PC Game Fun Time

Another week, another heinous DRM debacle. This time the travesty is with the recent release of Grand Theft Auto IV for the PC, a game that I was really looking forward to because I enjoyed all three of its predecessors on the PlayStation 2, but do not own a “current gen” console system on which to play it. Unfortunately, it looks like the PC release has been completely botched by poor quality control and Digital Restrictions Management issues, to the point that I’m not even considering wasting my money on it.

Let’s do a quick comparison between the console experience and the PC experience for Grand Theft Auto IV, shall we?

• Console
  • Put the game disk into your console and it works.
• Computer
  • Put the game disk into your computer.
  • Go through multiple stages of authorization, including DVD validation, entering a serial key, and entering a code from the manual.
  • SecuROM gets installed (naturally).
  • Mandatory sign-up for both Rockstar Social Club and Windows Live, both of which require email validation.
  • Download the decently sized Windows Live update.
  • The game menu takes forever and a half to display, because the menu is downloaded dynamically from a heavily overloaded server on the Internet each time you launch the game.
  • The game is buggy as hell, with lots of crashes to the desktop, and performs poorly even on high-end hardware.

The game cannot be played without Internet access, even if you are just trying to play the single-player mode. So much for gaming on the go. And if you’re running Windows Vista 64-bit, which you should be because the limit of 4 GB RAM with the 32-bit version is turning into a huge liability, you’re hosed, because the game flat-out does not support 64-bit operating systems.

I have a simple message to the craven idiots responsible for the release of Grand Theft Auto IV on the PC: This is why gamers migrate to consoles, you fools! Instead of wasting your development time on DRM and activation features, you should have spent it on 64-bit compatibility, stability fixes, and performance boosts. In an age when most higher-end PC graphics cards have two GPUs on a single card, Grand Theft Auto IV’s developers had the utter shortsightedness to not even bother including dual-graphics card support, thus guaranteeing that no one can get high quality performance in the game.

Grand Theft Auto IV suffers from a lethal combination of obnoxious DRM and terrible quality. How much longer can this situation go on for before PC gamers collectively exclaim “Enough!” and refuse to buy the rubbish that publishers seem so intent on feeding us?

TechRadar’s list of twelve reasons PC gaming is better than console gaming is a fun little read. I’ll admit, I was thinking of doing something similar on this site for awhile (although better fleshed out), but in the end thought better of it, because I don’t think gloating is particularly helpful. PC gaming faces some severe challenges over the coming years. Series that used to be PC-exclusive are now regularly being released on consoles as well for profitability rationales that are impossible to refute. Now while that isn’t bad on its face, the amount of dumbing down that too often goes along with it is.

The only genre that I would really say that is thriving on the PC above and beyond consoles is the MMORPG, which doesn’t exactly help me much. I have an MMORPG post still in the works, but the gist of it is that, following experience with The Realm Online, EverQuest, and then World of Warcraft, I no longer allow myself to play MMORPGs as a concession towards ensuring my own wellbeing. Other genres that are still doing well on PC over the console include strategy games, both the real-time and turn-based varieties. Regrettably, we seem to have lost the first-person shooter.

So yes, while it is mindless fun to point and gloat at consoles’ problems, including red rings of death, their “discovery” of high-def roughly a decade after the PC, and proprietary lock-in, I think it’d be more constructive to make a list of the the areas where PC gaming suffers in comparison to console games, and then make all efforts to rectify them. My number one complaint is how console games “just work”, while the Digital Restrictions Management software included in nearly all new PC games introduces a flummoxing plethora of potential pitfalls that turns many potential PC gamers to consoles in search of a less frustrating gaming experience. What’s your biggest complaint?

It has been a long time since the days of Windows 98. While the famous “Blue Screen of Death” was a common occurrence for users of that operating system, most of our readers have probably only seen a handful of full-blown computer crashes in say, the past year.

Unfortunately, while Microsoft operating system stability has improved by leaps and bounds since the 90’s, the same can not really be said for the games that run on Microsoft operating systems. At least these days when a game crashes, you generally only need to restart the game, not the whole computer. But many PC games, even the very high profile big budget titles, still crash with distressing regularity.

For a recent example, look at Fallout 3, a game that has sold a lot of copies and received a huge amount of press.  The latest patch supposedly fixed several crashes related to alt-tabbing behavior and updating the game.  I did not experience these crashes.  I have however had a steam specific problem: unless I disable the steam “in-game” client, Fallout 3 crashes immediately at startup, every time.  This is obviously not an issue that affects every player, or it would have been fixed by now.  Still, it is an issue that affects me, and it is quite annoying - when I play TF2, I really want to have the Steam in game options, so I have to enable / disable this feature every time I want to switch between games.

