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Over the last couple of months, you may have seen several posts here on Gamerblast complaining about a bunch of ridiculous digital rights management (herein simply DRM) that’s been placed on games recently (most notably Assassin’s Creed II).
All of this brings up the question… Can there be a compromise? Can there be a type of DRM that fits the needs of the developers while still pleasing and not arbitrarily impairing customers?
Well, first, let’s take a look at why DRM is in place…

DRM allows a publisher to try and impair piracy and allows them to set what rights we do and do not have, as consumers, with the games that we purchase. These rights include the amount of machines the game can be installed on as well as under what conditions the game can run (for instance, with Assassin’s Creed II, you have to be connected to the internet at all times to play). This helps protect the publishers and developers by ensuring that customers go out and buy the game rather than just borrowing it off a friend and installing it on their own machine. It’s also widely believed that DRM slows down (or even stops) pirates from stealing the games, but 99% of the time, this is not the case.
Many pirates, especially the ones that crack games, are very savvy computer users, and are used to getting around all sorts of protection. They may have slightly more difficulty with one kind over another, but the game will get cracked. That’s just how it works. These people are persistent.

Now, on the consumer side of things, DRM holds no benefits. As a legitimate customer who purchases things, you sometimes have to jump through hoops to activate/verify legal ownership of a game. With some games it’s as simple as filling in a serial number that’s on your game’s CD case. With others, it can be as painstaking as insuring a constant internet connection.
While legitimate consumers do all of this to get the game that they paid cold, hard cash for to work, pirates get the same game without any of the DRM fuss. This is my absolute biggest argument against the use of DRM in games. The game WILL get cracked. Pirates WILL download it for free. Customers WILL still get the short end of the stick, even though they are the people opening their wallets to support the developers.

All of that said, publishers still justify it as a means to put an end to piracy, which it fails terribly at.
Know the best way to avoid piracy? Don’t use DRM. Treat your customers like kings. Give them the absolute best experience you can.
I think the people who are doing this the best right now are the folks over at Steam. While they still do have authentication necessary when you purchase a game, it’s a one-and-done kinda deal. As soon as you buy a game on their platform, you authenticate it with their servers, and then you can play it online or offline whenever you want, wherever you want, on however many machines you want. The only catch is that you have to have the Steam application installed.
Plus, the service is incredibly convenient and has really nice community features that make it an overall pleasant experience. All of this just about makes up for the fact that there still is a slight form of DRM on the games purchased through the service.

So, to answer the original question, no. There can probably never be a “perfect” kind of DRM. There will always have to be a compromise.
But that’s just it. A lot of developers (such as Ubisoft) choose not to compromise and just make it as arbitrary and ridiculous as possible. They end up losing sales and the respect of a lot of consumers.
While all of this is happening, developers who publish their games on a service such as Steam keep the legal purchases coming in while providing an unmatchable service, packed with all the convenience a guy needs to excuse a little bit of copy protection.

Related posts:

1. Assassin’s Creed 2 DRM Is Excessively Ridiculous
2. Ubisoft’s DRM Servers Crash
3. Ubisoft’s Draconian DRM Cracked

Call of Duty

Last March we witnessed the two high profile employees of Infinity Ward studio heads Vince Zampella and Jason West getting fired. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist, to figure out the consequences this would have regarding the other long term developers of Call of Duty, and just as expected that scenario appears to be unfolding as we speak. Infinity Ward’s head designer Tod Alderman and the leading engineer Francesco Gigliotti both left the company this month.

The duo joined Infinity back in the year 2002, about one year before Activision took over the studio and the first COD installment of the series for the PC was sent to the stores. Particularly the departure of Alderman, could be regarded as a significant setback for the studio as he spearheaded the design of the multiplayer part of the popular first person shooter game. At present Activision has yet to respond regarding the mentioned departures of both Call off Duty veterans.

The turmoil at the studio started a month ago, when Zampella and West were fired by Activision without warning. Supposedly the two were laid off for breach of contract and insubordination. Simultaneously, Activision announced a new business unit, dedicated to the COD brand, in order to supervise developments on a new FPS shooter at Treyarch, which is set to be an action game from Sledgehammer games, and supposedly is going to be a huge multiplayer online role playing game, destined for release on the Asian market.

As a response Zampella and West have sued Activision for the hefty sum of $ 36 million and full control over the COD licenses. The laid off duo is reported to be represented by the Creative Artists Agency, who represent a number of high profile clients, among them Steven Spielberg, Brad Pitt and David Letterman, to name a few.

Related posts:

1. Exodus at Infinity Ward
2. Activision strikes back!
3. CoD Warfare in Space?

Mac computers have always been shamed by their lack of support from game developers. It’s one of the key arguments against the Mac operating system in all “Mac vs. PC” debates, and there’s nothing anybody can say back. It’s the truth.
Well, it WAS the truth. It’s quickly becoming a decent competitor in the gaming world.

