Ubisoft vs PC gamers

Ubisoft thinks you are going to like this.

Well, NO. We are not going to like this.

Ubisoft wants PC gamers to be constantly connected to their internet servers. If not, BAM! You are expelled from the game. That is stupid on so many levels... If you want to stop it before it's too late, try to get organized, and do something that may work.

I respect Ubisoft. One of my first games was Zombi, a shameless rip-off adapting George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead to 8-bit computers. Yes, at that time Ubi Soft was a new French company "inspired" by B movies (they also released Manhattan 95, a transparent adaptation of John Carpenter's Escape from New York) and with very little shame.

For me, Ubisoft means imagination, risk... Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, XIII, Beyond Good & Evil... A company that combines commercial tripe and cash-ins with innovation and imagination. But they can be also evil. Their PC DRM schemes are usually as annoying as possible: They put Tages in XIII, Starforce in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, SecuROM on FarCry 2... But that was nothing compared to this.

In 2005 I decided I wouldn't play pirated games anymore. I've sticked to that, and now I purchase all my games on Steam. But if they also include SecuROM and those stupid activation limits, I'm out (well, unless they sell it for $3.75...). When you have Steam, you don't really need any other DRM, and even that is too much.

I used to buy those expensive House M.D. DVD box-sets, but when I put a disc in the DVD player I always had to watch an unskippable anti-piracy ad, the annoying "You wouldn't steal a car" one, every single time. Well, I like to watch a whole series in a short time, so I watched two or three episodes every day. At the end of the week, I had seen that bloody video a dozen times. And I was thinking all the time, "But I bought this! The people who get these episodes from the internet don't have to endure this crap".

Then, I bought the third and the fourth season, and... they had repeated or missing discs (!) and several packaging defects. I tried to contact Universal, but they ignored me. Are you surprised that I stopped buying House M.D., or any other Universal series for that matter? Of course not.

Ubisoft will be surprised when their customers do the logical thing. I won't.

We said it was going to suck

And we were right.


Rebellion, you suck.

UPDATE: 1Up.com, GameRevolution, Gamespy and the no-nonsense guys at GiantBomb agree: this game blows chunks. And all the fans scream "Noooo! You are lying! You are wrong! Aliens vs Predator is awesome!"

Grow up, kids. Listen to the voice of reason.

Activision's overkill

Activision, WHAT the hell are you doing?

I've been mean to those companies that consistently make a string of mediocre or bad games and then they go bankrupt. This is a tough business, and nobody has money to buy bad games. If your game is bad, we will know it as soon as the first review hits the internet.

But sometimes it's just not fair. You make great and successful strategy games, but then you are shut down by Microsoft. Or you create the Guitar Hero series, you are bought out by Activision and forced to churn out game after game until the market says "Stop!" because we are sick and tired of plastic instrument games, and then Activision shutters the studio .

I agree that if you release a piece of crap like Haze you deserve to go under. But if you make a good game like Prototype... is that fair? NO, IT ISN'T.

Activision, stop. Just stop.