Slowtrain

I'll never forgive Bioware for making me rescue Imoen. Never. Oh and for Aerie period. Those were the end of my Bioware days for many a year. I'm buying Mass Effect PC though. If Sand likes a game that much it is at least worth trying, I think.

It all looks pretty sweet to me. IMO, the independent developer who can use the internet to bypass the need for a publisher to get their game out is probably the last hope for interesting games. I can't believe people are complaining about the animations. The animations? Who cares. Give me the greatest animations in the world and nothing else and I wil play the game for precisely 5 seconds before tossing it into the trash. I wish people wouldn't get down on developers who can't afford the shiny sparkly DX10 eye candy and graphical prettiness that the major publishers give us on a daily basis. Don't we have enough of that already? Do we need more Todd Howard-esque game design visionaries in the world of crpgs? I think one is enough. More than enough. Too much, actually. Oh and the idea that anybody who has played both Bioshock and System SHock 2 would rate any apsect of Bioshock superior to SS2 other than the neato keen graphics just makes me start to giggle uncontrollably.

Hardware configuration. Noone knows anything more specific than that. exactly. Is it a hash? Is it specific system config information? Is it the mac address of your network card? Nobody has any idea. I can understand why they would want to keep that under wraps. It would kinda defeat the point of the drm.

Doubtful. I don't know exactly how Bioware/EA 's EULA is written right now, but they can modify it to restrict sales. Novell (and I believe a few other companies) have had eBay pull down auctions of their second-hand software for years and years without being sued. So the right EULA can make that legal? Edit: I have a question. How does EA attach each installation to a specific PC? The drm and installer are seperate. Bio wrote the installer themselves. The drm authorizes the pc to have the game installed on it. You can uninstall and reinstall the game as many times as you like on that pc. The drm limits you to 3 authorized pcs. That is what I understand from the bio people. They keep repeating that the installer and drm are totally seperate.

No argument from me on its daftness. My point though is that if you ask somebody to change their behavior and they do, but only part way, you are more likely to get get additional change if you reward them for the initial change rather than simply tell them it wasn't enough and they need to do more.

Basically, yes. I mean, I have installed and re-installed some of my older games at least thirty-fifty times - would I be able to do that with Mass Effect? Probably not. You've gone through 30-50 different pcs over the last 10 years?

The question is, have they given up enough? For you, maybe they have - but the three installation limit is going to weigh heavily against them when it come to buying the game in the minds of some people, myself included. Just to point out that it has been stated that one can call EA tech support and have installations returned or freed up or whatever the term is. I think EA tech support blows doughnuts and would never want to call them about anything, but the option does appear to be there.

Well, it is part of compromise right? In order to come to an agreement both sides have to be willing to give up some part of what they want. It would not be ethical of me to simply demand the Bioware give up everything while I give up nothing. Whether they are a giant corporation or not is irrelevant. What can I say? I am a slave to my principles.

its a matter of give and take. Just the fact that they (whether Bioware or EA) listened to people enough to make changes in the cp is meaningful enough that I kinda have to give them something in return. Given the context, I now feel obligated to buy the game. Hows that for a switecheroo?

Well, now that they have relented, even if its just part way, one almost has to buy the game to prove to EA and other publishers that it was teh right thing to do.

But you signed the poop waiver! Fine, I'll disable the webcam. My poop and what I do with it is private.

otoh, drm is more likely become even more invasive and pervasive on all platforms rather than less. I think it umlkely one will be able to avoid it simply by sticking to a particular platform.

And it always has to be discussed in context. Putting cameras in a bank to watch me while I bank is OK with me. Or at least I understand why that might be done and that given our society I have to tolerate it. If somebody wants to put that exact same camera in my bathroom to watch me poop, I'm going to have a different reaction.

That's a good point, pixies. A good director and/or screenwriter could probably turn even poor source material into a decent flick if they had enough freedom to operate. Benchley's original novel for Jaws was pretty poor but Spielberg and Gottleib found all the right parts to put on the screen and dropped the crap.

Well as far as source material goes Bioshcok has to be richer than Doom. I did enjoy the first 2 Resident Evil movies to some degree. They were still pretty bad though. The third one was just boring. I stopped watching halfway through the film after spending 5 dollars on the ppv.

I'm trying to recall if anyone has yet filmed a computer game adaptation that was good. I can't think of one at the moment. It must be a task which is fairly difficult, probably mostly due to the pretty uninspired narratives and characters that most video games have. Its actually kind of funny that this is happening: video games developers spend most of their time ripping off movies for narrative and story, now movies are adapting what was already ripped off from them previously. How odd.

