Castle Magus

Was looking at the Apollo Justice trilogy on Steam. Seems like they removed Denuvo, which is good... only to replace it with Enigma Protector, which is bad. They may as well have just kept in the fucking Denuvo, as far as I'm concerned. I'm guessing they'll probably do the same with the Edgeworth games collection when the Denuvo license expires on that, too. I'm just glad they haven't shoehorned that Enigma Protector shit into the original trilogy I already bought (yet, at least).

Well, I'll say this much, it certainly "protects" Crapcum from getting any more of my money, if nothing else.

Full headline, due to the inexorable fact that the Dreamwith subject field size is inadequate: "If 1 million people sign a petition, a ban on rendering multiplayer games unplayable has a chance to become law in Europe"

"A European initiative is now underway for videogame preservation and consumer protections against publishers 'killing games.'"

As a bonus, I'll embed the Ross Scott (remember him?) video they mention in the article:

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Europeans can save videogames from being destroyed! The European Citizens' Initiative has just launched and represents the biggest and most ambitious chance to create new law against publishers destroying games they have already sold to you. Get EU citizens to sign it!

Link to sign EU initiative:
https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu...

Guides on how to sign EU initiative:
https://www.stopkillinggames.com/eci

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(EDIT) See also: this, to which all of this is a follow-up. (/EDIT)

I'll just say it again. Companies have been gravitating toward online-only games (multiplayer-only or otherwise) not because they believe that's what people actually want to play. They've been during it purely for DRM reasons. That's also a big reason why games are split up into DLC now, rather than being released whole. Well, that and all the extra money they get from selling the game piecemeal at inflated prices, but also because of DRM reasons (i.e. the game having to phone home all the time to "verify" the DLC and all that shit).

As for me, I'm in the US and can't sign the petition, and thus this doesn't directly apply to me, and I don't personally know anyone who lives in the EU, but if my posting this here helps even the tiniest bit, then... *shrug* ...great! That said, I'm not going to be holding my breath until this thing succeeds, that's for sure.

Just for the hell of it, I signed up for the newsletter on the Stop Killing Games base-level site, too (or, at least, tried to, as I haven't gotten any kind of confirmation yet or any other indication that it actually went through [EDIT I tried it again later and actually got an email verification almost immediately, so I guess the first one just got eaten by my aggressive spam filters or something /EDIT]). And I also added the Accursed Farms Youtube channel to my Feedly, which I hadn't already done, for whatever reason.

The comments under the PC Gamer article are about half and half between people saying this is a bad idea (i.e. reputation management drones, utter fucking morons, etc.) and people who can't believe that there would exist anyone who would say this is a bad idea. I think my favorite interaction was the one between one guy (one of the "this is a bad idea" guys) saying something like "But this could have a chilling effect and just end up with them not making multiplayer games at all anymore. They'd go back to making single player games." (Despite the fact that that's not even what was being discussed here.) And a few of the replies were something like "Yes, and? That would be great, actually." (Personally speaking, I don't care if multiplayer-only games exist, I just also wouldn't care if they didn't exist, either, especially if they're being made instead of/at the expense of offline singleplayer games. But again, that's mostly irrelevant to the actual discussion at hand.)

For clarity's sake, the headline for this article on the Google News app on my phone (as well as on the browser tab in Firefox/Chrome/etc.) shows as "Dragon's Dogma 2 gleefully rejects modern game design rules," which conjures a vastly different initial impression than "All the ways Dragon's Dogma 2 will fight against you" does.

So... let's see, then.

Draconian DRM in the form of a Denuvo malware infestation? Check.

Worthless, predatory DLC? Check.

Game-breaking, progression loss bugs? Check.

Bad optimization/performance, even on high-end computers (which is very likely at least partly the fault of Denuvo)? Check.

Dubious design choices? Check.

So... no. Looks to me like Dragon's Dogma 2 gleefully embraces modern game design rules, not rejects them. In fact, Dragon's Dogma 2 looks like a perfect storm of the absolute worst of modern game design. A textbook example of what not to do. (At least if you don't want to be perceived as incompetent, greedy asshats, anyway, which Crapcum seems to not really care about anymore, I guess, like so much of the rest of the modern video game industry. *shrug*)

...

...

<sarcasm> Oh, wait, they were talking about the actual game that's hidden under all that huge pile of garbage listed above? Well, then. Never mind, I guess. </sarcasm> *eye roll + smdh + weary sigh*

This is all academic to me because I had no interest in this game to start with, but if I had, the infestation of it with Denuvo would have killed my interest utterly dead. But then, the main reason I had no interest in it in the first place is because of fucking course it was going to be infected with Denuvo. It's a Warner Bros. game released within the past 5 years or so. Like, no fucking shit the Denuvo contamination was going to be there.

