Just as you were getting over the hurt – just when you said to yourself, “O.K. Ubisoft used and abused me, but hey, she’s French so you have got to expect that right?”… 

It happens all again.

Here is an excerpt from an article over at Kokatu.com.

In a post over on Command & Conquer 4′s forums, EA community manager Apoc writes “First thing to be clear about, Command & Conquer 4 has NO DRM. Zip, zero, zilch, none.”

Sounds great! Until, a few lines later, he says this. “To play Command & Conquer 4, the computer needs to be connected to the internet.”

Uh. Apoc. If the publisher is imposing limitations on when and how a game can be played, it’s DRM. While it’s unclear how often you’d need to be connected – whether it’s just at startup, or whether it requires a constant connection – what is clear is you’d still need a connection at some stage. So laptop gaming is out. As is playing when your internet connection is down. – Plunkett, Kokatu.com

Maybe all this only means you need to be connected at startup, but it appears not. Most of the sources we see are saying otherwise.

In fact we discussed this very issue on show 56 (nearly through the lengthy editing process).   Maybe we should have expected the gaming equivalent of Robin Williams early years out of Ubisoft (always need to be on).  Maybe we should have said to ourselves what does a French company care about American soldiers in isolated areas of the world who can’t play some silly game, let alone American gamers. After all, those soldiers aren’t protecting French freedom right? Yes friends just as I was getting used to the pain, it seems that I am going to have to go out and buy what grandma used to call “an inflatable donut”.  You must have seen them – those inflatable round rings that you can sit in because yet another gaming company decided to shove one up our collective posteriors? Perhaps that’s not what they are used for but personally we expect a run on them down at the local Wallmart now that Command and Conquer 4 is on the shelves.  Originally my thought was that EA was going to ship a free inflatable donut with each copy of the game.

Now that we think about it however…

They did so well with Spore that the best course of action would be to simply ship the game with the code to crack the “always connected” DRM, after all, it’s probably already out there.

The No Prisoners, No Mercy Team