Monday, July 24, 2006

UBISOFT Rainbox Six Lockdown truly sucks, and so does reinstalling Windows

The game is probably not all that bad, but the experience truly sucks. First, the game takes five CD's which load ever so slowly. Second, it installed some copy protection software called StarForce.

Seems ok so far, right?

Well, I bought three copies of the game since it was listed as a good co-op multiplayer game. This game crippled one of the machines. The CD-ROM drives no longer work - they sit there forever and just wait and wait - Diablo II reports a timeout error now. All games that require CD's now fail.

I ended up having to reinstall the operating system to see if it was a hardware issue.

Of course, once I got XP installed, I needed to install the ATI video drivers. The ATI drivers require DirectX 9. DirectX 9 requires a network connection to Microsoft. The network connection requires the NVIDIA platform drivers. Oy! Why should it be this hard to reinstall drivers?

So now the CD-ROM drives work fine. UbiSoft truly goes into my shit list for producing what appears to be a decent game that cannot be played without breaking my computer. I'll never again be buying anything from UBISOFT or anything with StarForce. Thanks for crippling my computer guys. Nothing I like better than to spending an evening reinstalling the OS and software programs.