On a related note, along with the above, this other headline here was the one that I saw in my Google News App today that got me to add the topic of "Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League" to my "show less like this" list[1]: "Suicide Squad devs say despite being a live-service game it'll respect players' time because 'We all love playing games, but we also have lives'"

Any game that is a "live service" game is pretty much just as dead to me as any game that is poisoned with Denuvo, and this game happens to be both of those things. (Why the fuck an always online "live service" game even needs Denuvo at all is beyond me, but whatever.) But then, even aside from all of that stuff, everything else I've heard about this game (even just today alone) has given me the impression that the game is utter dogshit, so even if it weren't a "live service" game or a game polluted by Denuvo, I would've had next to no interest in it. Only because of the legacy of Rocksteady and the Arkham games (up to Arkham Knight anyway, but even that one had an incredibly shitty launch on PC initially) would I have even given this game more than a glance, but even that isn't enough for me to care about all of this rancid horseshit.

This game is a textbook example (among many similar examples) of why I think the modern video game industry is nigh worthless and in dire need of crashing again like it's 1983.

[1] - I would've said "ignore list," but there is no "ignore list" in Google News App. Telling Google News App that you don't want to see a particular topic anymore is only the merest of suggestions, at best.

Full headline, thanks to Dreamwidth's too small subject field/PC Gamer's too long headlines: "They're putting DRM in trains, now: Hired hackers Dragon Sector take to the Chaos Communication Congress stage and explain how they caught a manufacturer red-handed"

DRM is asinine. Full stop.

DRM in things like trains or tractors or whatever is especially asinine, though.

Fuck off forever, Squeenix.

(EDIT) On a vaguely dim, only semi-related bright side, Squeenix has apparently removed the malware from Live A Live, so there's that, at least. Maybe this Star Ocean 2 remake will similarly be actually worthwhile in six months or so, too. (/EDIT)

So, I bought the "Humble Book Bundle: Seanan McGuire: The Urban Fantasy Bundle" an hour or two ago at the $18 "get everything" level. However, because I stupidly didn't pay attention when I was buying the bundle, I failed to notice that they are apparently only available via "Kobo," which I had never heard of prior to this.

So, I've been trying and failing to obtain and convert the files to a format that my Kindle Paperwhite can use. To start with, just to even get the epub files at all, before thoughts of any sort of conversion process came into play, I had to download Adobe Digital Editions on my PC, create an Adobe account, sign into that, and set up Firefox so that it automatically opens .acsm files downloaded from the Kobo store in the Adobe Digital Editions program on my PC (since, otherwise, the files I downloaded from the Kobo site were utterly useless to me). This, finally, converted them to usable, viewable epub files.

So, now that I had the epub files, I tried to send those epub files to my Kindle. Failure. The emails I got back from Amazon just said "something went wrong" with the files I tried to send to the Kindle. I tried directly connecting my Kindle to my PC and copying over the epub files. Failure. The files did copy over, but my Kindle doesn't actually see them, apparently.

(EDIT) Oh, and the Adobe Digital Editions thing also didn't recognize my Kindle at all when the Kindle was connected to my PC, because if it had, I'd supposedly have been able to just directly copy them over that way using the ADE thing without having to fuck around with any of the below shit. Failure again. Maybe there's some more jiggering I can do on that front to make this shit work, too, I don't know. (/EDIT)

So, I tried opening them in Calibre to convert them to something else that the Kindle could use. Failure. Because they've got fucking DRM on them. This was the first actual solid confirmation that DRM is the culprit here, because the Amazon "copy to Kindle" process just said "something went wrong" or whatever, without specifying why. Calibre straight up said I couldn't do jack shit with them because they were "protected" by DRM.

So, I tried installing the DeDRM plugin to Calibre and reimporting the epub files into Calibre. Still failure, because apparently the DeDRM plugin, which is supposed to just strip out the DRM during import into Calibre, doesn't actually work. Can't even view them in the Calibre viewer itself, despite the plugin.

So, now I want to, figuratively speaking, take a steaming, diarrhetic spew directly into the screaming mouth of the very concept of DRM, just in general. DRM is dogshit, especially DRM on goddamned books. I don't want to upload these things to Pirate Bay or whatever, I just want to be able to fucking read them on my fucking Kindle, that's all. But I can't even do that, because of this DRM dumbfuckery. In any case, just to be crystal clear here, I will never again buy a Humble Book Bundle if it is only available through Kobo, and you can be sure as shit I will be paying attention more closely to that from now on. Lesson fucking learned.