To me, invasion of privacy in the interests of safety and/or security is not a black and white issue: it is not always OK and is not always not okay. Each scenario requires a weighing of risks vs degree of invasion. What is acceptable under one scenario is not necessaerily acceptable under another scenario. Equating spot checks at airports to DRM in a computer games is not valid because what is at risk is so totally different. I don't consider random spot checks at airport to be "bad" although they certainly are annoying. However, if new laws were passed requiring every single passengger to be subject to a full strip and body cavity search, I would have a real problem there since the degree of invasion would suddenly outstrip the risk. To me, personally, ME's DRM is close to tipping pver the line where the degree of invasion becomes unreasonable. I'm not going to pirate the game in response, I just simply won't buy it. Not worth it. There is another issue as well, though stil peripheral at this point. Invasion of privacy often reults in people/companies/organizations having access to private information about others. In some cases such is neccessary, but there still needs to be regulation and oversight of those who hold such information. AS fasr as I can tell, no one outside of the drm companies know xactly what is installed on your computer and what information is transmitted during this drm process. Derek French certainly doesn't know. He was asked the question directly several times and never answered. His only response was: its a wrapper for the exe. That's not really much of a response. And who is reponsible for overseeing all this private information? WHo does Sony report to? At this point it is probably all pretty innocent, but that doesn't mean it will always be the case. I am not trying to convince you that it should bother you. Do as you will and feel as you will. But the concerns are very much legitamate to anybody who believes that privacy and the right to have a private existence is important even if not always possible due to the limitations of the society we live in. Not everybody does believe that. I do.

To some degree that is true, at least in my case, though I would leave out the bitterness part as regards Fallout. But its more than that. My associations with music comes from a wide variety of experiences, not just simply Fallout or even computer games in general. I find instrumental music extremely evocative of images, especially landscapes and colors. When I listened to that main title piece, what it evoked for me was not the imagery I expect to be a part of Fallout 3. In Fallout 3 I expect a lot of brown, metal, rust, garbage, a variety of old buldings materials, etc and so forth. These expecations come from both the original games and what I have heard the devs say about Fo3 and the screenshots that have been released. The ttile theme does not evoke anything remotely that I would associate with those expected images. Please note that I am not trying to present this in anyway as being other than completely subjective, I am only trying to explain why I felt the title theme was not appropriate for me.

lolz. I found this tidbit at NMA. Worth posting here, just to annoy mkreku. just kidding, mk WHole thingie here: http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=c...40&Itemid=2 Damn console players always gumming up the works! Can't you people learn to read?

But it's "for our own good." *intones* the greater good <3 Simon Peg

Well, I tend to agree with Grommie, that from a technical "this is how it works" point of view, it is not terribly onerous or a burden. Simply the fact that scurom is installed on my computer isn't really going to stop me from buying the game. I'm more opposed to what I see as almost a witchhunt mindset on the part of publishers. Just from a personal viewpoint, I don't know if I want to support that. I don't believe my not supporting it is going to make any difference, however. So that leaves me having to consider does doing somethign because of a principle, even though it clearly won't make any difference or advance that principle in any way, make me unutterably stupid and naive. I don't entirely blame the publishers. They aren't in the business to give away free games, so they do what a bank does when it gets robbed. Beef up security. Honestly, I kinda-sorta saw this coming over the years, but I didn't think it would get to the point where you could no longer play a single-player game unless you had an internet connection that could be invisibly verified every 10 days. I really, really wanted ME. I'm going to think about it over the next few weeks, read up on SecROM, watch the Bio tech forums for a couple of weeks after it's released, then decide. Grommy: I don't think I'm brainless. I used to think that way, but I've begun to change my mind. Folloiwng this out where does it all end? When we all have to play our games naked in chains in a small white windowless room under the watchful eye of an EA security guard dual-wielding mace and a billy club? Because we might be pirates? IMO, there's something wrong with that.

Well, I tend to agree with Grommie, that from a technical "this is how it works" point of view, it is not terribly onerous or a burden. Simply the fact that scurom is installed on my computer isn't really going to stop me from buying the game. I'm more opposed to what I see as almost a witchhunt mindset on the part of publishers. Just from a personal viewpoint, I don't know if I want to support that. I don't believe my not supporting it is going to make any difference, however. So that leaves me having to consider does doing somethign because of a principle, even though it clearly won't make any difference or advance that principle in any way, make me unutterably stupid and naive.

Older version of securom, Di. The latest version does things differently. It was used in Bioshock and there were some problems there.

Where in the heck did that come from? This is one of the most moderate gaming boards Fallout-canon-wise, I've ever seen.