It’s true. Sleeping in saves Money.
I sleep untill 11AM, and so I eat lunch, then go to classes, eat dinner, then hang out untill 1AM. Thats saving about $30 a week from not eating breakfast, and I still eat after I wake up 
An interesting article appeared in the BBC today. Confirmed pictures of three “Exoplanets” or, Planets not within our solar system.
The article states that they are large gas giants, approximately 3 to 16 times the size of Saturn. They don’t know if there are additional planets orbiting that star, but, they believe there are.
This is pretty interesting to see a picture of another solar system. It’s stunning.
This post has been coming for a while. A rant on DRM, but, I’m going to sweeten it a bit with a rant on DLC as well.
I’ll start off with a simple explanation what DRM is… It stands for Digital Rights Management, and it’s pretty much a little piece of code or a program that makes sure that You, the consumer, have purchased and are using Their product in the way that they see fit. Most of the time, this comes in the form of putting in a CD key when you install a program or game, but, now it is turning into a whole bloated mess. EA/Maxis’s Spore has a notorious “3 Install Limit”, meaning, you can only install Spore, Uninstalled or not, 3 times before you need to buy another copy. Or, there is Farcry 2’s 5 Install limit, but wait, if you uninstall it, you get an install back!
Wait…What?
That’s right…the company you purchased this product from tells you how you can use it. Now, I generally am not one for pirating, but, I downloaded the cracked RELOADED version of Spore, then went out and bought a copy from Fred Meyers. I used the CD key in the actual purchased copy to install the cracked, DRM free version of Spore. I wasn’t the only one to do that either. In hindsight though, EA is getting slapped with some class action lawsuits over their DRM policies, so, I wouldn’t be surprised if we hear a bit more about DRM in the future.
Of course, with all this money grabbing in the Gaming Industry, Microsoft is trying to take a piece of the pie away from Steam in Digital Distribution. Guess what part they are taking… Downloadable Content that you have to pay for. Yeppers, Buy a game, and pay for any additional content they decide to give you. I’ll take Valve’s method of patching TF2 every 3-4 months with some new toys and achievements, or CCP’s Expansion Pack, for free, every 6 or so months.
Really though, I can understand why you want to charge people for DLC. You spent time and effort creating that Content, and you want a return for it. The problem is, In the case with Spore, who is going to pay $20 for extra creature parts? Who do you alienate if you, lets say, release a multipayer map that people have to pay for? And, are you going to go so far as to Charge users to download other user’s custom content? How far do you go to make money?
I guess what I’m getting at is, It should be fun to make games for other people to play, but, the big industry is trying to lap up as much money as they can. It makes me sad to see something so great be swallowed up by money grabbers. I mean, Come on…there is going to be a 50 Cent game. He isn’t even a good rapper…
Also, played Fallout 3 and loved it. The Liberty bot at the end screaming democracy catch-phrases was a great touch. I loved hearing “DEMOCRACY IS NON NEGOTIABLE” and “COMMUNISM IS A LIE” from a 75 foot tall walking, laser firing robot that looked like it came out of a 1950’s comic book. Made my day.
Well, after a very frustrated post yesterday, I have made some progress on rebuilding my Desktop from erasing everything.
I’m really suprised on how many tools I use…from winrar to Visual Studio, theres so many little things I use every day that I had to reinstall.
Thank god for Steam though. While I lost my game files, I still have HL2 and its friends (TF2, Portal, etc) tied to my account, and I can just download an play. I lost Warcraft3 though, but, I’ll head home and pick up the CDs
I lost all of my music though, all 75gb of it… That stung. Oh well, I can probably get it back pretty easy.
Executable Injecting Viruses are no fun.
3 Live boot disks, 2 frustrated nights, I’m now running a fresh install of windows XP, and lost all of my music.
Good Game. Really.