Shades of Twilight

Right at this very moment, I am in the process of installing Half Life 2. Yes I bought the legit game. I always buy legit games.

But it’s a damn pain to install. FIVE, count them, FIVE full CDs to install, and mine’s the retail standard version! After that, I gotta reg an account on Steam, minor inconvenient but ok. Did that. Then the screen says to insert CD 1 into the drive, so I did. Then Steam went ahead and regged the CD Key with Steam.

Fine and dandy.

THEN the next screen comes up – “Unlocking Half Life 2 game files” and the damn progress bar is moving SO SLOWLY. I’m on broadband dammit! I loaded up some network utilities and see the following stats:

Average speed is 22K/sec
Amount of data received thus far is 5MB

It’s been over an hour and approaching TWO hours since I inserted CD 1 into the drive to initiate the install.

This “anti-piracy” measure sucks big time.

Heheheh…. I’d love to say “I TOLD YOU SO” but I won’t.

Anti-piracy methods, my *ss. Pirates can never be completely beaten… just slowed. That doesn’t mean I support piracy, oh heck no.. I dislike pirates because:

1. They jack up prices of legit games
2. They make game companies bend over backwards to introduce dumb copy-protection schemes in their games to SCREW ME OVER.

Case in point – Valve introduced a “revolutionary” new method to protect their latest game – HALF LIFE 2. Many people who are anti-pirates praised this method and heralded it as the way to go for all future games! They practically drooled all over themselves.

Guess what? Yup… on the day of launch, servers went down. People can’t play it because they need to authenticate their copy with the server first.

But what if I want to play Single Player?

Sorry bub… as long as it’s not authenticated, you can’t play.

Cool technology huh? Meanwhile the guys who have the pirated versions are happily fragging away in Single Player… and you’re stuck with the legitimate, retail box copy, waiting for the servers to come back up.

Oh yeah… NEWSFLASH! HALF LIFE 2 has been cracked. Yup.. the much vaunted anti-piracy technique once again, has screwed the legitimate customer over.