Rockstar dropped the ball

I have recently acquired a sparkling new computer-rig made of pure electric-current asskickery, so of course I looked around to buy some equally kickass games, and saw that GTA4 came out (for the PC) recently. I hurried to Amazon (Yes, i know, I’m a cooperate whore), raised my finger to click and buy, but then, just as my finger was on the verge of sending the signal to Amazon, 3rd party corporations, and probably the government for good measure, I glimpsed at the 1.5 star rating. GTA3, being something which probably cost me my soul, sanity, and prospects of a good career, demanded of my fanboy-self, that I flame and, if possible, wreak terrible vengeance on the infidels who unjustly voted on the (arguably) fourth coming of my lord. When I actually saw the complaints of the 1star-raters however, my rage was quickly extinguished and turned into the opposite: Pure frustration about the current state of PC-gaming, combined with disdain and loathing of Rockstar.

I knew that Rockstar would probably violate both my computer and my sense of self-worth with some sort of evil copy-protection scheme, but this time I was prepared to throw my ideals overboard like some stranded guy roasting his best friend on a pike, while furiously masturbating to memories of him having his way with his friend’s wife.

Despite my moral downfall, one thing I still cannot bring myself to do is to accept Windows Live. Just like Steam I reject this sort of monolithic paternalism in its entirety. I do NOT want to connect to the internet to save my game. Period. I have 1 Terabyte of storage on my PC, I can save MILLIONS of GTA4 savefiles, I want to have it on my local harddrive, end of story. After activation I want to have the game on my PC, still activated, till the day the music dies, and I want to play the game even without being connected to the internet. Why do I want this? Because I actually care about my privacy. Yes, remember that word? Privacy? You’ve heard of it, right? I will not give anyone the right to know what I am doing in the privacy of my own 4 walls, noone has the right to know when I play GTA4, for how long, and how much I suck at it. Neither Rockstar nor Microsoft is entitled to this information. They are entitled to my money, afterwards they are entitled to going away to disappear into the meadows of obscurity. And maybe come out once in a while to deliver some patches, which, reading the reviews, I think they are going to need. Wow.

Windows-Live is just another travesty like Windows Vista, which is a clunky piece of unnavigable trash. Vistas menu-structure is simply horrendous, and the control panel, no words for the control panel – I mean did their designers purposely decide to force me through 10 minutes of searching till I actually find anything? Can menu-names be any more uninformative? I don’t even want to find out. And now they expect me to welcome Live into my PC? No. Matchmaking and playing online were NEVER a problem EXCEPT in the rare occasions in which companies decided that selling out to companies, like the one behind Gamespy, was somehow reasonable business practice.

Another problem is this Rockstar “Social Club”-hogwash. Does anyone in their right mind actually give a shit about “sharing user profiles” with other people, running around virtually killing people and blowing up cars/buildings/playgrounds? What the hell is wrong with these people?

I know I could be potentially be shooting myself in the foot, since this is wordpress after all, and lets face it, it’s a platform for sexually unsatisfied losers to talk about how much Rockstar is pissing them off, but there has to be a difference! And there is of course, because I actually write here on my own free will, while this social club nonsense is imposed upon me, if I want to play the game. You simply know that a service is going to suck if they actually require you to use it, and not give it to you as an option. But of course they do force it, because if they wouldn’t, then noone would give a damn.

Rockstar, I’ve been a loyal customer since GTA1 – but there is always a time to say goodbye. I can’t say that you’ve always treated me nicely, because most of the time you’ve been a bug riddled hassle, but we all have our faults. But this time your constant bitching and jealous hand-holding was simply too much for me to bear. I really hope you learn your lesson, and if not, well then go to hell.

By the way, I tried to include some pictures to make this wall of text more appealing, but ill be damned if I have to load another one of these fucking flash animations on their homepage – HTML simply isn’t good enough anymore it seems.

Ways to piss paying consumers off

When I was a kid I was an avid PC-Gamer. I got my first computer in 92, me being about 6 years old. Over the years i played great classics like Commander Keen, Monkey island, Betrayal at Krondor, Quest for Glory, Duke Nukem, Robot, and so on. The first experience with copy protection at that time was probably in “The Settlers”. You needed to put in a list of symbols at the start of the game, and if you got it wrong the game simply quit. Other means of copy protection were typing in certain words in certain parts of the game-manual, answering questions whose answers you needed to extract from an extra sheet or the manual again. All fine and dandy. As time moved on, games required you to put in the original CD, which I always found a huge hassle, needed you to put in codes, needed you to register at some on-line service. I still don’t have any problem with that, after all, I understand the developers need to obtain lots of money to buy whores and expensive wines. I have slight problems with this on-line verification aspect (because it renders the product useless should the service be canceled, and limited activation tries are a big no-no), but I can manage. What really pisses me off is, when hackers and other freeloaders are actually getting a BETTER deal than an honest customer, going into a store and actually PAYING MONEY for their games. What am I talking about you say? Well read on:

I went into town today and bought some games and hardware. One of these games was Colin Mcrae Rally 2005, for about 10$ from the rummage bin. So of course I went home and installed the game. But to my amazement the game needed to install “Copy Protection Drivers”, namely Starforce. If you don’t know what this means, just google Starforce. Like any sane customer I felt raped and violated, why oh why I asked myself, must a developer force me to install Starforce drivers TO PROTECT A 10$ GAME FROM 2005 I OBTAINED FROM THE RUMMAGE BIN? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE? You might say I’m being overly melodramatic, after all they are just kernel drivers being able to wreck all sorts of havoc in my finely tuned system, right? Wrong, there’s a reason I mentioned these old copy protection methods, none of them were system intrusive. They didn’t force me to install any kernel drivers of questionable origin (except maybe DirectX, a graphics library worth trusting), which are capable of compromising my entire system. This is my computer, this is my platform I play your shitty game on! My platform, my rules, bitches! And the funny thing is, it just protects games being burnt to CD/DVD. Who the hell gets their illegal games from discs these days? There’s something called the “Internet” you dipshits! And the hacked versions of this game have this copy protection removed, which means that people who don’t spend money on product are actually better off. What kind of a logic is that? It’s no wonder the industry is complaining about bad sales of “top games” on the PC, if the customer has to put up with this shit. Yes, I’m sure all these hackers are the cause of your dwindling sales morons, how about giving people incentive to actually buy your games by providing a trustworthy copy void of viruses and other malware aka Starforce?

But the biggest complaint is still coming: I downloaded the Death Track Demo a while ago, and guess what? It had Starforce copy protection. WHAT THE HELL? Are you telling me I just wasted 2GB of bandwidth downloading a shitty demo needing me to install copy protection drivers? I looked around and it seems the demo needs copy protection to prevent hackers from reverse engineering the demo, and thus also cracking the “real” game. Anyone with a little bit of knowledge in this area knows: This is a steaming pile of shit, aka lies. They just want people to “accept” these drivers, because they are everywhere and you can’t get around them. But you can get around them, by playing hacked games, or in my case, by not playing them at all. Indeed, this copy protection is really worth its money.