Jack the Ripper Review

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            Jack the Ripper

Review by ScoutMarch 2004

One winter I attended several dinner parties given by a woman intent on forming a salon. Twice a month she would invite various mucky-mucks of the local creative community to sit at her table, eat her food, drink her wine and be their eccentric if amusing selves. (I was a friend of one of these arty up-and-comers and was invited as a space filler to even out the boy/girl ratio … hey, it was free food and the wine was really good.) Though the hostess attracted an interesting cast of characters, she herself had little to say.  Or, rather, she had a lot to say, but none of it was particularly interesting—not that that slowed her down. About halfway through the meal she would launch into a monologue, pressing her point home in a slow, plodding, utterly lackluster style. Invariably, someone would grow bored and try to derail her. As others joined in the mutiny, the chatter grew louder, the jokes dirtier, the topics all over the map. For a while it looked like we had earned a reprieve.  The conversation was fun again, moving fluidly like good conversation (and good games …) should. But the hostess would wait patiently, and when the inevitable silence fell over the table, she would pick up exactly where she had left off, trudging inexorably to the bitter end. Realizing we were bested, we would give up, sit quietly and take our medicine, washed down with lots of the hostess’s wine. I had forgotten all about these parties until recently, when I had the opportunity to play the new Jack the Ripper game by Galilea.

Good old Jack the Ripper. Eighteen eighty-eight, the Whitechapel district of London, fog, serial killer, glittering blades, weird letters, Scotland Yard, wild theories, city under siege, case never solved. The theme has been a goldmine for the book and movie industries and has been used at least twice before in adventure games, in GameTek’s 1996 game Jack the Ripper and Take 2 Interactive’s 1997 Ripper.

The newest Ripper offering, by Galilea by way of Microids and the Adventure Company, is reset in New York City of 1902. A killer is on the loose in the Low Side district of Manhattan, slicing and dicing young women just like the Jack of yore. You play as James Palmer, a young, inexperienced reporter for New York Today. As the game begins, the editor waves the competition’s paper in James’s face. A young woman has been found dead in an alley, carved up a la Ripper, but what’s far, far worse, the competition has scooped New York Today, outselling them ten to one. The editor wants James on the case and orders him to file a column daily until the killer is caught. James grabs his notebook, pencil and a map and heads off to the scene of the crime and then to the police station.

When James finds someone he can talk to, the cursor changes into a cartoon conversation bubble. One click and a notebook appears in the upper left of the screen with the topic headings “Mission” and “Community.” Click on Mission, and you’ll hear a comment about the Ripper case. Click on Community and learn how the case is affecting the neighborhood. Other than a few halfhearted puzzles, this is pretty much the extent of gameplay. You wander the Low Side until you find a character to talk to, dutifully click through the notebook and that is that. Off to find the next lowlife.

I guess this was much like a reporter’s day in 1901 New York. Without phones, faxes and computers, it was shoe leather and a curious mind, lots of wandering and persistent questioning, prying tidbits of information from the source before moving on. No doubt, realism is what this game is about, with varying degrees of success.

Absolute fidelity to real life is not my idea of fun. A lot of real life is just chores. Good entertainment needs dramatic resonance, well-constructed scenes with emotional impact, scenes that draw the player in, engage the mind and the heart. Think Black Dahlia, Gabriel Knight 3, Pandora Directive. All investigation-based games with riveting gameplay and engaging characters. In contrast, the gameplay in Jack the Ripper was like walking the aisles of a grocery store with a shopping list, except instead of baked beans and toilet cleaner, you’re looking for the next dancehall girl or bouncer or hawker.  Once you’ve made the rounds and found all of the characters there are to be found, you return to your desk and write your daily column.  This advances the game to the next time slot, where basically you start the whole process over again. This, more or less, describes the bulk of the gameplay.

Right-clicking the mouse brings up a game map that grows more detailed as the murders mount. One interesting feature is that you have to pin location labels to the map manually before they became active.  The labels appear in your inventory when you complete a slug of dialogue or click on an object. Beware, though, this isn’t consistent, and once I was stuck near the end because a location labeled itself in an entirely different way. It took a while for me to realize the location was already on the map, and this resulted in some needless frustration.