I might still try to mess with it some more, later, to see if I can't still get this infection removed from the books that I bought, as there are still some potential workarounds that I haven't tried yet (like using an older version of Calibre or an older version of Adobe Digital Editions or whatever, or maybe there's something besides just Calibre that could possible do the job), but I'm mostly sick and tired of messing with it for the time being. I'm not sure I'll actually bother, to be honest.

I can still technically read these books I bought on the Kobo app I downloaded on my phone, and I guess I could read them on my desktop via the Adobe Digital Editions thing, so I'm not completely SOL, but I can't read them on my Kindle because fuck me, I guess.

(This would be the book equivalent of, like, buying a game bundle and then finding out after the fact that the games were only redeemable on the Epic Gangrene Store or something. [EDIT 2] Now, to be fair, I'm not trying to say that Kobo or whatever is as vile and scuzzy as Epic Games is... I mean, maybe they are, I don't know... but I haven't personally seen anything to indicate as such. Granted, I haven't looked very hard, either. [/EDIT 2])

Full headline because Dreamwidth continues to suck: "Denuvo plans to offer independent benchmarks in an attempt to prove its DRM doesn't cause performance problems"

It's already been proven many times over that it does cause performance problems. Hell, I know for a goddamn fact myself through personal experience that it does cause performance problems. Their worthless, lying, "independent benchmarks" can eat shit. I will never (knowingly) buy a video game that contains that badware.

And here's the thing, even if there actually weren't any noticeable performance issues, there are more than enough other issues with Denuvo that make it utterly unacceptable. Just as one example: How many games are unplayable now because of lack of support for (and lack of removal of) shit like SafeDisc and SecuROM? How many games are unplayable now because of shit like Games for Windows Live going down (and the games that used it weren't updated to work without it)? And, follow me on this, how many games will be unplayable when Denuvo inevitably dies as well (hopefully sooner than later), if that dogshit hasn't been removed from the games infected with it by then? And there will be games from which the Denuvo malware will never be legitimately removed, regardless of the circumstances or reasons why it should be. So, yeah, even if the games contaminated with Denuvo did run flawlessly (which they demonstrably don't), it's still terrible and needs to die.

This video is entirely ranting about Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. Aside from the title, I don't think they mention Redfall at all. And... I've heard some bad things about Jedi Survivor, but if even half of what Pat and Woolie say in this video is true, then it's far worse than I was aware. I'm not surprised or shocked by that in any way, mind you, it's just that I haven't really been keeping tabs on the game at all, outside of stuff like this. And though they're mostly focusing on the horrendous PC port of the game, they mention at several points that the console versions are just as fucked up broken in their own ways as well.

And on top of all of that, which Pat and Woolie don't even mention at all, the game is contaminated with the malware Denuvo on PC, because of course it is. (Which, yet again, is not disclosed on Steam [outside of the warning from the third party "Denuvo Games" curator, which wouldn't be seen by anyone who doesn't follow that curator], because, for whatever asinine reasons, Valve continually allows EA to get away with not doing that.) The Denuvo infection, in and of itself, is probably a not-at-all-insignificant part of the reason why it runs like dogshit. It's also reason #1 as to why I have zero interest in buying it, even ignoring the fact that it's still a broken piece of shit otherwise, regardless.

I bought the first game in the series, Fallen Order, back in December, when it was on a 88%-off sale, i.e. for $4.79 USD, a while after they wisened up and removed the Denuvo malware from it (because if it had still been defiled by that shit, I wouldn't have bought it for even $0.479 USD, let alone $4.79). It runs okay on my 10-15 year old PC. It's pretty fun. Mind you, I never finished it, but still. If and only if they ever get this new game into a working, optimized, non-Denuvo-infested state will I even begin to consider maybe someday getting it possibly in perhaps three to five-plus years or so.

In any case, at this point in time, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is like a textbook example of everything that is wrong with the modern video game industry.

For once, at least, they were up front about it being infested with Denuvo, so that I can just go on ahead and ignore it already. Not that I would've gotten hyped about it even if they didn't disclose it beforehand, because at this point it's pretty much a given that the shit is going to be there, whether they admit it prior to release or not, based on just about everything else Atlus/Sega has released on Steam in recent years.

Also, it doesn't even include the P3FES "The Answer" epilogue chapter (which, to be marginally fair, wasn't in the original PSP version, either). It does have the female playable character though, so there's that, I guess? In any case, regardless of the version, I won't be buying it while it's contaminated with that shitty malware.

All of the Persona games, every one of them, would have been pretty much assured eventual purchases on Steam by me, if they weren't infected with that dumbfuckery, but because they (still) are/will be, then they can just fuck right off, as far as I'm concerned. Seriously, to hell with Atlus and/or Sega, at least on PC.