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Odds are we all hate Digital Restrictions Management. Everyone has either been bitten by it either on games they’ve legitimately purchased (I know I have), or knows someone who was. Even pirates hate DRM because it requires 30 seconds of inconvenience to copy a cracked executable over the installed one (if any sarcasm over the “hassle” DRM creates for pirates versus the hassle it creates for paying customers is showing, please disregard it). But 2K Sports, bless them, has managed to invent out of whole cloth a folly even worse than DRM: serial code activation in a game that doesn’t ship with serial codes.

Presumably they meant to include serial codes in the boxed copies of NBA 2K9 for PC; it’s just that somewhere along the line of communication between headquarters and the packaging factory, that (possibly important) instruction was lost. Yes, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and 2K Sports is now partially to blame. So if you bought NBA 2K9 for PC and tried to install it, you’d be the software installation equivalent of all dressed up with nowhere to go. Along with everyone else. It’s the same feeling as when you’re left wondering “Where’s the NFO file?”, except you’re out fifty bucks for the privilege.

2K Sports did manage to get on the ball really quickly and released a patch that is automatically downloaded during installation that removes the serial number activation. So anyone attempting to install the game now will never realize anything is amiss. Unless they aren’t connected to the Internet during the attempted installation. And unless they try it at some point in the future.

Just like with DRM, there’s another hidden folly inherent in this “solution”: what happens when the patch server goes offline? The server 2K Sports is using to support this game won’t be around indefinitely. Heck, the company won’t survive forever. Yet there are still people who get a retro gaming kick from playing PC games that are two decades old right at this very moment. Had those games used such an incompetent verification scheme during installation, you wouldn’t be able to play them today. 2K Sports owes it to posterity to release at least one good serial number for people twenty years down the line to be able to use to play the game, if that’s what they want to do.

But let’s be honest: Who in the hell plays sports games on PC?! I didn’t even realize anyone bothered publishing them. Is there any greater disparity between console gamers and PC gamers than the relative affections for sports games? Sports games on the PC seem so antithetical to the hardcore PC gaming crowd I know it’d be like rick-rolling a Black Panther rally — though that is something I’d actually like to see.

The long wait is finally over, and after many years of hype, Spore has finally been released. This news was immediately greeted with a huge backlash against the malfeasant Digital Restrictions Management included with the game, which limits each purchased copy of the game to three installations — ever. I’ve written about DRM multiple times in the past, so I don’t feel compelled to take this opportunity to make any statement on DRM beyond reiterating how terrible it is for the consumer. And judging by all of the negative reviews Spore’s DRM has engendered on Amazon, even Electronic Arts has to be questioning whether including such draconian DRM was worth it. As I write this, Spore has 934 one-star reviews out of 1,011 reviews total, a number that is only going to increase dramatically over the coming days.

No, what I really want to address about Spore is its failure to live up to the amazing game play that it once promised, an issue that has been mostly lost amongst all of the (justifiable) complaining over the DRM (although Ars Technica didn’t fail to take notice). What really sold me on Spore from the first times I read about it was the promise of truly being able to design a creature. I remember marveling at how all aspects of a creature were supposed to be procedurally generated based solely on the design of the creature. The characteristics of the legs you designed would affect how well the creature would be able to move — its gait, its stride, its jumping height, etc. Ditto for every other component of the animal. I was instantly fantasizing of three-legged creatures with a single exceptionally long appendage used for striking. Such a feature has never evolved naturally on Earth, either by chance or because natural selection is not conducive to creating it. The real appeal of Spore, to me, was being able to test out all sorts of bizarre intelligently designed body configurations that do not appear in the natural world to find the most effective ones. And it would be very telling if the most effective predators in the games looked curiously similar to tigers, lions, and bears.

Combine this ability to truly design your own creature with the Sporepedia, which lets you match up your creations against everyone else’s, and Spore would’ve been amazing. I could easily see myself spending days trying to tweak the ultimate predator, able to kill as many of the creatures created by other people as possible. But alas, such a thing is not possible with Spore the way it ended up, because the ability to truly design creatures was removed at some point during the development process (probably because it ended up being exceptionally difficult to do correctly). Don’t get me wrong, you still have the ability to fine tune the appearance of creatures to your heart’s content, but it is all cosmetic. The finished version of Spore, unfortunately, shipped with an ability-generation system that is all-too-familiar, not revolutionary.

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