The most recent and amazing victory in the realm of Mac OS X gaming is the announcement that popular gaming platform Steam is coming to Mac, along with Valve’s game catalog, which will run natively using OpenGL. This is great, because it will also help advertise the fact that OpenGL is an amazing cross-platform alternative to DirectX, which is used in most modern games (and is the primary reason that the majority of large game releases are for the Windows platform, as DirectX is Microsoft’s software, and is not available for Mac OS X). For more information on why this is a great thing, see this article, as well as this comparison between DirectX and OpenGL.
This alone will blow the door wide open for the Mac gaming community. Valve’s games include the Half-Life series, Portal, Counter-Strike, Portal, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, and Portal. Did I mention Portal? Speaking of Portal, the second iteration of that fantastic game series will be the first to have a simultaneous release on Mac OS X, Windows, and Xbox 360 when it hits later this year.
As for Steam on Mac, that’s happening next month. Plus, if you’ve bought a game for Windows on Steam, you’ve bought it for Mac, too. No need for separate purchases.

That’s just one of the upcoming contenders in the very open and very welcome marketplace that is gaming on Mac OS X. Next up on the list is OnLive, which has a June 17 launch. This service will use streaming to play video games instead of installing them directly onto your machine (as I wrongly expected Steam would, when it inevitably came to Mac). This makes it so that essentially any machine with high-speed internet access can play the newest and highest-quality of games. It will be available for Mac, Windows, and as a standalone console. Looks pretty sweet, but I’m skeptical, mainly due to the possibility of major game-breaking lag with even single-player games, since the game is never actually running on your computer, but is being run on a remote server and streamed to your computer live.

Now, all of that isn’t to say that the Mac gaming community has been completely dead. It’s gotten support from lots of independent game developers, such as 2D Boy with the wonderful World of Goo, and Amanita Design’s Machanarium, as well as some of the big-wigs, although normally those are ports that come after the launch (such as Modern Warfare and Bioshock).
There is also an unofficial game porting community that primarily uses TransGaming’s Cider software to emulate a Windows operating system to allow the game to run. This is referred to as a “Cider port,” and often has issues, be it with sound, visuals, or otherwise (although there are some perfect ports).

On another spectrum, we Mac users with somewhat newer machines that have Intel processors have the ability to run a Windows operating system on a separate partition from our Mac OS, dual-booting with the help of Apple’s Boot Camp. This allows you to play any Windows game on a Mac, but you’re also running Windows, so it sorta defeats the purpose and is not nearly as awesome as developers supporting the operating system.

I’m not saying that the Mac gaming world is going to blow up overnight, but it’s definitely working toward greatness and possible equivalence to the support that Windows has. Someday. *Looks off in the distance*

Related posts:

1. Almost All Valve Games Now On Mac
2. Half-Life 2 for Mac Released
3. Steam for Mac Released – First Impressions

The famous developer of games: American McGee, has started working on a gory version of  Little Red Riding Hood, and has published concept art for this new game in progress.

On his Flickr page the games creator posted:

“This is something Ken Wong and I have been working on for years – a concept built on “Little Red Riding Hood”

Truth be told, this Little Red Riding Hood kicks butt! The imagery that was shown, comes from the folks at Spicy Horse Games Studio, and was created by the hands of graphical artist Luis Melo, another legendary name in the gaming industry, and features our ‘Little Red’ as a small white haired girl wielding a giant Axe, while driving it deep into the skull of a giant bad ass looking Wolf. After looking at this we will be anxiously awaiting news on the game-play, and weapon combos that will be put into the game. From the looks of it, there are lots of possibilities in that area.

If this is how Sweet Little Red Riding Hood looks, we can’t wait to see what they will do with the character of the hunter!

This game, based on the fairy tale, promises to be a lot more grim than the movies, and certainly will not be Disney material! Lots of blood and gore, if the concept art published is anything, like the game is going to be.

No information was given about release dates, or through which company the game would possibly be released for that matter. American McGee is currently hard at work on his second adult Alice In Wonderland game, and expressed hope to be able to get to work on Little Red Riding Hood, after finishing Alice 2. The only concrete information given was that discussions with several publishers are still in progress.

Oh my, grandmother what a great weapon arsenal you have!

Related posts:

1. Review: Red Dead Redemption
2. Red Dead Redemption – First Impressions
3. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves Review

To be specific, I am talking about classic beat em’ up games, you know those old school favorite side scrolling arcade brawler games. Games such as Double Dragon, Streets of Rage, X-Men, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Golden Axe. These classic 2D beat em’ up games are still providing great gameplay, even if the technology behind these games is quite antiquated.

Side scrolling games have recently enjoyed a small resurgence with the Metroid games for Gameboy Advance, Contra 4, the New Super Mario Bros games, and the more recently Shadow Complex. The success of these games has demonstrated that the two-dimensional side scrolling games can still provide some supurb gameplay without having to rely on heavy graphics power.

What will the future bring? Who knows. But I’m sure we’ll see more realistic graphics, better social interaction and many more new and exciting features as gaming technology evolves to the next level. As far as beat em’ up game go, maybe the genre is just too damn outdated in this age of high end graphics, to really make much sense for game developers to pursue commercial development of such games. Who knows, perhaps a well developed beat em’ up game could end up being a surprise hit. All it would take is an indie developer to give the genre a complete makeover with 3D graphics or stylized graphics on a two-dimensional viewing plane and the addition of some cool new features to the old school gameplay to breathe some badly needed new life into this genre which has been neglected for years. Perhaps that could be a big success or maybe classic beat em’ up games are just far too simplistic for modern gamers to fully enjoy. Only time will tell.

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2. Hard Games vs. Easy Gratification
3. Sonic 4: Returning To The Second Dimension