See Colon Slash: Go Suck a Bag of Discs

Welcome to ‘See Colon Slash’, my weekly column on Negative Gamer. As you might have guessed by the title, the series will be about looking at bleeding rectums. Oh, actually, I got that wrong. It’s actually about PC gaming. If you don’t get the clever pun in the title, perhaps you’re a Linux or Mac user. In your case, the title of the column should be mentally shortened to simply “Slash”.

I’ve been trying to stop myself talking about DRM (Digital Rights Management), as it’s a much-discussed subject. However, I’ve had enough of one sort of DRM, and I’m going to let everyone know about it. The particular thing that has pissed me off this time is having to have the disc in the drive to play the game. It’s an archaic thing to have to suffer these days. I can see no point in it whatsoever any more.

I have a five hundred gigabyte hard drive. It can store many full-size games. In fact, it does. All of my Steam games, for example. There is no reason why I should have to play Crysis or Fallout 3 with the disc inserted, especially as literally the whole game is on the drive anyway. All the disc does is confirm to the game that there’s a disc there. After that it just sits in the drive doing nothing at best, and at worse randomly spinning up, using up hardware resources. It’s just not worth it.

The fact is, the protection this offers is useless. Cracks are in abundance for any game you can think of- usually a crack will appear within 24 hours of the game’s release. I wont shy away from the fact that after buying Fallout 3, Crysis, and Red Alert 3 I downloaded cracks for them. I game on my laptop, and I do not want to be carrying discs around with me all the time in case I feel like a quick game. It’s a preposterous thing to ask. Anyone who says the disc authentication stops piracy is incredibly out of the loop.

Aside from not wanting to carry discs about with me, having to put the disc in the drive is a chore. I guess it’s only what console gamers have to go though but often I will decide against playing a game when I remember that the disc is at the bottom of a pile of PC games that don’t require this stupid authentication. Thus, the game stays at the bottom of the pile, and never gets played. Call it laziness, but it’s a legitimate problem. At least my console games get used enough to warrant a box and not a stack.

I’m all for physical possessions, but let me put it away once it’s installed. Plenty of games let me do this. There is no reason for this any more, and any game in the future that makes me have the disc in at all times will suffer my wrath. That’s right, I’ll resort to not really playing it all that often and generally being apathetic towards it. That’ll show them.