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.

StarCraft 2 bloggage will return this weekend.

. . . [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.

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.