Entries from June 2006 ↓

Yesterday, I received an e-mail from CDV's press machine informing me that the English language demo of the upcoming "Night Watch" PC game had been released.  Being a fan of the film and having known about the game for a while, I was excited to know that I would finally be able to check it out.  Unfortunately, I wasn't able to make time for that till tonight and I'm writing this now to tell you that I still haven't played it.  After downloading, installing and then running the demo I was greeted with: "To launch this application, you need to install additional libraries on your computer."

Strange.  I just finished the install why didn't it just install everything?  It was then I noticed that the window that was telling me it need to install libraries was titled "Protection System (Pro)".  After checking out the directory I installed the demo into I noticed that there was indeed an a file called 'protect.exe'.

So I loaded up Sysinternals FileMon and RegMon to get a better look at what was going on and it was just as I thought: StarForce!

protect.exe:26572  OpenKey  HKCU\Software\Protection Technology\StarForce Runtime NOT FOUND

That's right, CDV released the demo of a new game with copy protection!  Not only that but, they used a copy protection scheme that has been the focus of several recent debates and lawsuit threats.  CDV themselves say they are moving away from StarForce protection in future releases but this one seems to have slipped by.  I sent an e-mail over to Mario Kroll (Director of Marketing and PR for CDV North America) asking about the release and if we can expect a "clean" version sometime in the future.  I'll be sure to pass the word along once I hear from him.

Word just came through – the Spiderman 3 teaser trailer is up over at Apples trailer site!

Tomb Raider: Legend came out for the PSP this week so I decided to sit down and get it a try.  I may be bit spoiled from playing the Xbox version but, I could barely get through the first stage – it just felt clunky. Maybe it's just every game that needs a second analog stick just shouldn't be released on the PSP. For the most part it controls rather nicely – having the benefit of already knowing the stage that is. I couldn't imagine having to actually explore to find where to go next. Gun play isn't that bad – as long as you don't try to turn to fast the enemy! It's easier to just back up till they are on screen. Graphically, the game is on par with most other PSP offerings – it looks nice on that screen.  Although, I'm surprised Eidos decided to stuff the game into PSP shape.

To sum it up: Look for my copy on Ebay soon.

• Metacritic Review

After seeing the link for Slave Hack on Digg yesterday, I, like a bunch of other people (4000 or so new players signed up) decided to check it out. Now, for those who are out of the loop, Slave Hack is a web game whose goal is for you to "hack" your way around the "internet", installing spam/ddos bots and warez dumps, all in the quest to earn money so you can upgrade your hardware. It's pretty crazy when your first starting but, with 30 minutes of "n00b" protection should at least give you a chance to get on your foot.

The game is very addictive! I've been flipping from work to Slave Hack and back for the last two days. If anyone else was around they would have heard me cursing when I "hacked" a server with a full log file. 16 minutes gone! Yes it takes 16 minutes to delete a full log file. Of course after some upgrades you can cut that time down. Just for laughs I did take a look at changing the page with man-in-the-middle proxy but it doesn't seem to work – they must keep approximate track of time on the server. The "download" times are kind of nice because you don't have to sit and watch, you can just check back in 20 minutes.

I have been pretty lucky so far, I haven't experienced a major hack on my "computer" yet. *knock on wood* According to the high score list I'm sitting at number 281 right now – not too bad for flipping back and forth… Maybe I'll try to break the top 100.