If you knew how long it took me to come up with a title for this little piece you’d laugh. Either way though, this most likely a new semi-weekly update on the gaming world and how retarded it is.
To kick things off, lets start with the king of the crop, EA. You remember them, right? The guys that love DRM on their products and their foot in their mouths. Well, if you were them, and you had made yet another error…what would you do? You’d tell people how to get past copy protection schemes you inadvertently forgot a letter on:
"There is currently a work-around that may allow you to bypass this issue. Since you have the first 19 characters of the code already, you can basically try guessing the last character," said a note on EA’s customer support site.
Yes, they’re serious.
"To do this, simply enter your existing code, and then for the last character, try the letters A-Z, and then the numbers 0-9. You should eventually get the right combination, and be able to play the game."
EA is so far ahead in the idiot gaming company of the year category Sony, last year’s winner, is starting to feel left out.
Next up in the dumb as a box of rocks category, the Christian Children’s Fund. Wait you say, they seem like an organization with their heart in the right place at least… Except, then they decided not to take donations from GenCon, on behalf the recently passed away Gygax, because they are associated with D&D. I kid you the fuck not:
On Saturday, August 15th, 2008 at 6:00 PM, the Gen Con Live Game Auction hosted their traditional charity auction. This year, the event was in honor of Gary Gygax. Originally the charity chosen for GenCon was Gary’s favorite charity, the Christian Children’s Fund. Unfortunately, when they found out that the money they would get came partially from sales of Dungeons and Dragons they decided not to be the sponsored charity.
Wow. What next, a press release to announce how they won’t be taking anymore money from people that play chess because it’s the devil’s game?
And in the not yet a hot mess, but will most likely end up being so at some point, we have China. What is China doing now, besides going through a major industrial revolution and trying to handle serious growing pains and a changing society by still continuing to silence all that disagree? Well, now they are charging taxes on virtual currencies:
The announcement, which was distributed to local tax bureaus, specifically takes aim at those who buy virtual currency from gamers and surfers and sell it to others at a mark-up. Taxation officials are granted the right to determine the original price of online virtual currency if the individual fails to provide proof of an original price, it says. The policy would cover China’s legions of online gamers, who can use online virtual currency to buy better equipment and new powers for their online warriors.
Yeah, that definitely won’t be wrought with problems. Definitely not. Now just wait until we get similar measures in the US. Or until someone starts trying to buy insurance on their virtual currency. If it’s worth actual money, people will want guarantees on it. I’ve always said that companies aren’t going to be able to get away with not guaranteeing the bits in their system forever. As soon as it’s worth money, people are going to start suing when they lose it all due to a bug or being hacked.
What Would Matt Do: I can’t do much but sadly shake me head about it all. On the plus side, nothing can dampen my mood today after last night’s historic win by Obama. I heard mainstream media talking about how academics and the like will actually want to work for the administration now and how different that would be… We live in crazy land where smart people are shunned…well, at least we did. I hope.