Sigh. It's seems to be a trend nowadays. Release a title with the most annoying content protection known to man kind. Mass Effect (aka Mock Defect) is a very good sci-fi game with lots of replay value. But the publishers (or punishers)/developers decided to turn it into a glorified rental. And an expensive one at that. Not only does it have more kill switches than Windows Vista--securom, but it also contains a ridiculous 3 install limitation.
Yeah, yeah it's to stop piracy. However, it doesn't and I'm sure you'll find many 'workarounds' to the activation system. So, once again the suckers who pay for the game end up losing. Not only are you locked out of what you paid for, but are treated like garbage on the so-called 'support' forums.
Even worse, I had to pass several non intuitive commands in the DOS shell to activate my legitimate $60+taxes game. This left my system open to attack while opening the door enough to activate the game. None of this information was supplied by 'tech' support, but rather a forum user who had enough patience to experiment.
I've posted this routine on r-force.
Take a look. How in the world would you even begin to explain this to someone who is not familiar with DOS commands and have an understanding of what's taking place?
In the end, my son, who loves the game is now locked out because he 1) reinstalled his OS 2x and 2) changed his graphic card. As for Spore. Forget it. Sorry, but that's enough for me.
Secusphere
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