As I mentioned, there are next to no puzzles in this game, and what few there are are for the most part easy. Lack of pithy puzzling in an adventure game isn’t necessarily a bad thing if there is something else to pick up the slack and enliven the adventurer’s journey, but in this case the dialogue, which was the main deal, wasn’t up to the task. It was serviceable enough and on occasion approached good, especially in the scenes between James and a pub singer and James and an enigmatic tramp. It wasn’t that the voice actors were bad. They weren’t. It was just that the dialogue did not entertain.  For one, it was utterly humorless and lacking in wit. Jack the Ripper wasn’t supposed to be funny, obviously. Still, bits of humor, like a pinch of seasoning, can make the most sober game more tasty, making the horror more horrific, the darkness darker. For another, the exchanges often seemed flat, and at times the characters’ conversations sounded almost tone-deaf, as when, after whiny, clueless James Palmer has inadvertently helped to bring down a local gang, a young prostitute gushingly refers to him as her Dark Angel. Now this could (and probably should) have been played for laughs, but it wasn’t. When another character, a sports writer, bemoans the fact that a pickpocket has swiped his World Series opener ticket, James doesn’t even register what should have been at least a minor emotional beat. This isn’t a throwaway line—it is there for a reason—but James just forges ahead with whatever it was he is talking about, ignoring his friend’s distress. Stuff like this adds up, eventually dragging the tone down and dulling what little luster this game started out with.

There’s a strange lack of interactivity in Jack the Ripper.  Though you wander through some spiffy-looking environments, you can do next to nothing with them. This is a pity, because the visuals of the 1901 Low Side Manhattan were excellent. Rendered mostly in browns and taupes, with just hints of primary reds and blues, they have a real power. There are garbage and clutter and distressed walls and squeaking rats and laundry flapping on lines.  The slant of the sun on a back alley, the dull glint of moonlight on a rail track, the threadbare quality of a gambling den—it is all really impressive to look at, but unfortunately that is all you can do. That interesting doorway? Just wallpaper. Those battered barrels standing against that stained wall? Space filler. Those hobo shacks, those alluring passages leading into the mist? Don’t even think about it. For the most part, I navigated via a balky cursor, plodding along through the untouchable scenery, growing more and more disgruntled because there was no way to interact with my environment. By the end of the game I felt twinges of dread at the very thought of returning to this dead, empty world.

And were the slums of New York at the turn of the century really such an unpopulated place? I’m guessing there were money issues at Galilea when it came to filling up this game with NPCs. They managed it occasionally, putting butts in seats at a brothel and a theater/pub you are required to frequent, though even in this regard I have a complaint. I lost track of how many times I entered one specific interior to see the same board-stiff NPCs sitting at the same table, night after night after night. Sure, this isn’t anything new. A lot of lower-budget games are strapped with this problem. Fine, but in a game where realism seems to be paramount, it didn’t seem very real. Having seen the streets, I wanted to see the crowds, the press of bodies, in at least in one or two scenes if not the entire game. But time and time again, day or night, I was confronted with empty alleys, empty streets, vacant rooms.

This was brought into stark relief and made even more annoying by the presence of a lush, multileveled soundtrack. Here, finally, were the crowds, but they existed only as disembodied voices, swelling applause from the next room, murmurs from the next alley, and the occasional deliciously creepy footsteps. It was as if the denizens were invisible ghosts that only I couldn’t see. Often, even the sound effect were missing, making it seem as if entire streets and buildings had emptied out just moments before my arrival on the scene.

As you progress through the game, you accumulate documents and sketches and maps and letters, which are stored in a handy notebook for instant reference. Several of these documents lead you down different paths of investigation in your quest to find out who is killing the ladies of the night in the Low Side and whether he is really Jack the Ripper. You acquire the services of the Pinkerten [sic] Agency, with their 1901 state-of-the-art forensic, communications and archival resources. You get to roam some pretty spooky places down in old Low Side, though again most of the premises are off-limits to you.

