With a barely concealed rage, I returned my DVD Collector's Nonfunctional Edition of F.E.A.R. for the five (!) CD version, which installed and played like you would expect a piece of retail software to do. I wanted elaborations upon the action-packed gunplay I saw in the demo, and that urge was stronger (although just marginally so) than the urge to set the DVD ablaze and instigate some kind of consumer march.

I haven't discussed it for a while because I find it so frustrating, and I honestly believe that nothing could change their approach to software protection. What made it come up again was the copy protection that came along with the King Kong demo. Oh, you heard right: the wave of the future is apparently copy protection on freely available software. I'd never have known, either, if it hadn't made me restart so it could load fuck knows whatever bullshit memory resident. Is it still there now? Watching?

Someone needs to emphasize this in such a way that the right people see it: people who pirate software enjoy cracking it. The game itself is orders of magnitude less amusing. And their distributed ingenuity will smash your firm, secure edifice into beach absolutely every Goddamn time. There are no exceptions to this rule.

It's not even an effective threat to say that I am being driven away from gaming on personal computers via a conflux of price and convenience issues, because traditional PC publishers and PC developers themselves are either hedging their bets with console content or are focusing their business on it entirely. They are sporting a wide, supple mitt and will catch that cash by hook or by crook.

Now you can see why I never bring it up. Optimally, I don't like to feel this defeated before noon.