New Games protection systems DRM, why even bother.
We have been playing video games since 1958, the gaming industry is getting even bigger and bigger every day, faster platforms, better graphics, smarter gameplay and control systems. But yet, we still struggle with the same problem we faced in the beginning, how to protect a game against unauthorized copying and distribution.
Back in the days in 1986 one of the first computer viruses ever was created as an attempt to protect against unauthorized copying. As if that was not a disaster per-say, developers kept on experimenting with different protection methods each of which was compromised sooner or later.
Today, 24 years later, we are still living the same struggle, and just until recently we didn’t care, but we are starting to get mad as recent DRM (Digital rights Management) systems started inconveniencing rightful owners of games, by insisting on a permanent Internet connection to some unstable servers to play offline games?
Coming to think about it, why are they even still trying? It has been like 24 years people, and not a single game got away without being cracked ( Don’t count PS3 games, but it’s coming for them as PS3 is starting the smile after being tickled for so long).
See, I believe there are 4 kinds of gamers, lets call them, the Buyers, The Testers, the leeches , and the Cheaps.
Kaspersky PURE, what is so pure about it?
I recently installed Kaspersky pure, It sure is a Kaspersky, meaning great protection against Virus, especially exotic ones that can make other anti-virus application run in circles.
I can think of a couple of things that I’m starting to hate in this version, and here is a little list of them:
1. Parental control, XD , come on you can do better, a 9 months baby can find his way around this security, just use a browser other than IE or FireFox and you are off the hook.
2. Back-up : this will just collect multiple versions of all the crap in your HD and and squeeze it into backups, eating up you HD space. If you need a backup solution this can still work, but if you’re just a home user with almost nothing to lose 
you don’t need this.
3. Where are all my settings? Kaspersky is slowly turning into a Norton, I can’t find the settings that made kaspersky so special over the years, no sliders to increase / decrease scanning strength, no scanning by file type, just plain prison meals, either enable your G D protection or disable it and go to hell. Actually the settings are there, you just have to dig deeper to reach them SRY
4. Password Manager. Kaspersky used to sell this as a stand alone application, without much success I guess. The Idea is that this application can import password from several application (No Opera guys) and encrypt them and receive new passwords entered into IE or firefox, or other application. You can confirm you identity to used stored passwords by typing a master password, by a bluetooth device, or other biometric devices. to me, this is just another icon in my status bar, and another window asking me to enter a password on every boot, plus if get get so friendly with this application then you wont be able to move past Kaspersky products for the rest of your life, or you will have to buy the standalone version of the password manager, but I’m not sure about the export capabilities of this passwords manager.
5. System tuneup XD Hurray!! you need someone to clear your browsers cash? what about cleaning the temp folders? this is the app for you. to be honest, this can come in handy if you have your browsers settings messed up by some Virus, other than this this is useless.
6. Tight network security: so tight, it will kill all your network and printer shares, you will have to run around the settings for hours to get everything up and running. This is probably why I only use Kaspersky Antivirus and not internet security.
Finally I miss the days when kasper used to scream like a pig giving birth when it catches a virus, the Pure vision of the product is just not suitable for the repel antivirus Kaspersky used to be.
6 things I hate about Dragon age: Origins
Some of the many things that I hate about the game called “Dragon Age: Origin”:
-
Bad retarded graphics.
The graphics in this game are basically bad, they try to cover things up with some blur and full screen effects, but the result still sucks. Most of the objects in the game world are have low geometry. Check out my comments in the picture below:
2. PS1 like magic spells.
In a game of this genre, I always expect to see cool spells and magic effects. Well in this game most of the spells remind me of my old PlayStation one. Even there the Magic in Final fantasy IX was pretty spectacular. See an example in the pic below:
3. Crappy combat system.
As I usually do, I chose a mage as my main character in the game, for a start, your character will not respond to an attacker unless you ask him to, and then you will basically have to press “1” or “2” on your keyboard to lunch a spell, then you will have to wait until some count down is over to get to do the same spell again. And that, my friend is no fun.
4. Limited movement possibilities.
You are only allowed to walk in specific regions, don’t dream about crossing water, or even touching it. I think that the animation of footsteps in water is too complicated for our gurus here.
5. Bad long conversation and non-sense replies.
Every time you engage in a conversation, you will be given the chance to choose what to say from 3 or 4 options, most of the time, 1 option will make you sound gay, and the other 3 will make you a total jerk. They should have learned from “Rise of the Argonauts” when each conversation option is influenced by the teachings of some Greek god, and hence each answer is rational and reflects a well specific personality. But here you are just too rude or too nice.
6. You will never get to hear your part of the conversation.
I think that recording multiple conversations in multiple voices was just too troublesome for the developers of this game. But my problem is, why did you decide to record to other part of the conversation? It would be just ok with text conversations as it is in many other role playing games.
Are you a dragon age : Origin fan ? come on! get our of here, or at least tell us what you like about this game.
Did I forget some other things? come on lets make these the “100 things i hate about DAO”
who the hell is acai-health-diet.com ?
I keep on getting incoming traffic from this www.acai-health-diet.com. it is some website related to diets. the best thing is that when I go there, they have no links to my blog and are not using any traffic exchange program.
Also I also found that they are referring some people to my referral account on on webhostingpad.com
This is just weird
Is anyone else experiencing the same problem?
Radeon Catalyst and display driver 9.6 NEW
A new driver is released for almost all recent Radeon display adapters. The following improvements are announced with this new driver
- Company of Heroes – performance improves up to 25% with HD 4600 series products and below as well as improvements of up to 10% on HD 4800 series
- Crysis – performance improves up to 13% in multi-GPU configurations
- Crysis Warhead – performance improves up to 11% in multi-GPU configurations
- World in Conflict – performance improvements of up to 30% can be seen in settings
that were previously CPU limited
Also, some crashes and problems with the CCC has been fixed.
This is all great, but now in a time where AMD (ATI) cards are considered better than their equivalents in nVidia, I think it is time for AMD to stand up for the challenge and fix embarrassing bugs such as:
- 3D graphics corruption in many games with Adaptive anti-aliasing enabled.
- Games crash on minimize and resolution changes.
- funny looking effects.
- Buggy deinterlacing that actually make movies interlaced (scan-line effect)
- V-sinc does not know when to turn on or off
AMD (ATI) must work more with the developers and do more “Best played on Radeon” games. Also it is time to flood the market with DirectX 10.1 games, since no nVidia cards already supports it. and I’m not talking about crappy games such as Stormrise.
Radeon card are strong but I feel that this miss a Strong software support.
what do you think
Silent Hill: Homecoming Review
I’m an old fan of the Silent Hill series, I played the first silent Hill on PSX a long time ago, loved it, it was one of my favorite PSX horror games.
Enough with the old 1999 game; let’s talk about the new 2008-2009 title Homecoming which I’m playing on PC.
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