Be Excellent To Each Other

Since I first got a job that could actually pay my bills and leave me with enough money to do... well, anything at all, I have paid for every game that I've installed on any of my computers, including several that I'd previously pirated. In fact, thanks to the reasonable prices - at long fucking last - of sites like gog.com, I've spent more on games in the last year alone than I previously had in my entire life (and I was hardly a prolific or long-time pirate before this year, either).

Now, I'm currently working six days a week under a boss who alternates between scrutinising and criticising my every move and giving me complete freedom to do what I think is best when someone else screws up, apparently not noticing that during the latter periods, about three times as much work gets done. I am also looking for somewhere to live.

So what do I want from my hobbies? I want to relax, unwind after stressful times and, y'know, enjoy life a little. I most certainly do not want to spend THREE FUCKING HOURS trying to get a game to start simply because the people who published it are USELESS FUCKING TITS.

If it weren't for Securom, I would have started playing the game I paid good money for three hours ago. As it is, however, I have wasted my entire evening off pissing about with several computers and getting absolutely nowhere. I still cannot get the game to run, purely because of the customer-punishing bullshit they have infected it with.

So, once I have posted this, I am going straight to a torrent site, and I am pirating the game.

Fuck anti-piracy measures. They do no good (they certainly never stopped me when I pirated games), they drive up prices (as though the industry that's been ripping people off for almost as long as I've been breathing), and they serve only to piss off and inconvenience legitimate customers.

JC's gotten into hacking accounts now.

Also I am installing some kind of neon light.

Yup. You are the criminal, the paying customer. Running a hacked one does no checks and runs.

Look for a cracked EXE and some dll files to overcome Securom but yes, store brought games usually need to be hacked to work. Excluding NFS Shift of course, that never ever worked for me. Oddly I pirated it first and it worked. Yet when I brought the full game ('cos I lost the pirate in a hdd death) it has never worked, even if I hack it.

Actually...

Two days ago I installed Crysis on my silver Alienware because Furmark only pushes the GPU and not the rest of the card. I wanted to push it to the limits within the 7 days. It ran fine of course.

However, it also worked ! On this machine I am on now I have two DVD drives and Securom would fail every time. So I would normally have to hack it to make it work. It seems that if you only have one DVD drive it works

Of course, if people weren't nicking games, there would never have been a need to come up with Securom and its ilk.

Turn that can-opener!

But it's not the people nicking the games who are fucked over.

Lid off, magnetised opener. No cut fingers.

An argument that would hold more weight if the counter-measures (a) worked and/or (b) didn't harm the customers more than the pirates.

Anyway, as it turns out, the 'download a cracked exe' thing actually worked, much to my surprise. So, let's review:

After three hours of fucking around, I was still not able to play the game I legally purchased. Once I broke the law, however, the game was up and running in the time it took to copy a couple of files to another computer.

I'm not going to stop buying games because of this, for what it's worth. But it's bloody ridiculous that I've had to break the law to get my legally acquired game to work. I'm certainly going to be avoiding games that feature this kind of crap in future.

It's just utterly staggering that the people who run these things are unable to see or unwilling to admit that they do almost nobody any bloody good.

Get a 360.

No fucking about, just fun.

Stupid question.. what's the game? Or is it 'Can of Worms' - a compilation of Scorched Tanks clones?

PC owners get really uppity about opinions like that, man. Must be because of all those games they don't get to play.

Actually SA I don't think you have broken the law.

You own a legal copy of the game and you have paid for the license. I don't think that cracked exe files are illegal or sites like http://www.gamecopyworld.com would not be around for the years they have been.

It could be far more complicated but TBH I don't give a fig. If I have paid for a game and I can't get the money back (which is pretty hard) then I will do whatever I have to do to make it work (unless it's NFS Shit of course) and don't care.

Edit. What I meant with the far more complicated was it might not be illegal to host or download the cracked exe but could be a shady area with actually running and using it.

With a 360 you are already pwned and have already taken one up the jacksie. M$ pwnz Jo0.

PC owners tend to like things being a little less controlled (thanks to the monopoly laws).

/touches some wood
I've never had trouble with a PC game.

Apart from Cities 3000, but that just didn't like Windows Vista, I think.

How so? They sell stuff I like the look of and so I buy it. If that is too much control for you then you'd have to stop shopping altogether, for anything.

The reason 360 titles cost what they do is down to the licensing fee that m$ get to charge every developer per copy. Royalties if you will. They're not allowed to do that with the PC. And that is why I could bugger off to cool shop right now and order that new Transformers game for £22. Infact I think I will

...and? I suppose Sega and Nintendo pwn M333 too then.

If you have a Wii? yes. If you had a Dreamcast? yes. However, Nintendo are far less greedy with their fees. I suppose having the most popular hand held device in the world of evahhhh makes them more generous. M$? why they're just greedy cunts.

