2006 Games Poll (poll is up - see link)

[shovah]

im waiting on rise of legends too and of course for dom III

[B0rsuk]

WARNING:
Heroes5 will be protected by Starforce. The mechanism is infamous for disabling your software, installing itself without your knowledge, staying on your computer even when you uninstall the game, REinstalling itself after removal (there's no official removal tool, mind you), breaking your hardware, causing crashes and performance hit. It's effectively a trojan.
Also keep in mind that while Starforce may not damage your computer, it may make work easier for other viruses. Just like there are viruses that cause no harm by itself, but attack your body's defence systems and let other bacteria/viruses in. Oh, and did I mention it's windows-only , so if you have dual boot system and buy Starforced game, you vote with your money against multiplatform support for games ?

Criticism by Tom's Hardware:
http://www.tgdaily.com/2005/10/01/th...tes/index.html

List of games using Starforce:
http://www.similarities.org/starforce.html

Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starforce

[Agrajag]

B0rsuk said:
WARNING:
Heroes5 will be protected by Starforce. The mechanism is infamous for disabling your software, installing itself without your knowledge, staying on your computer even when you uninstall the game, REinstalling itself after removal (there's no official removal tool, mind you), breaking your hardware, causing crashes and performance hit. It's effectively a trojan.

Well...
The only known issues in the latest version of Starforce are disabling Alcohol 120% and the Nero burning tools.
I've heard about disabling certaing CD-Burners, but I'm not sure with which version that is.
As far as Reinstalling - that only happens if you try to run the program it came with after you uninstalled the Starforce drivers.
Also, there is on official removal tool on their website.
And as far as being installed without your knowledge, being a trojan and causing performance hits... The rest of the copy protections do that as well.

Also keep in mind that while Starforce may not damage your computer, it may make work easier for other viruses. Just like there are viruses that cause no harm by itself, but attack your body's defence systems and let other bacteria/viruses in.

Yep, like I said, this vulenrability applies to other copy protection methods.

Oh, and did I mention it's windows-only , so if you have dual boot system and buy Starforced game, you vote with your money against multiplatform support for games ?

Yeah, that's true.

I'm not trying to say that Starforce is good, it isn't.
I'm just trying to show the (true) arguements of the opposite side.

And by the way, I played several (well, two) games that came with Starforce, and neither adversly affected my computer in any way.

[isodea]

I bought one game with Starforce (silent hunter 3) I was not able to play for almost a week after I purchased it because the activation code they gave me was wrong. Finally tech support got back with me and gave me a working code. During that time I was wondering, "Is it my DVD drive? Is it a compatability issue? Should I buy a new drive? Should I take the game back and demand a refund even though technically they don't offer cash refunds on opened software?"

Now that it's over, the hassle wasen't worth it. I should have attempted to take the game back. Starforce, nevermore.

[Graeme Dice]

B0rsuk said:
Oh, and did I mention it's windows-only , so if you have dual boot system and buy Starforced game, you vote with your money against multiplatform support for games ?

This is ridiculous. Most games are Windows only because Windows, unlike the *nix world, has actual support for the hardware needed to play games. You aren't voting against multiplatform support, since no major manufacturer cares about a market that will always be only a fraction of the size of the already small Macintosh market.