Impulse is proud to announce the addition of the Electronic Arts catalog to its growing library of games. Today sees the release of The Sims 3, Command & Conquer Red Alert 3, Command & Conquer Red Alert 3 Uprising, and Spore.
In The Sims 3, every Sim is now a truly unique person, with a distinct personality. Will your Sims be evil, artistic, insane, and romantic kleptomaniacs? It’s entirely up to you. Influence the behaviors of your Sims with traits you’ve chosen and watch how their traits impact their relationships and the neighborhood around them. Combine over 60 personality traits to create millions of unique Sims and control their lives. The Sims 3 is available for $49.95 at: http://www.impulsedriven.com/sims3.
Command & Conquer Red Alert 3 continues the alternative history strategy series with yet another tweak to the timeline. Facing certain defeat, with the Allies at their doorstep, a desperate Soviet leadership uses its own experimental time machine to save themselves. Going back in time, they ensure that the Allies never gain their technological advantage, saving their future selves. However, like all changes to the timeline, this has unforeseen consequences. Fight as the Allies, Soviets or the all-new Empire of the Rising Sun in this action-packed real-time strategy game. Command & Conquer Red Alert 3 is available for $29.95 at http://www.impulsedriven.com/redalert3.
In Command & Conquer Red Alert 3 Uprising, players learn what happened in the aftermath of Red Alert 3. This stand-alone expansion pack adds four all-new campaigns, more star-studded live-action movies to tell the ongoing Red Alert story as well as an all-new Commander’s Challenge mode where players must withstand the brutal onslaught of the world’s toughest commanders. Command & Conquer Red Alert 3 Uprising is available for $19.95 at http://www.impulsedriven.com/ra3uprising.
In Will Wright’s PC masterpiece, Spore, players take an amazing journey of creation as they guide their creature through five stages of evolution. Unleash your imagination as you make fantastical creatures, vehicles, buildings and spaceships. Players can show off creations and everything you make can be shared and used by other players. Explore your world and beyond with Spore, now available for $39.95 at: http://www.impulsedriven.com/spore.
I'm certainly aware of that too... but, lemme give you a trick or two; find out what registry dispatching slots can call for in a series of self-executing fake files pulled off plenty of differently managed folders while ini & other zero zum "transitional" assets loop directly to rootkit codes.
Also... get a degree in low-level languages such as assembly, patchworking your ways into runtime memory addressing.
Don't forget to maintain a system wide boot-tagging detector device which would set an alarm as soon as your firewalls skip their pre-installed port calls fast enough to escape any sort of track records.
Minimally, you should arm yourselves with a fluent C++ set of mnemonics, particular coding functions & procedures, compiler tracing, debug listings.
Clear your temps, empty the bins, wipe out the swap files, re-allocate OS virtual space **in real time**, press re-start. While you're at it, unplug the modem.
Anyone can uninstall or detect anything illicit if that's what they want to do on *THEIR* PC.
The last EA game I installed on my computer was the Spore Creature Creator (before Spore came out). It completely f*ed up my computer. I'm not going to boycot Stardock for putting EA on Impulse, but I definitely will not be buying an EA game again until they get rid of SecuROM.
DRM is acceptable as long as it doesn't affect me, but I won't put up with it if I have to reformat my hard drive just to get the internet to work again.
Yes, not all DRM is bad. DRM is acceptable if:
Are you using the word "illicit" to describe secuROM? If you are then you at least admit that it is undesireable.
Look, I don't know if this post was meant to be sarcastic or what but either way you are only proving my point. Everything, other than the last paragraph perhaps, is ridiculous. We want to play a game, not "get a degree in low-level languages such as assembly." If what you've typed is what is necessary to avoid installing secuRom or uninstall it then guess what? You haven't changed my mind. I'm still not buying any software that comes with it.
It does not invade user's privacy.
A game has nothing to do with what software I run on my system, let alone that it needs to collect that information. Let alone that it needs to upload that information to a game producer.
Get. The. F***. Out.
Good point, I will add that.
For you guys with the lists...you know the first one on the list..."It does not inconvenience the user" Well, you really don't need anything after that. Or else we could go on ad nauseum.
Well, then you get into the symantics of what exactly is considered an inconvienence, in which case companies will argue that a legit user never sees a problem thanks to the sophistication of their software and thus only pirates will complain - ignoring the fact that pirates have DRM free software. Legit Users will argue anything more complicated than typing in a CD Key needs to be re-thought as Pirates don't have to put up with any of it.Personally, I don't mind one time online activations and I don't mind using CD Keys - however when I have to email the support address of the company who's game I've bought because I uninstalled the game to format my computer and then reinstalled the game only to be told to contact support as I've eclipsed my alloted number of installs who then request a scanned copy of the sales receipt and digital photos of the days news paper coupled with my CDs - and I'm not joking either - I draw the line.
Ah, did not know we were creating a legal document, my bad.
Also- Isn't RA3 EA? I played that (A little anyway) and I don't remember any bad DRM, I could be wrong about it being EA though.
Really? Come on....
Exactly the reason why I made a seperate point about it. DRM can screw up your entire system, but it can also sneak in there unnoticed, which is the whole intent of game producers, and do whatever it wants, including my example. Hell, I got my first BSOD in Windows 7 because some DRM shyte (TAGES or something) was not designed to run on my system, so instead of doing nothing it crashes your whole system. Google it, this is by their design. Whenever the DRM is not entirely sure your system is doing exactly what they want it crashes your whole system!