You learn a bit about the original Whitechapel case in the course of your sleuthing, and diehard Ripper fans will be on familiar ground here. The developers came up with some mildly interesting ways to prove and/or disprove the various leads they throw at you, none of which I can really go into in detail about. These strategies were realistic and logical, if not exactly satisfying. More than once, an avenue of investigation seemed to end abruptly after a confusing cutscene. Much of this felt like a first draft to me, as if someone had reached over the developers’ shoulders and snatched the game away just as they were getting it right. In the end, for all the realism and attention to detail, the game felt undone, green, uncooked, the puzzles halfhearted, the dialogue lackluster, the plot, though intriguing at times, finally confusing. Had this game been given even another six months, who knows what might have been achieved. Maybe at least this player would have been able to understand the odd raven/Poe motif that wove in and out of the game for no apparent reason.

There seemed to be a lot of bugs, too. I encountered inventory items reappearing after I had disposed of them, a slot machine going wacky on me, cursor clicks teleporting me several screens away from where I wanted to go, ten-second lag times when entering and leaving the inventory screen, corrupted, unusable game saves and, on the second play-through, a nasty game-stopping bug where I needed to get into a pub to deliver a calling card and the proprietor simply wouldn’t answer the door. I finally had to skip ahead via a save from my first play-through. All this makes me think this game was released before its time.

As the game ground on, I, like a bored dinner guest, found myself growing distracted, goofing on the oddly elongated arms on many of the characters, the strange body language, the funny, touching facial expressions, the odd decisions the sound mixer made. I retreated into the art, I guess, because at least there something was happening.  And like a boring dinner party, as the game wrapped up I found myself relieved that it was finally ending. Except … well, the game did indeed stop, but as for a satisfactory ending … you can decide for yourself. It had to be one of the bigger head-scratchers I’ve come upon lately, and I can only think (with a shudder) that it was some kind of setup for a sequel.

As for the woman and her dinner parties, I remember asking my friend later what had happened to her dreams of a brilliant salon. He replied that everyone eventually stopped going and that as far as he knew, the woman was still sitting at the end of her table talking to an empty room. I can likewise imagine James Palmer still out there in the Low Side, wandering the streets forever with his pad and paper, knocking on doors that will never open, staring up at buildings he’ll never enter, listening to the murmur of the crowds always one street away, frowning and wondering where everybody went. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Galilea Publisher: The Adventure Company Release Date: January 2004

Available for: Windows

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System Requirements

Windows 98/ME/2000/XP 500 MHz CPU (800 MHz recommended) 64 MB RAM (128 MB recommended) 16X CD-ROM drive (24X recommended) 16 MB DirectX compatible video card (32 MB recommended) DirectX 7 compatible sound card 1.6 GB free hard disk space

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Links provided for informational purposes only.  FFC makes no warranty with regard to any transaction entered into by any party(ies).

      Copyright © Electric Eye Productions.  All rights reserved.  No reproduction in whole or in part without express written permission.

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29 Responses to The Long, Sordid Tail of DRM

  • Meho

    Good one.

    Of course, it will be very interesting to see the battle between crackers and UBI’s cryptographers. PC version of Assassin’s Creed II is already circulating the warez scene, although as yet uncracked. Everybody seems to think it will be cracked in a couple of weeks time at worst, which, admittedly is better for UBI than what usually happens (games cracked before release). Of course, I won’t be buying it because I find this practice unnacceptable (and I do have the console version anyway) but the success of this game and its DRM might mean quite a lot in the future. Of course, we ARE moving towards the age where you will be required to be connected to do any playing at all, whatwith the Gaikai and OnLive systems rearing their heads on the horizon. Doesn’t mean I have to like it, eh?

  • Spike

    I went to the Ubisoft website and looked at their list of published games.  It seems that the last of their games I played was the last Myst game in 2005.  In fact the only Ubisoft games I’ve played have been Myst games.  So I don’t see that their new DRM crime-against-my-privacy will have much of an effect on me.  But I hate the idea.  It’s an “Off with their heads!” kind of development.  Reminds me of the idea that people will put up with lost privacy in exchange for security.  In this case the security is only to benefit Ubisoft.  Yes, I allow my privacy to be violated every day – each time I visit Amazon, or read Google News -the list goes on and on.  BUT THOSE ARE MY CHOICES.  I also have a choice about where and how I spend my money, and I’d refrain from buying a game that allows so much intrusion into my computer/life.  A game that tells me how I must live my life even in the smallest of ways such as always being connected to the internet is a game I can forgo.

