on my computer, and they gave me store credit. I was expecting some huge ordeal, but they just had the service desk supervisor person come over and it was okay'd after just a couple minutes of explanation.

If you bought Sims 2 at a big box store, chances are they're getting lots of returns, and are likely to be more understanding. It's better than just sitting around waiting for EA to release a patch so you can play the game you bought.

MosBen said...

Unfortunately I bought the game on store credit from Electronics Boutique. I think I'd have to bitch pretty hard to get them to take it back.