Valve requested that slide show after my Steam Account screwed up after I bought Half-Life 2. Downloaded, decrypted and was told my Game ID or some such was invalid. I contacted support and despite having the Account Name, Password and details all provided to them as proof of ID, they requested photos of the CDs (not in box) and the current days News Paper - I'm Australian, their American, so go figure - and a copy of the sales receipt be emailed to them before they'd re-activate Half-Life 2 on my Steam Account. Why? Because I'm a pirate until I can prove otherwise. This was 2 days after Half-Life 2 launched, I might add, so Steam was still in it's infancy.
've also had to have my Install Limit reset for SPORE despite having installed it only once, due to their moronic patch which removed the names of everything in the entire galaxy unless you had you're PC's language set to "US [English]" and once it had happened, couldn't be reversed. That was an exercise in frustration as I had to convince Tech Support that my game had been screwed up by the patch, and uninstalling and reinstalling the game had caused an error. They seriously thought I was trying to get them to allow me to install the game because I was a Pirate - if I was a pirate I wouldn't have install limits.
Indeed and compagnies like EA are totlay failling to to get the point. I can tell yout hat for having pirate SPORE ym self as retaliation to EAs draconistic regime I had no problems what so ever to make the game work. None of the problems reported for spore were present for me in the pirated version. It worked like a CHARM.
The most important aspect of the issue, AFAIC.
Kaboooom, yo'got'it.
Some DRM verification "processes" prove to you & them that YOU aren't a Pirate.
You never "have to pirate" a game.
Indeed I jst grew tired with EA that's all. In fact it's the only game I have deliberate pirated to get back at them. In the pass I was given a pirated version of total annihilation, I bought the game 2 days later. I did downlaod a pirated version of gangters 2, but the game wasn't for sell anywere. I couldn't even find it int he old used game bins. But SPORE I pirate out of spite for EA 4 days before the official release. Just my way fo telling them to grease their corncomb up their exit only track. And that is my full pirate career. I didn't even botehr to pirate the other EA titles since I think they suck period to beging with. SPORe looke dinteresting but after 1 week I grew bored with it. Made me happy I pirated it EVEN more.
So they can go, "Look! Another pirate! Slap more DRM on it!"
So fuck em if they do that. If by what I am saying those retards can't fugure out they turned a once payign customer of their products to a boycutter/occasional pirate of their products by imposing him on horrible DRM then they can pleasure their selves with their corn comb for eternaty. Do you they that more of the thing that made me do what I did will somehow magicaly make me into one of their paying customers again?
What they shoudl do is realise that they are aliniating customers like me who are feed upw ith it. That they should adop a model like Stardocks. Becaus eI will say it I do not own many Stardock games yet. But Ic na garanty you my collection will grow with time. And that it will be 100% legit. I probably own or have owned close to 150 games and SPORE is the only so far I can say I truely 100% Pirated and have ABSOLUTELY ZERO intentions of paying for. And for 1 reason only: DRACONIAN DRM.
I think some people are having problems with Stardock letting companies use their own DRM on Impulse. But think about these two options Stardock has.
1. SD refuses to let any company use anything more than Stardock's DRM (GOO) on Impulse. These companies don't like being forced to use some other DRM than theirs, so don't put their games on Impulse. Result: Impulse stays 'clean' of any nasty DRM but stays as a small distribution platform, and eventually is forced to concede the market to Steam and D2D etc.
2. SD promote the use of no DRM or at most GOO, but allow companies to use their own DRM on Impulse. Once these games are on Impulse, it becomes clear that the games with less DRM are comparatively better sellers, and are much less pirated. Certain companies then decide to try using GOO instead, and find that sales increase. They change to using that system, and pirating decreases. Result: while there may still be some draconian DRM in use on Impulse, several major companies have changed their DRM policies, and Impulse is a major player in the digital distribution market.
Which would you prefer?
in the dim distant days of history,
there was a 'powerful and flexible' computer called the 'crash80' or "TRS-80 model 1" that loaded "software" from cassette, I have one of these,
and a cassette game called 'flight simulator by sublogic' that used a machine language preloader to load the game,
BUT due to a fault in the manufacturing process the cassette would only load 1 in 20 times,
and I did try to get the faulty cassette replaced by the retailer, the distributor AND the manufacturer,
but they ALL said that if it works just once it is NOT FAULTY, therefore we will NOT replace an item that is not faulty,
so by the ENTIRE supply chain I was forced (so that I could use more reliably a program that I had paid the huge price of $49.95 when the weekly paycheck was $118.00) to write a program to read in the pre-loader and the data it loaded,
and write out to another cassette the same data in the correct timing so that the copy would work as the manufacturer of the program had intended,
but if the manufacturer had used the more normal methods of program loading available at the time I would NOT have had to do this.
this happened back in 1981
harpo
Not really true. If, for example, you DO live in some Asian area and no one online will accept a creditcard/ship to your area (As is the case i've heard sometimes), and the game sure as hell isn't going to hit retail...what the heck else could one do?
Not play the game? It's not a primary life need people.
If I find a game's DRM unacceptable or just can't get it in my region, I don't get the game. I just go buy a competitor's game instead. Hopefully market forces will eventually sort out the offending parties. (mind you, they'll still blame any sub-par sales on piracy, thats just the way the DDRM crowd rolls)
I wonder if game producers count using a crack as pirating. I know it's illegal by their terms, but I use a lot of no-dvd cracks for games I bought. Swapping cds is so 1995..
I see nothing wrong with cracks, I hate swapping DVDs (And it wears them out), as long as you still have original DVD. I keep meaning to crack my fallout so I dont have to keep putting it in but they keep patching it so I dont bother.
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