The Clever Geek

There was an interesting article about how the developers decided not to spend the time, energy, or money it would take to copy-protect their game. They said people are still going to get around stuff like copy-protect and pirate the game, so why spend the effort? They made a great game on a relatively low budget and it made the best-seller list still.

The game is pretty cool, no single player campaign which is a bummer, but it's basically a turn-based real-time strategy in a way. It has aspects of a turn-based game, but it's all happening in real-time. The other major cool thing is how far you can zoom in and zoom out. You can get down to near pilot level in your ships, yet you can zoom out as far as the starts and rotate the galaxy around in any way shape or form. There's a lot of micro managing involved, however combat doesn't require as much attention as you might think, you can get away with just sending in a massive fleet (earlier stages may require more strategy).

There's not a lot of replay value in the game, but I have fun with my friend over TCP/IP.

I'll probably blog this later.

That's the opposite of Spore and Mass Effect where they have huge budgets and new SecuROM piracy protection that requires activation against a server then the program has to phone home and check your serial against the server every 10 days so that it can disable your software if your key gets distributed amongst warez sites.

Of course if your internet connection is lost because your shady roommate forgot the bill or you just choose not to use the internet, your game will be useless.

I remember back in the day when only multiplayer games required the internet.

Penny Arcade did a great comic about SecuROM today.

That's the only way they can invade our privacy more.

You know they're working on a way to do just that too. (anal probing)... Except they'll make the robot's Enjoy it.

I guess they decided not to use the phone-home SecureROM protection for spore.