  • Jason O

    Consoles CAN be connected to the internet 100% of the time, but there are still many consoles that never go online. Modern Warfare 2 sold over 11 million copies, yet XBox Live only shows 840,000 users that have been on-line with it. That’s not played online, that means they played the game in any mode while connected to XBox Live.

    Games that have required an internet connection and were multiplayer only have a history of vanishing quickly from the console marketplace. Phantasy Star ONLINE did much better on the Gamecube then it did on the XBox. What was the difference? Oh yeah, you could play PSO without an internet connection on the Gamecube, the XBox version require a live account and an internet connection. That’s hardly the only example but one that is near and dear to my heart.

  • Bennet

    No, no, you don’t get it! Ubisoft’s “always connected” requirement isn’t DRM, it’s value-add for you, the beloved customer. Just like the Albertsons supermarket chain requires employees to plaster obnoxiously bright orange “Thank you for shopping with us!” stickers on your Coke and milk not because they think you’re stealing them but to express their sincere gratitude for your patronage.

    Maybe my memories of a time when consumers paid for a product and got the product, unadorned by FBI warnings and impossible to open wrappings and authentication servers that can vanish at any time without warning were planted by aliens. In the current cultural climate it’s certainly difficult to believe that time ever existed.

  • Meho

    But Steerpike makes a good point: business model, retail model is lagging behind the times. And developers, instead of researching ways to use the existing systems to sell more games rather research new ways to piss off their paying customers.

    Seriously, in my opinion, pirates pirate games because they are better value than retail games. Not just in the sense that they get to spend less money on them, but they get them faster, do not have to go through any hassle with DRM and have full control over the game. I think that Gabe Newell put it best saying that Valve sees pirates as customers who haven’t been served yet.

    I think UBI and their ilk should look for ways to make retail games more valuable to their customers than (free) warez copies. Yes, stuff like achievements/ trophies helps a little, sure. There are other ways too and one of them is resale value. But, oh, what a surprise, used games market pisses publishers off MORE than pirates do. In fact most of the current DRM schemes are only effective against resales. EA’s ten dollar project and all other free DLC on day one initiatives. So, honestly, I’m afraid that UBI’s online-all-the-time-or-no-service DRM is basically only going to affect sales of used games. The crackers are going to bring their games to pirates eventually. I believe that draconic DRM schemes such as this will only inspire people like GeoHot, Dark Alex and Yoshihiro to spend more of their time on circumvention. Their street cred is going to be huge after all…

    What Valve seem to understand is that playing games through Steam should make playing MORE valuable/ comfortable than not playing games through Steam (which is, at the end of the day a DRM system). Being able to instal a game on as many machines as you want and not having to have a disc in the drive is exactly what pirated games give us too, but with Steam you also retain all your stats, friends lists, achievements and everything. So it’s BETTER than playing pirated games. I only hope that UBI wake up and realise they have to ADD value, not just subtract freedoms.

  • Lewis B

    I’m not really sure I see their DRM as a huge problem.  If my PC is turned on, so is my internet.  I’m fully aware that my name is probably on a million data bases already, and although it might be annoying knowing that Ubisoft have implemented such a security feature, if you don’t physically notice it, I don’t particularly care.

    I’m currently playing Myst at the moment, having never before.  What an odd game…

  • Meho

    Well, you know, just from a philosophical standpoint: if the game is unplayable as soon as you don’t have Internet connection (which, I’m afraid, happens to me more regularly than I am comfortable with) for no other reason than making sure you have paid for it then to me this is pretty much unnacceptable. Requiring a connection for something that is a function of the game itself is OK, but enforcing it just for the sake of protection of the publisher, sorry, no sale.

  • Lewis B

    True Meho.  I had 40 minutes the other day before I went out and thought I would have a quick skirmish on Dawn of War II.  Steam (despite my love for it) wouldn’t launch the game because for some reason it kept freezing and refusing to connect or launch in offline mode.  I couldn’t actually locate the source directory either to boot the game up manually. So, I didn’t get to play and instead spent 40 minutes in a fit of rage cursing Valve and all who work under them. 

    Not exactly the same situation, but not hugely dissimilar.

