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BioShock Movie To Be Made By Universal
azuredrake writes "Gamasutra reports that Universal Pictures has just announced a completion of licensing negotiations to bring the game BioShock to the silver screen. For those unfamiliar with the property, it was the much-lauded Game of the Year contender, praised for its storyline which emerged through gameplay, not just cutscenes. The director for the project is to be Gore Verbinski, who proved himself on the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, and the current writer for the screenplay is John Logan, who is recently known for the also-creepy Sweeny Todd."
It gets even worse. He directed that last movie, but not the first two.
I just refused to buy it (and Mass Effect and Trackmania).
I would really have liked to play Mass Effect on the PC, the 360 version has too many loading issues due to constantly streaming of the DVD (it was clearly not really a finished game, even though the content is all there and very high quality) I assume that presumably wouldn't be a problem on a powerful desktop PC so I was looking forward to it until I heard it had the crappy copy protection scheme.
A representative of the guys behind Trackmania (which I would really like to play...) has been really cocky about it too, he thinks its not impacting sales and only pirates. Of course he's wrong, and of course I'm sure you can still get downloads of it anyway (as is always the case...). Nice work there, chump. It's on Steam now, but I'm still not buying it because he was such an asshole I don't want to give them any business.
It's not simply that I have a principled objection, I installed X3 and it's Starforce copy protection totally hosed my system. It was crash all over the place after installing, even when playing games other, and some times while just at the desktop. I had to look in the event logs, the device manager and search Google then put all that together to see why (from what I gathered, it installs a device driver / virtual disc controller to the OS, and one that's very poorly written at that, which not only slows down you system, but also causes it to crash, often frequently.)
After running the Starforce uninstaller (found online) my system was immediately fine again. Of course I had to do that as uninstalling X3 - which had installed it - didn't take off the crap it had put on. I never did play the game for more than a few minutes, I sure as hell wasn't about to install it again.
As a result of this sort of crap, I pretty much only buy PC games on Steam these days. I know it works, and when it comes to reinstall Windows know the games will just re-download fine.
I know I won't have to hunt around looking for a serial number, which is on the manual, when it says it should be on the box, or is on some inlay card or sticker that's got lost. and then I have to hunt around for a crack, but then the crack only works with an unpatched release of 1.0 of the software, which is no use because version 1.0 is a pile of crap and without patching to a new version it can't be completed because of some bug in the gameplay on level 4 (etc, etc).
Ironically, it's primarily the PUBLISHERS who have forced all this crap on to go games (not developers). I've even emailed a few developers (politely) to let them know what I think of their copy protection and a more than one has responded sympathetically saying it's a request of the publisher, or the original licenser (in the case of ports). I say ironically as it's the existing publishers who will lose out with (legal) online downloads, because they will get cut out all together.
(Sorry that this is off topic, but Bio Shock was so well know for it's POS copy protection, seems hard to discuss it without mentioning it).