This week on Steam they're running the EA special, which means you can get Battlefield: Bad Company 2 for six dollars. The last single-player FPS I played was Half-Life 2, and the last multiplayer FPS was Counter-Strike 1.6, so I had been wanting to try one of the new goosed up ones for a while. I have no fucking idea what the difference is between all of them: Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Battlefield, Black Ops, Bad Company, whatever. They all sound like Steven Seagal movies to me. The deciding factor in my call to try Bad Company 2 was that it was six dollars. So far I am enjoying it and it was definitely worth six dollars. However, when I was installing it, there was all kinds of shit it had to install. And then I remembered that this was an EA game. I probably have six rootkits and two things hiding in the firmware of my hard drive to keep me from pirating their six dollar game, which I paid for. This is because EA is well known to be EEVIL. I'm not particularly happy about this, but it is a pretty cool game. Conversely, I got Stardock's Elemental: War of Magic right when it came out. They don't use any DRM, but the game sucks BALLS. FOCUS: What's the most EEVIL company you deal with? What makes them so EEVIL? Why do you continue to deal with them?
On a similar subject... I don't game much, and lead a pretty busy life, so on the few occasions when I want to sit down and play a game, I want to do so with minimal fuss. I've about had it with the retarded gaming industry, though. The DRM has gone way, way too far. I bought Bioshock and the DRM baked into it was ridiculous. My activation failed twice, which set off some limit in the DRM so I couldn't activate it anymore. SecuROM told me to call 2k Games. 2k Games told me it wasn't their fault. The activation screen told me to go to the store I bought it from. I had such a fucking time trying to load it up and play it that I downloaded a pirated copy and vowed to stay away from 2k Games. DRM is evil and I have stopped supporting it. If software comes out that I want, if it's clean, I'll buy it. If it contains DRM, I pirate it. Ironic, isn't it?
For all the complaints about DRM, remember when games used to have a physical component to protect them from piracy? X-Wing and TIE Fighter would tell you to turn to a random page of the instruction manual and find the fifth word on the third line... Maniac Mansion came with a thing you needed to break the codes on security panels. Kings Quest VI required the manual to beat some glyph puzzle. Come to think of it, aren't these all Lucas Arts games? I think Jar Jar was invented because George wanted to try to find something more annoying than his video games (which, btw, were awesome games).
Microprose put out a (for its time) attack helo sim for DOS way back when. The last pre-mission screen was a cockpit panel mockup, and you had to match a displayed unit patch to one in the manual, and enter the corresponding code to a 5-digit challenge. If you put the wrong one in, the game crashed when you killed an enemy unit. Simple, effective, and completely uninvasive. Anyway, I'm also critical of EA. If they spent half the time focusing on game design and entertainment value that they do on DRM and marketing, they would have the gaming industry on lockdown. Not that they don't make enough money as it is, but I have little respect for a company that buys out smaller studios and completely destroys their franchises. (Westwood Studios, anyone?) Wal-mart is also massively evil and soul-sucking, but that particular horse has been beaten into the ground enough over the years.
Sierra did that too, especially in the Space Quest series, and my PC version of Mortal Kombat would ask for random paragraphs in the manual - I just memorized one answer and kept resetting it once I returned the manual to a friend. I was a crafty pirate when I was 7, apparently. Car dealerships - it's been done to death how sleazy they can be, though I think the worst was when I got screwed out of my deposit (valid, I screwed up) but they tried to claim I'd "devalued the car because I owned it briefly"... despite the fact financing was never approved and I never owned the car. Good to know Mazda dealerships are well in tune with reason.
I've never gotten so frustrated with a game than Bad Company 2. It's a super fun game, but incredibly infuriated. The most EEVIL company? Blizzard. Why? Warcraft. Thread over.
