Pirate MarioA few updates to the "Games to the Video 4" list.

Legendary has been pushed back from September 30, to October 21. Mirror's Edge is given the release date of November 11. Prince of Persia will be released December 2. Good times people. I rushed the honorable mentions list from it.

I forgot about Little Big Planet for the Playstation 3. It's set to be released October 21, 2008. It didn't make the list because I wasn't sure about it. Now that I've watched some videos, it looks pretty amazing and fun. I'm very tempted to by it, just for the level creater. There's a ton of options to make unique levels. Plus it looks like a very fun platformer. I think I might by it. It's going on my personal list of games. Anyways, just thought I'd update that stuff for you.

Piracy is starting to piss me off. Because of a few people, everyone is treated like pirates, and that's not fair. Piracy is the downloading of video games (or movies and such) illegally. The reason it pisses me off is because people have to type in CD keys for every piece of software that they buy. They have to register with the company. They have to call the company if they need to reinstall the software for any reason, sometimes. It's just stupid. Why should I have to do that if I paid my hard earned money?

The most recent example of this is the video game Spore. It has some hardcore DRM (Digital Rights Management, pretty much percautions against piracy, such as typing in a CD Key when you install). You would have to authenticate Spore every ten days, and you could install it on only three computers (or three times). You could call Electronics Arts if you go over the three times (much like you do with Windows), but why should I have to? I paid 50 bucks for the game.

That was the original DRM though. Because of the controversy, they upped the number of computers to 5. Oooooo.

You want to know a funny thing? The game was cracked, and pirates can download the game illegally. So I'm treated like a theif, and the real theives continue theiving the game anyways. I didn't buy the game (not because of the DRM, but just because I don't want the game). No I didn't pirate it either. I don't do that. I respect developers enough to buy their games.

My DRM problem occurred when I bought the game Sims 2. Another EA product. The thing with this game is it would not let you play the game, if you had a virtual drive program installed. This includes Nero CD burning software. As soon as I got that error, I checked it out and found out what it meant (it wasn't worded all nice and neat. It just said an error code number and i had to go to their website and find out what it meant). Anyways, I uninstalled Nero, because I wanted to play the game. I uninstalled Nero, restarted, I think I had to reinstall the Sims 2 also. After all this nonscence, I get the same error. I don't think I had any other virtual drive software installed.

So guess what I did. I took the suggestion of a couple of people. I pirated the game. I owned it. I paid for it. Was unable to play it for some dumb reason. So I had to pirate it and crack it. I couldn't play online (I didn't really want to but what about the people who wanted to?). I also reinstalled Nero. I was content.

And EA, if you don't believe that I own the game, I'll send you UPCs, take pictures with me and the box and CDs, or whatever to prove that I did buy it. You probably would make me. I'd probably sue you after I proved to you that I bought it. So that's my bad experience with DRM... other than having to call Microsoft eveytime I reinstall windows.

I'm not done. No.

Pirates pirate for very poor reasons (except in the case of you actually bought the game but was unable to play it because of DRM :P). "I want to see if my computer can run it." That's one of the poorest excuses. There's system requirements right on the box. Usually on the website too.

Now some people are like "yeah well the requirements lie". No. No. Just no. 99% of the time the requirements are spot on. Yes there are a very very very few exceptions, but most of them are spot on. If you played the game the way it was suppose to be played (without cheats and a thousand other applicaitons running the background) the recommended system requirements will run the game smoothly on high settings. Which is what most people want. And most poeple should know that the game will run on minumum requirements, but it won't be pretty. It's just common knowledge by now people. If you're smart enough to pirate, your smart enough to know this ( on a side note, music is easy to pirate, but video games are tougher than that, so yeah, smarts are important).

Personally, my PC ran Crysis just fine on high settings, and it met the recommended requirements. Now when I used cheats and was shooting infinite ammo out of a rocket launcher, it lagged, but that's because I wasn't playing the game it was suppose to be played. Although it was still playable and fun to shoot 10 rockets in a row.

Oh and even if you pirate the video game to see if it runs on your system, and it does, you aren't going to go buy it because well, you already have a free copy. It's going to end that way most of the time.

Reason number two pirates pirate. It's also a weak reason, especially in this day and age of video games. "I want to see if I like the game." BS.

There are several video game reviews websites, such as Gamespot.com, IGN.com, among several others. There's TV game review shows like XPlay. There are forums for gamers that you can ask what a game is like from people who have played the game. There are player reviews. There are Demos for a lot of the games that you can download for free to see if you like it.

And if all those fail, you can rent them for 3 bucks! And if all those absolutely fail you, you can trade in the game and get some of your coin back. This is just a retarded reason to pirate. If you know how to pirate, you can read, watch videos, download demos, walk/drive to a rental store, etc. 10 years ago that excuse might have flied, but not today.

Reason number 3. Money. This is not as poor as the rest of the reasons. I mean video games are expensive, so are the consoles to play them. But that's the price you pay for entertainment (literally). Video games are a privledge, not a right. But video games aren't that expensive. People spend time and money to make video games. The good video games are have the creaters' soul in it. You can tell when a developer has spent a lot of time and effort into a video game. Don't they deserve that money?

I'm loosing my momentum. I think I'll quit when I'm ahead. I'm going to do some research on this subject of video game piracy, just to see some solid numbers. I found one site studied a sample of PS2, and XBox pirates and it said that over 70% of them said that they would have bought the video game within a month, if the game was not available for free.

Good bye.