I’m definitely intrigued. I miss the ’90s. There were some great strategy games. Whatever happened to them? Sigh…

The young man is explaining some design ideas for a ride to a man was told is a new employee, when in fact he’s actually the company’s CEO. In this instance, the CEO is Joel Manby, President and CEO of Herschend Family Entertainment. I believe this was at Silver Dollar City, a park I haven’t been to since I was a child.

I haven’t played that game in a long time. Even when I was running RCT Station, I only played the game for a few years. I haven’t had it installed or playing in at least three years. I couldn’t help but be shocked and somewhat overjoyed to see that old game show up on television.

I’ll have screenshots up in the morning.

As I mentioned recently, Spore had that digital rights management in it and is one of the reasons I declined buying it. Spore doesn’t look nearly as good as RA3 to me. I’ve not bought a new PC game in a very, very long time and as long as DRM is included, it’ll be a pretty long time before I buy another game. That’s kind of sad that good games aren’t being ruined by DRM.

For me, I want to be able to install a game as many times as I want. I want to be able to come back in 10 years and still be able to play the game, not be locked out because I’ve already installed it X number of times and therefore I must be a thief. I’m tired of all this right now. I would have snatched up Red Alert 3 in a heartbeat if I learned SecuROM wasn’t going to be included.

The DRM Electronic Arts deployed on the title is controversial because you need to activate it over the internet and there is a limit to the number of times it can be activated. If you format your HDD or something, you’ll need to re-install and re-activate it. If you activate it more than 3 times, you need to call EA and ask them for additional activation options and they apparently request proof of purchase (receipt) and reasons for why you used up your three activations.

No DRM system is perfect, but this sort of DRM is silly; it’s like putting down $50 to rent a game. It’s a good thing this is a problem with current games and not old ones; I can’t tell you how many times I’ve installed Age of Empires or RollerCoaster Tycoon over the years.

I wish companies would just go back to requiring CD-keys and be done with it. It worked just fine for me as a user and didn’t restrict me to the number of times I install the game.

Companies usually complain that piracy is the main reason PC game sales are low every year. It’s true that games are commonly pirated, but other reasons include DRM and frankly a lack of innovation in gameplay. It’s all about who can make the best graphics… what happened to addictive gameplay?!

I was initially interested in getting Spore, but at this point, I have no reason to check out the game. $50 is too much to simply rent a game. Poor options in gameplay and DRM are the two reasons I’ve almost abandoned gaming altogether.

Update: After some additional searching, it seems some sites are censoring reviews for this game. Gamespot and ebgames are censoring (deleting) anti-DRM reviews. Ha! EA’s reach is far.

Piracy has been a huge problem in the PC game market. Some companies have scaled back publishing for the PC because of it. I’ve seen some figures that were downright scary from a game developer/publisher standpoint. As much as half of the installations of some games are illegitimate.

CD keys aren’t working. I don’t mind this copy protection scheme so much. But when I put the CD back in the wrong case, then it becomes a problem.

So online authentication sounds like a good idea… in theory. Not everyone has their gaming PC connected to the Internet. Not everyone gets into the multiplayer aspect of games.

Anyway, what happens when the game’s developer goes out of business? EA isn’t likely going to go under anytime soon, but we’ve all seen developers and publishers come and go over the years. If the company shuts down, how would I authenticate the game? Some of the best games I have are almost ten years old now. Not all companies are in business for that long.

If online authentication becomes the wave of the future, I hope the companies look into creating some sort of system that can be hosted/shared by all of the companies so that if one company goes down, people can still authenticate their game(s). They need to share some sort of centralized system for this to win me over.

And holy cow, does that game look great?! Considering the fact that the new machine is running an nvidia 8800GT, it’s no surprise. Even with anti-aliasing off [default option], it looked good. But turned on and to High, everything looks sweet. The rifle-fire is fun to watch. It was what caught my eye when the game was in development and some videos and screenshots of beta versions of the game were released.

I went through the tutorial, which was a bit shorter than I was hoping. Sure I’ve played all of the other games in the series, but I think the tutorial should offer the player information on each of the buildings available.

Anyway, it was a lot fun to play with for a few hours.

The drives will begin manufacturing very soon and will be shipped in the third quarter of this year. I suspected that Microsoft would realize that there’s money to be made and regardless of their rivalry with Sony, they’re a company and they want to make money.

This all comes out at a rather ironic time though. A piece of news surfaced about the fact that BluRay players and disks aren’t selling as fast as people had hoped for and many consumers claimed they couldn’t tell the difference between DVDs and BluRay.

Haha. I had to laugh at that because on my tiny 20″ LCD monitor, I can tell the difference. I can’t imagine what BluRay on a 40+ inch HDTV would look like. DVD is a great format. It’s leaps and bounds ahead of VHS, but consumers will eventually come around. Because of BluRay, I have stopped purchasing movies on DVD. I’m frankly holding my cash for TV shows on DVD which I know won’t see BluRay releases for years [if ever] and will buy the others when BluRay players and movies become affordable. Players currently cost over $300!

But the level of attention the game gets always interests me. Some of it’s good and some bad. The bad tends to focus on the violence that this and other games include. The praise this year doesn’t seem to be from the typical groups of fanboys. I watched the video review on IGN the other day and was somewhat impressed by what I saw. Not all of it appealed to me [lapdances in video games? WTF!?].

What I thought looked interesting was the fact that you can pretty much do anything you want in it. Open-ended games are very appealing to me. I don’t being limited to a scenario. One of my favorite things in the RollerCoaster Tycoon & Age of Empires games is you are free to do whatever you want.