Aspirations, thoughts, and Operator overloading

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After reading all of the sucky news the past month or two about all of the fantastically hyped (accurate?) games that continue to be published ridden with DRM, I stumbled across this article again and wanted to post a link to it here.

CD Projekt also recently launched its own digital distribution service called Good Old Games, offering classic games from years past patched to run on current systems and completely free of copy protection.

Sounds pretty awesome. But …

I’m a huge proponent of hard media that can be resold as it supports second hand markets (eBay, Amazon Marketplace, brick and mortar game shops, etc). I’ve bought used books (and new ones, this one lately) for as long as I can remember. I made a regular habit of buying used dvds from pawn shops (I am on a limited budget after all) and plan on doing the same for Blu-Ray in the future.

With all of that said, I am of the understanding that “Good Old Games” will feature modifications to the original games to make them run on modern OSes (XP or Vista?).

All of this sounds fantastic.

But … how does that factor in to the second hand aspect? Up until recently we’ve been ‘quite’ accustomed to physical goods. …, Atari, Nintendo NES … Playstation 2 used hard physical media without a need or the option for non-physical means of providing the content.

Now that we have other options, many are jumping for joy and leaping into it. Often with mixed results.

Maybe if I was from the current generation (i.e., born after 1988) this wouldn’t be an issue, but I’ve come to rely on a game being available to install whenever I feel like it – from hard media. I just rummaged through my collection a few hours ago and came across Baldur’s Gate, Total Annihilation: Kingdoms, Blood and many others from the same time frame.

If I want to play Blood, I can fire up DOSBox, install the game, and I’m off playing. That is soon to be 12 years after it was published!

From what I can tell GoGs is going to allow people that missed out on those older games or lost their original media to purchase and enjoy them.

I’m still left with a big question: What if I want to resell my purchase?

I don’t know the answer to that one …

I thought it was going to go well, then the news started coming in.

First I heard about Starcraft being pushed back, then lately I heard Blizzard was going to charge $150 USD for it.

I was looking forward to Sacred 2, but that fell through once I realized they were using activations.

Then there was Stalker: Clear Sky. Yep, same issue.

I was holding off on Crysis: Warhead until Crytek issued the Crysis 1.3 patch they withheld from customers, but now they’ve guaranteed that some gamers will never purchase it.

Then I got REALLY psyched about Far Cry 2, but just found out today that Far Cry 2 will also be using activations. I canceled my pre-order in a hurry.

It’s surprising just how stupid publishers can be sometimes. I’m just really hoping THQ doesn’t screw up the publishing of Dawn of War 2. It’s sounding like it’s going to be really awesome but I’d hate to have to pass on it too.

In the end though I’m afraid the people protesting will do little good as untold amounts of people will just blindly fork money over without paying attention to these sorts of issues.

Too bad, they could be making a difference instead.

Edit:

I do have The Witcher to look forward to (bought it to support the devs & their stance on Piracy), so I’m not totally feeling the backhand from the publishers. Though with that said I’m not crazy about them using Tages for their cd check.

Another day and some progress. A Wiki has been started, groceries purchased and a Cordon Bleu lunch a week ahead of my birthday. Not a bad way for the day to go.

I think I’ve managed to read another page of a C++ book I borrowed from the library but I still feel pretty good about my progress. I can see how I could overuse that word, but it’s really been a concern of mine lately. I’ve read C++ books in the past but felt pretty overwhelmed. I also got distracted a bit by other things, namely video games.

Of course with me being ‘me’, I don’t tend to stay on one topic for too long. Something usually comes along and grabs my attention and I’ll be derailed by it for a while. I suppose that could be called fickle, but I like to think I’ll get back to it eventually.

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