  • Gregg B

    I’m really not concerned about the privacy issue simply because that illusion is just that, and doesn’t really comfort or unsettle me. My problem with this whole thing is that internet connections can be temperamental at the best of times and the idea that if the connection falters I will lose my progress (and thus my invested time which I’d argue is more valuable than my money) then quite frankly Ubi can fuck off. I’ve been pretty placid up to press with DRM simply because it’s not seemed that intrusive but this will affect the paying customers more than the pirates. It devalues the product and I fear it will push otherwise paying customers to download cracked versions that don’t suffer from this shit. Which, of course, will play into Ubi’s hands.

    Am I right in believing all this stems from the hideous retail model that just refuses to die? Physical retail creates pressuring deadlines, costs considerably more due to increased physical production (and overheads in staffing and floor space), it’s inflexible with stock limitations and shelf space dictating the range of titles available in any given store and by the sounds of things is the sole reason for this ‘tail’. If you look at Steam, it isn’t always the newest games that sell the most due in no small part to their sales and weekend deals.

    “I wonder if we’ll ever get to a point where a person would be just as likely to invest in a beloved classic as a hot new release.”

    From my experience there are a lot of people who simply can’t stomach old looking games, even some of my friends who’ve been playing games since they were young have turned into total graphics whores. Seriously you want to see the totally underwhelmed look on their faces when I show them XCOM for any period of time. We’re at a stage now where graphics are so advanced that for a lot of people going back so far to sample an allegedly classic title is simply too much. Thankfully GOG is doing a fantastic job of making these titles as accessible, and valuable, as possible.

    EDIT: Spot on Meho. My point exactly.
    See what I mean though Lew? Time. Valuable stuff. A quick skirmish on DoW turned into a 40 minute skirmish with Steam.

  • Mat

    This seems like an awful idea.. or at least one which sounds like a good idea to somebody somewhere, but in reality is unworkable.

    Since I’ve been a paying internet customer I have lived at 3 different addresses and used around 5 different ISP’s. I have ALWAYS had problems with my internet connection. With my current set up it tends to go down if a menacing looking cloud passes overhead..

  • xtal

    Some people may like to play a game offline now and then; this is especially easy with older ones before the dawn of activation codes and online authentication. While those aren’t that annoying, having to maintain a constant internet connection just to play a game that you paid for, which is not specifically a MMO, really bites.

    Gregg B said:
    “Am I right in believing all this stems from the hideous retail model that just refuses to die? Physical retail creates pressuring deadlines, costs considerably more due to increased physical production (and overheads in staffing and floor space), it’s inflexible with stock limitations and shelf space dictating the range of titles available in any given store and by the sounds of things is the sole reason for this ‘tail’. If you look at Steam, it isn’t always the newest games that sell the most due in no small part to their sales and weekend deals.”

    I agree with this. Just a few years ago I couldn’t see myself paying for intangible, digital goods. Fast forward to now and it’s really my preferred method of computer gaming, whether it’s GOG, Steam, or elsewhere, I find it’s the model that works best for the customer. If I’m not mistaken, I believe once upon a time that was who the industry was trying to serve, no? The customer?

  • Cesar

    You know, I’m from Brazil and there piracy is HUGE. Maybe for that reason I feel for the industry and understand the efforts to stop it. However, I suspect this crack delay would have a very minor impact in markets like Brazil. People can’t afford the games, so they wouldn’t pay full price anyway.

    It is a shame that we don’t have privacy anymore. The other day a friend of mine on XBox Live sent me a message to congratulate me on a goal I scored in Fifa 10. I didn’t know but apparently not only you can see I’m playing Fifa, but you also see when I score and my avatar cheers! While that sounds very cool, it is also very disturbing. But like Matt points very well, privacy is already gone. And since I don’t have it anymore, why not help stop piracy?

    On the other hand, the plurality of solutions is a different matter, it becomes a hassle. I think the solution should be platform dependent, not publisher dependent. In Brew phones, the control is embedded in the system and you cannot use an app if it cannot be verified, which means if you are not connected to the network you can’t play.

    Unfortunately that cannot be applied to consoles, there’s a considerable number of devices outside the internet umbrella. But if the game constantly checks if you are online and tries to authenticate the copy, online piracy will suffer a big hit and the technological move towards full connectivity will make the practice more and more efficient over time.