I know what you mean. I found out the other day that when I purchase goods or services, a portion that money actually goes to the person or company providing those goods or services, the manufacturers of those goods or services, the distributor of those goods or services or the license owner of those goods or services! I was so appalled I now live in a cave eating free dirt and gravel like the gods want me to.

Shit. The park where my cave was located is actually owned by the government or The Queen. One of the two. I'm trying to find a cave unknown to these license owners. Can anyone help? I need access to dirt or gravel that was placed there by the whims of nature, too.

So Microsoft write and develop every single game on the 360?

Or is it just a case of charging a whacking great fee for some one to release a game on their console.

Maybe the council should charge us for each step we take on their paving stones, or each breath we take from the fresh air?

And the PC is like the common. And a lot of people like it that way.

It's a license. What's the beef? Seriously.

On a console. This is a PC gaming thread.

Some people game on a PC for a reason. Some don't.

Personally I don't like paying £40-£50 for a game. I never have either. A long time ago we all gamed on the spectrum, it was cheap. Then we gamed on C64 and Amiga and STs. It was cheap. Then along came the consoles with their really high game prices and we were told it was due to the ram used to store those games. And then, the PS1 came along and showed us all just how hard we were being fucked and lied to. It wasn't the cost of the media at all it was greedy monopolisation.

Which is just my opinion of course.

Like "PC ones"?

POTW.

Microsoft's all-time balance sheet on the Xbox programme is around $5bill in the red, but feel free to keep imagining they are making lots of money.
Yes, the heartless bastards. All they did was research the console, develop it, pay test engineers to test it[1], buy CPU and GPU designs from IBM and ATI, pay factories to make it, sell millions of them to users at a loss to themselves on each and every one sold, write development tools, provide support to developers, spend money on TV ads and newspaper ads and website ads, hire people to write websites, pay second-party publishers like Bungie to write games. How dare they then expect to make a return on the platform they have created!

[1] badly


Did you ever buy a copy of Fallout, John?

Don't you get most of your stuff off Steam?

How many times must I post a photo of the collectors edition I have sitting on my shelf? Seriously.

I already have one. It broke not long afterwards, and I still haven't fixed it as I don't have a soldering iron or something, and I'm not buying one just to use it once (also, I'm not sure where I could actually buy one).



Raven Squad. Apparently. Somewhat ironically, it looks like being a console port as well, judging by the login screen that had a yellow "Y" button rather than an 'ok' or whatever. A bit clumsy, but hardly important as long as the game itself isn't as hasty.

I should point out that I've not had trouble with most games I've bought. But then, most of the games I've bought were from sites/publishers who don't do this shit. I'm actually scared to count up how much I must have spent on gog.com alone in the last 18 months.

Fair enough then. I've never seen said picture so I'll shut up about it now.

SA: What's wrong with it? If it's the red-ring-of-doom thing you're not fixing it with a soldering iron, either get M$ to fix it for free or buy another one (they're super cheap at the moment I believe).

TBH that is the only reason I have not brought a 360. If it was completely hassle free and allowed me to game with no cares in the world I would get one. But the thing is the RROD is not a small isolated thing. Every single forum I have ever visited has had a seriously alarming rate of failure. Infact, even on Facebook yesterday my friend Chris had an RROD. I literally see one a week on the handful of forums I have been on.

Which kind of nullifies the "but the console is far cheaper" argument. In order to keep gaming on it you end up buying multiple consoles. Come on seriously, without being aggressive how many people here have had to buy more than one?

None of us, I'm pretty sure. We've all had free repairs for our early models which suffered RRoD. And I don't know of anyone with a 360 made in the last 12 months or so -- since they moved to the v3 internal hardware -- that has suffered an RRoD.

It's a license, get the fuck over it. Consoles vs PC again can fuck off, too.

I bought my Xbox off a friend and it did RROD but the inconvenience of being without it for 6 days while Microsoft fixed it is easily outweighed by the fun I've had with it.

Also.... I agree with Dimrill.

I think Dave bought a second one, but he did get his (first gen) broken one repaired under warranty and it's still going strong for me what, 2 years later.

I'd have no hesitation in buying a replacement from the latest batch when/if it eventually dies either. 60 quid plus the live sub isn't bad for two years of the most enjoyment I've had out of gaming.

But yes, let's not do this

I really don't know why anybody bothers with PC gaming* anymore. With the exception of Steam, which I found to be pretty hassle free (but which I haven't fired up in 18 months at least), you're bound to run into DRM issues, bound to spend thousands on upgrades in order to play generic (FPS/RTS/MMORPG) #6026, bound to spend more time piss-balling about with configuration than you actually do playing games and bound to lose out, having spent thousands on upgrades, when in two year's time Dell will sell you a far more capable machine for less than £200.

