Found: One Troll

Ubisoft hates customerspirates. I mean really hates pirates. They hate pirates so much that they are willing to assume that all of their customers are also pirates in order to protect their intellectual property. Ubisoft, in its infinite pirate-hating wisdom, concocted a digital rights management scheme that required anyone who purchased their new PC games to be constantly connected to the internet in order to play, even for single-player only games.

Ubisoft said it was pirate-proof. They were wrong. The DRM was cracked in under 24 hours. That’s not the funny part.

The funny part is that the DRM servers that Ubisoft’s customers need to call in order to play their games have been down all day. If you bought into their fuck-the-customer DRM, you can’t play the single-player game that you paid $60 for, but the folks who stole the game, who didn’t pay one red cent, can.

The moral of the story is: don’t buy Ubisoft games.

You must watch this.

A co-worker introduced me to this band a couple of months ago. Considering their gimmick, Zombie Surf Camp is incredibly good.

StarCraft 2 bloggage will return this weekend.

Today I played as the Zerg on the Desert Oasis map. There are some surprising changes to the Zerg from the original StarCraft. For example, Zerg players no longer build Creep Colonies to expand the creep field. Now Queen units (which are the only Zerg unit not bred from larva) spawn Creep Tumors, which spread the creep field. The old defensive structures which used to be an evolution of Creep Colonies are now built on their own. Queens also have the ability to temporarily speed up a Hatchery’s production of larvae and to heal Zerg units and structures. The Guardian unit has been replaced by the Brood Lord, which behaves similarly but has the added feature of using Broodlings as ammunition. Any target attacked by the Brood Lord takes a large amount of initial damage as well as secondary damage from the Broodling units that spawn from the attack.

I played a match as the Terrans against an AI opponent to get a feel for the new Terran units. Here are some screenshots from that match. Click to embiggen.

. . . [N]o-one of any sense has ever bet against the scorn and resourcefulness of young men.

Jerry “Tycho” Holkins, A Cyclical Argument With A Literal Strawman

Holkins was writing about Ubisoft’s ridiculous new digital rights management scheme, but this principle is just as valid when applied to prohibition of any kind.

SC2 took several hours to download, so I only got one match in tonight before bed. I played as the Protoss against another Protoss player on the Desert Oasis map. First, the game is very much StarCraft. If you were worried that Blizzard was going to go mucking around with a perfectly good thing, you needn’t (yet, it is just the first day of closed beta). The classic Protoss units that I fielded felt just like the old ones, and the new units each felt like they each had a purpose and their own place on the battlefield. I’m a fan of the new top-tier unit for the Protoss, the Mothership. Aside from kicking serious ass with its disruptor pulses, the Mothership cloaks all nearby friendly units, including your buildings. Want to hide an entire base or army from prying eyes? Park a Mothership over it.

Some new elements of the UI are pretty nice. Your ‘control groups’ are displayed at the top of the unit pane and can be selected with a click. Each group lists the group number and the strength of the group (in number of units). Although not strictly necessary for someone like me, who has long since developed standards for control group assignment over decades of strategy gaming, it’s definitely a handy feature to have, especially for keeping track of group strength in the middle of battle. I now realize that I forgot to check out how many units can be selected in a single group. SC1 had a group limit of 12 units, but I do not know the (current) limit for SC2. I will find out and report it later.

Another nice feature is the improved end-of-match report. There is a new screen on this report which shows each player’s build order. This will be a great tool for helping to improve one’s game when matched against significantly better opponents, to be able to see in detail when they build their resource gatherers, when they expand and build their armies, etc. A good build order is key to victory in multiplayer matches, and a poor one can easily cost a player the game.

The graphics are also quite good. I  will, however, admit that I am a sucker for the way Blizzard’s art style can make even low-poly models look beautiful. The movies and screenshots that were available before this beta really do not do this game justice.

Of course, playing the game only highlights how utterly terrible I am (and always have been) at multiplayer strategy games. This Penny Arcade comic about Warcraft III (NSFW for language) sums up my experience with online strategy games. My opponent disconnected in the middle of the match, but I took a look at his forces and he would have stomped me quite soundly if he had stayed. Hopefully over the beta period I’ll be able to improve my skill. It also looks like I’m going to have to install FRAPS because printscreen does nothing in SC2 as far as I can tell.

So, a whole bunch of blogfodder just dropped into my lap.

Command and Conquer 4, the last C&C game in the Tiberium War Universe, will be released next month. That’s not the news, however. EA has released the first three Command and Conquer games for free. These games are classics of strategy gaming, if you haven’t played them then this is an excellent opportunity.