  • Andrew

    Not going to buy the game, long tail or not, it sucks to have that kind of persistent connection needed for offline play. Not even just startup authorisation either. I must admit any Game For Windows Live games can be similar (Dawn of War 2 being one of them necessitating it) although most of them allow offline profiles, and most of them allow the saves to be moved easily between any online or offline accounts.

    Oh, and if you’re disconnected it won’t kick you out of the game too, even Microsoft didn’t get that wrong.

    I don’t even understand how privacy comes into it, my main issue is twofold:
    – The above note about simple, offline play (and disconnects for blips in service)
    – The fact it isn’t just your connection that is necessary, it is THEIR connection and servers

    The second point as a partial game historian leads me to wonder how many years (not decades) the servers will be there. Publishers have removed much more necessary servers quickly if they are a cost liability (or they want to push people onto a newer game…). Downtime is also, considering some of the services require payment (Xbox Live for instance) devastatingly poor considering the user base sizes, especially on high load days (and I wonder if we’ll see “Assassins Creed 2 unplayable at launch due to server overload” at all, heh). Lucky it’s “just games” though, no worries if we only have 99% uptime right?! 😉

    (Also, frankly their Assassins Creed 1 port was poor until they patched it, where at least then it was playable (in full on 16:9…for some reason), which makes me wary of any PC release of a console game they do. I wonder also if they still have unskippable cutscenes, I’ve not checked it out on the consoles).

    The fact they’ll never have enough sales of this PC version due to the earlier console release to either say this is a roaring success or roaring failure. It’s the longest end of the tail in the first place. Or they’ll lie about whatever happens anyway. It’s utterly bizarre…I just don’t understand it.

  • Meho

    Cesar: I’m in Serbia and here piracy reigns supreme (much worse than Brazil, I imagine) but still, this is pure and simple bullshit. I purcahsed BioShock 2 today, for my PS3 even though I’d prefer to play it on my PC just because of the stupid DRM that won’t let me control the use of a game I pay for. They can fuck off with that. So, my purchase was influenced by DRM, depsite the game being more natural to play on a PC. Protection measures should not create this kind of bitterness in a human being.

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    The issue of server overload on release days is significant. Think about it – a game like Modern Warfare 2? Or any other hotly anticipated release? Of course the servers would go down. It’s not cost-effective to install a server infrastructure capable of handling Day Zero traffic. That would royally piss people off.

    Ubi and others who use draconian DRM typically insist that if they ever go out of business or shut servers down, they’ll issue patches so the games can be played offline.

    Around the holidays here, big stores like Best Buy station a guy at the exit. His job is to go through your bag and consult your receipt to make sure you haven’t stolen anything. That’s a very similar ideology to this one: treat all consumers like thieves in hopes of catching the few who are.

  • Lewis B

    Considering most MMOG servers cannot cope on launch day, I see it as a gaurentee that when the next Modern Warfare is released, if they do follow through with this, would see many unhappy players.

  • lakerz1

    This new DRM policy will totally be screwing me over because I have a wireless internet setup, but my signal is a bit weak so here and there it drops out for a 10-15 second period before it reconnects.  Plus my wireless router is a bit wonky and will just stop working once in awhile until I cycle power to it.  So, until my setup changes, I will be forced to avoid all Ubi PC games that use this.

  • Igor Hardy

    I seriously doubt a person which would normally pirate a game, will pay money for it just because she has to wait a short while longer for the cracked version. This can work only for very cheap games – like 1$ cheap.

  • Meho

    Just for those keeping tabs: the Russian version of Assassin’s Creed II has apparently been successfully cracked, with a fix for the saves too. Of course, I don’t KNOW this for sure but that’s the word circulating through the grapewine.

  • Cesar

    Brazil is a strong competitor in the piracy rates. 95%-97% if I am not mistaken.

    Anyway, I don’t have a problem with the privacy issue. Not even with the assumption that we are all thieves. If you extrapolate that idea, you will conclude we shouldn’t have patrol cars on the streets. They assume people will commit crimes and have to keep watch. Homo homini lupus. Society isn’t perfect and even though losses are part of the model, no one is ready to lose out of good faith alone. I don’t mean to say DRM and police watch are the same thing, I’m just saying it’s not that simple to draw a line where it becomes offensive to monitor society.