Fixed that for you. ALT. FOCUS: What about those companies who DO do a great job (not just limited to a software company that does a good job with DRM's, obviously): Steam's processing of DRM stuff, like the activation codes you get with CoD MW2 and Black Ops, and Fallout New Vegas. All 3 of those worked correctly* from the beginning (including when I reinstalled MW2 on my new PC - I had initially installed it on my old PC, whose motherboard committed hara-kiri - it STILL recognised me as a registered owner despite the different hardware). *Except for Fallout New Vegas' random crashes, but that's normal, considering Fallout 3 still crashes a lot despite patches.
Just to play devil's advocate, Wal-Mart is not as evil as it's made out to be. This is a really interesting article on that topic.
I'm sorry, this is completely off topic, but this is all I could think of when I read the topic title:
Not video game related, but GNC is an evil entity. Not only do they over charge for basically everything in the store, but they have a blatant disregard for the actual health of their customers. During the training process, employees are never taught the negative side effects of anything in the store; only the benefits are highlighted. You have hypertension and want to lose weight? Why not try Hydroxycut? Want to gain muscle fast and you are 16 years old? Why not try this testosterone booster/synthetic steroid with a double methyl compound. don't worry about your liver, continue drinking at your high school parties and don't bother with a PCT. Oh and don't forget that they are required to sell a certain percentage of certain products to keep their jobs and that their are incentives to sell certain products over others regardless of their actual benefit. *Edited for more evil.*
Right, because Im sure everyone thought I meant Warcraft 2 or 3. Alt-Focus: I used to think Valve was the enemy. I started playing Counter-Strike when it was in the beta version and it was just a lowly HL Mod. When it blew up it got a separate retail distribution when Valve bought it and packaged it with a bunch of other garbage mods (Wanted, Ricochet, etc). At that point I thought it was over, but it only got better and bigger. The (near) tipping point for me was the introduction of the Steam client with 1.6. Counter-strike and the HL "core games" were the only support games. The software was buggy, you couldnt find servers, and the group and clanning features didnt work at all (they were later removed entirely). I saw this as the biggest slap in the face to every CS gamer who had no problem connecting through the WON network and thought Valve was greedily cashing in with a way to sell add space. I wasnt the only one that felt this way either. Side projects such as Steamless CS and WON 2.0 went up as a way to circumvent the Steam software because people hated so much. Steam never was really created to help improved the original CS (version 1.6 at that time) but it was a medium to let it die and to launch the Source engine games. Lo and behold, its now 7 years later and Steam is a force to be reckoned with. I dont play games on it much anymore as I mostly play console games now. Every now and then though I fire it up and play a round or two of CS and Steam is admittedly only gotten better each time. Valve basically created what Gamespy Arcade always wanted to be, which was a central repository for all the games you wanted to play that are easily accessible. Admittedly, Valve wasnt so bad after all.
I got myself into a bad position a few years back and ended up working at Wal-Mart for about eight months. The environment described in that article is almost 100% different from the one in the store where I worked. Maybe that writer really did the experience things the way he describes, but I saw a completely different attitude towards base-level employees, teamwork, and efficiency.
Winna, Winna, chicken dinner. Fuck Sprint with a diseased, open, on fire, patio umbrella. We were with Nextel when sprint took over. We had 12 phones at the time and they assured us that we could expect the same level of service from sprint. BULLFUCKINSHIT. Coverage got worse, our business rep disappeared, and the billing got bicycle helmet retarded. There is a special circle of hell for those people.
I think Apple is pretty evil now, and this evil started when the release dates for new iPods got closer and closer together. This got worse with the iPhone and now its worse with the iPad. They aren't developing forward thinking technology like how Sony did with the PS3. The PS3 root technology hasn't changed, but it can do 100 things it couldn't do. To play 3D movies, all you had to do was download a 10 minute firmware update, same shit with Netflix, a music service, and media servers. They are developing devices that are limited to that time, releasing it, and having everyone else catch-up, when they do, bam a new one. I know no one is forced to buy it, but we can't go down that road. If they set up the iPad where the firmware kept opening up the system and didn't release a new physical form every year they wouldn't be so evil. Oh, and they created a bunch of pretentious assholes. SouthPark really beat me to all of this with their HumanCentiPad episode.