Consoles also have the advantage of a huge, maybe even oversaturated, secondhand market. This means if you're prepared to wait (sometimes as little as 3-6 months - Bayonetta, anyone?) you can pick up brand new copies massively cheaper than the RRP, and often almost next to nothing for the secondhand copy.

The PC does shine in the field of emulation - but that's another can of worms

*By which I mean boxed, retail games.

I've bought one. It finally broke last month after 2 and a half years of working perfectly. I sent it off for (free) repair. Ten days later it (actually a replacement) was back in my hands, along with a free month of Live Gold for my inconvenience. Yes, the whole RRoD thing is disgraceful, but my experience of the procedure was surprisingly pain free.

Neither do/have I. I have a 360, a couple of PCs, and more recently, a DS. It's true that it's harder to barg on the consoles, but it can still be done, and it's also harder to binge spend on consoles, as you only really use them for games, whereas you might find yourself 'shopping by accident' on the PC while doing other things.

The whole 'loyalty' to a type of machine thing is pretty tiresome, to be honest. It's pretty much just admitting that yes, some companies can buy your allegiance.

O.K. Now usually I don't do this and usually I take the blame, but this time I am going to point this out right at the beginning, just so we are clear on where it began OK?

Please see the picture attatched. See where this shit begins and maybe it can end. No doubt I'll just be tagged the asshole again for starting a row but whatever, seems that no matter what I do around here I am fucked any way.

This is a PC thread. It started off as one and the discussion of them started soon after. It had nothing to do with consoles. Yet, here we go again. I am seriously beginning to wonder why this happens time after time after time. Why is it that assholes like me can understand the title of a thread and not trample on it? Why is it that when I posted something in the Ipad thread that had nothing to do with the subject I got a warning?

Now without sounding like an asshole I completely agreed with Doc. I was in the wrong thread talking about the wrong thing. Yet, whenever it kicks off over PC gaming the start of the argument seems to vanish and PC owners are branded assholes.

Please feel free to point out to me how many times I have gone into a 360 thread and derailed it. Or, gone into any serious thread and derailed that without recieving (a completely just) warning for it.

I have tried so hard never to wield the "if you are not interested in the thread at hand don't read it or post in it" as I have always been for freedom of speech. But I just can't stand it when people walk in, kick off a fucking row and then blame you for it.

If you don't want PC owners to post here then say so. Please. It won't bother me it will just leave me rather bewildered.

What's the title of the thread then?
What's wrong with firing in a forum in-joke/meme as a comedy answer? & who rose to it turning it into the pc vs console debate?

FWIW I've never had problems playing games on my PC, although I've yet to install anything with invasive copy protection.

If the title of the thread did not make sense reading a couple of lines would have clarified it.

As for who rose to the PC vs Console debate? So what you are saying is I can waltz into any thread I like, goad people into giving me a reaction and then say it was their fault?

It's usually a given that if some one punches you then you have the right to defend yourself. The first thing asked when it is over is usually who threw the first punch.

So I usually stick by that as a way of going through life. IE - if I start trouble I don't then try and blame it on some one else.

Wow.. I knew the PC Vs Xbox debate often gets nasty but fisticuffs? Really!?!

D HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAH! Fuck me. Man get upset on Innernehs for not paying pennies to a Microsoft license. PC Gamers are fine. I do loads of PC gaming. It's the PC zealots that fuck me right off.

Well I was speaking metaphorically of course.

Nevermind.

Ah, but you weren't punched & you weren't even goaded

Well firstly it's not pennies is it Dim? This was brought up before and I posted several pics before of the same game accross the platforms. But hey, I'll do it again for you.



That's hardly pennies. Infact, that's almost double the price. Please tell me how you can be so flippant over paying double for a game. I would like to meet your bank manager, as you must know a secret I don't.

As for being a zealot? Well, it could be argued that when you are constantly poked with a stick and constantly ignore it and constantly try to put accross your case only to be ignored until the next round it gets kind of tiring.

I did this with films a couple of months ago SA:

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=5703

I'm still basically at a loss to understand why some 'industries' appear to hate their paying customers so much, or indeed, to feign surprise when we finally tell them to fuck off.

/Grim...

look closer.



I love tar and brushes. No really, it kicks ass.

It'll inevitably be shit though & they'll be selling it for a fiver in a few months. Even if it's not shit it'll be cheap soon enough anyway.
You've kinda got a point about AAA games, but most folk will be patient & pay what they think they're worth anyway.

PS. If anyone is upset by my stick, then I am sorry but it's my stick & I like it, even if the bears don't.

I don't know if I've said it this week yet, but pro tip: If you're about to watch a DVD and it gives you that 'language select' screen at the start, choose something as obscure as possible. Albanian or Swahili or whatever. Why? Well, they don't bother translating the piracy crap to those languages, so the disc simply skips them.

It probably varies with the film, though. Dunno if it'd work with a major language like Arabic or Spanish or whatev.

But yeah, I agree. Those adverts are infuriating on pretty much every level.