    That being said, it is not acceptable to have a DRM impact gameplay at all. I don’t mind it authenticating my copy. But if I am offline it has to work. And if I loose connection during the game I shouldn’t be kicked out.

    And while the efficacy of the solution might be questionable under these circumstances, like I said in the previous comment, it only tends to increase.

  • Andrew

    “Ubi and others who use draconian DRM typically insist that if they ever go out of business or shut servers down, they’ll issue patches so the games can be played offline.”

    I have seen this happen to absolutely zero games ever. The fact that it is nearly impossible to sanction any work on IP if a company is in administration is the key. That and it is non-trivial to get around your own disk DRM by producing an installer that will work with your disk copy to install it.

    I’d love to be proved wrong…this is by far the most worrying thing of the deal, just installed Bioshock 2 and it has online activation (sigh)…worried I might need to download cracked versions to install it in the future!

    Oh, did you see the patch notes of the first patch? It makes the DRM very very very slightly “better” (I mean, better as in “still shit”):

    http://www.fileshack.com/file.x/17456/Assassin%27s+Creed+2+Patch+1.01+-+US

    “Game can now be continued from the exact same point when connection is restored”

    Ho ho ho. Ho.

  • Gregg B

    I like this bit:

    “Only those who purchased a copy of ACII or SHV legally appear to be affected. Pirates playing illegally downloaded cracked versions of the game are able to play without a problem.”

    Is it apparent pirates are having no problems yet? If they’ve properly cracked it then what I feared (above) is true. Last I heard was that the DRM apparently downloads levels or important files as you play. I don’t know whether this is true or not though.

  • Spike

    Meho beat me to it.  I just read a similar article on The Register.  I don’t suppose that the DDoS attack will make Ubi rethink its evil ways, but this might (I can dream, can’t I?):

    “Meanwhile Ubisoft’s much criticised controls have been broken by software hackers. A hacker group called Skid-Row managed to bypass DRM restrictions on Silent Hunter 5 less than 24 hours after the game was published. Skid Row has releasing a crack for the game based on this work, Zdnet reports. ®”

    Full article here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/08/ubisoft_anti_drm_hack_attack/

  • Littermate

    Spike.  RE: The Register article
    There is a comment to that article that claims the crack for SH5 is not a complete crack and would only allow an incomplete experience, because not only are save games stored online but some of the game data files are stored online too, implying that the boxed game you buy is incomplete.  This seems plausible and effective IMO, because if I was demanding an internet connection for my software this is how I would do it.  It demands not only that a games code be cracked but that missing data files be supplied too.

  • Spike

    Having just read this article – link below – I’m thinking that DRM will be fine and dandy AND hunky-dory with me as long as the packaging it comes in is “green”.  Yep.  That makes it more palatable.

    http://www.fastcompany.com/1620105/ubisoft-green-recycled-case-digital-manual-sustainable-packaging

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    I would kind of like to buy games in potato cases.

  • xtal

    I was thinking… and remembered one of the most creative instances of “DRM” if you can call it that: King’s Quest VI! I looked it up and sure enough it is mentioned on KQVI’s Wikipedia page:

    A booklet titled “Guidebook to the Land of the Green Isles” (written by Jane Jensen) is included in the KQVI package. Aside from providing additional background to the game’s setting, this booklet serves as part of the game’s copy-protection. The player will not be able to pass the puzzles on the Cliffs of Logic that guard the Isle of the Sacred Mountain without information from the booklet. The booklet also includes a poem encoding the solution to one of the puzzles in the labyrinth on the Isle of the Sacred Mountain.

    I guess that’s not very feasible today, what with widespread use of the internet around the world. I still think it’s more creative than the “thank you for your money, we intend to treat you like a criminal” method.

  • Bluebogle

    I played the KQVI game with the booklet. I was a kid at the time, and thought the booklet was so cool! It really added to the whole game’s experience.

    The quest for Glory games came with fun booklets as well, though I don’t remember if they had copy protection elements to ’em.

    Ahh, the good old days..

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