Messages

1

General / Re: Aquaria hit the P2P

« on: December 16, 2007, 07:58:32 am »

Phoning home = bad.

Many smarter network owners monitor the traffic leaving their network.  If they see a mystery signal and they can't immediately read what it's saying, it means it could effectively be transmitting anything about you, even stuff you don't want it to send.

This leaves to very bad press.

Remember the stink about some Windows Updates sending more then just your distro info to Microsoft?

Again, it just makes the pirated version "safer" then the real one:  the true problem with DRM as a model(again, I don't consider simple reg keys as DRM).

2

General / Re: Sue Michael Bay Campaign!

« on: December 16, 2007, 07:52:27 am »

Gov't:  Mr Bay, that isn't a movie.  It's just a series of special effects.

Bay:  What do you mean?

3

General / Re: Aquaria hit the P2P

« on: December 15, 2007, 12:41:01 am »

rinku:

Registration codes are not that bad.  And I hardly object to their use.  this is mainly because they do not inconvenience the actual buyer any more then the pirated copy does and does assist in tracking purchases and the like.

Heck, even older games had clever ways of doing the reg code thing   Remember Wing Commander asking you when the USO show was going to be shown on the deck of the Cat's Claw carrier ship (you had to read the included 'newsletter' to find out).

That which I'm against is anything above that measure such as installing secret extra bits or bloating your registry or limiting how many installs you're allowed to do after you purchase the game for full retail price.  That is silly and counterproductive.

4

General / Re: Questions about full version & improvements + disappointment

« on: December 14, 2007, 03:19:05 pm »

Too bad it didn't meet your expectations

Call me violent but I didn't mind the shooting bits(I love the cackle Naija does when in energy form and shoots lots).

If I may make a suggestion, however, is the easy modding engine could allow you to make a peacefuller(that word?  oddly Firefox spellcheck likes it) version of the game or a side story or something.

5

General / Re: Aquaria hit the P2P

« on: December 14, 2007, 03:15:19 pm »

I'm curious as to how effective the SecureRom nonsense truly is on the bottom line.

Yes, lots of games are bought immediately.  But lots aren't either.  Let's think Bioshock:

Lots of people bought it on release.  That was a given.  There is a given amount of sales that can be counted on based on hype and loyalty alone.  That will not change.  AND, that demographic is not likely to pirate the game, at least in the long term.

Now, think of the fellow who doesn't have the video card for it yet or saving up for it.  Maybe he can't afford the game just yet.  By the time he wants to buy it, he hears all  this bad press about limited installs and such.  But his buddy tells him he has a pirated version of it that works nonetheless, no install worries at all!(yes, this is two weeks later, but this fellow couldn't afford it on release anyway...or maybe he's in Canada or, even worse, the UK where he only gets it after a suitable decade has passed).

"Wow!" he exclaims and wonders why he would shell out 80$ (remember, Canada) for something that can break his computer when he can get, for free, a fully functional copy.

For the short term, it looks great.  In the long term:  you probably lose lots of money.

Problem is, most of the bigwigs only care about the short term initial oomph of sales.

Now, also factor in the enormous cost to implement these systems and in the long term:  you're looking at massive suckage.

You also lose credibility.  Ubi got lots of bad press with Starforce and some games, such as Oblivion, got so much bad press they took it out of the final release.

DRM is a bad business model.  Problem is, spreadsheets, which is all the money monkeys in the accounting and marketing depts understand, have a hard time revealing this.

6

General / Re: Disc version/Future Retail plans

« on: December 13, 2007, 04:54:17 pm »

A "Gallery of sweet homemade cases"  forum thread in in order:)

7

Support / Re: for those of you with laptops using ati who can't get updated drivers

« on: December 13, 2007, 04:50:01 pm »

That is very cool.  I'm often called upon to fix or tweak people's 'puters and many of them have Dell.  This is a wicked find, Barret:)

8

General / Re: Aquaria hit the P2P

« on: December 12, 2007, 03:31:04 pm »

Let's look at it this way.

Big company like Sorny or EAikes spends 15 million dollars to make something that hooks into your registry, dials home, disables your burners ability to burn, bogs down Windows, installs 3 services, 'rootkits' five other executables, phones elderly people maliciously and kills your dog:  all in the interest of stopping you from pirating the game.

History has shown this to work for maybe 3 days after release(3 days before release if the release itself was 0-day), which is why DRM models are flawed in the first place.

Small indy group, two people and a voice actress.  No 15 million dollar budget.  Not likely to stop the cracking.

So really, all you can really do is factor it as inevitable, write it off(though not necessarily like it) and hope more people wish to buy it for the peace-of-mind/support they'll get from buying it and hope those who didn't pirate it keep buying it.

9

General / Re: 1280x800 resolution?

« on: December 11, 2007, 03:55:34 pm »

As far as I know, you can't.   No widescreen support yet.   If you have a WS monitor, windowed is probably your best bet for now.

I think Alec had stated on another thread that he was working on patching it to at least black bar the sides for now.

10

General / Re: Aquaria needs to be on XBLA!

« on: December 11, 2007, 02:56:00 am »

Sadly, one has to understand that for everything out there that hits the net, some of it will leak through to the underbelly.  Well, I paid for mine and don't regret it one bit:)  Told a few friends about it and hopefully they will too.

And here's to hoping that at least some of the people who download the naughty version will like it so much they'll pay for it to out of principal.

11

General / Re: Disc version/Future Retail plans

« on: December 10, 2007, 03:35:52 pm »

Oooh, just thought of a probably impractical idea(I'm full of those):

Clear Enamel rippled semi-see-thru case with Aquaria logo in it's normal greeny color and whirly font on the top.

Would be damned expensive to do....but would it ever be pretty (I might do one up myself just cuz  )

12

General / Re: Has anyone gotten a Wii remote to work with Aquaria? (GlovePIE)

« on: December 10, 2007, 03:32:57 pm »

I was so gonna try this.  I just haven't had time.  Probably will try on teh weekend, and'll let you know the results:)

13

General / Re: Aquaria Demo - Linux & Wine (good news!)

« on: December 10, 2007, 02:19:13 am »

Wicked awesome screeny:)

14

General / Re: Aquaria Demo - Linux & Wine (good news!)

« on: December 09, 2007, 05:26:08 pm »

I tried a few things myself on my un-accelerated box(see if I could get past activation).  I tried the unicode url format%c3%a9 , the escape character \

15

General / Re: Aquaria Demo - Linux & Wine (good news!)

« on: December 09, 2007, 02:10:08 pm »

Bah, c'est la vie, I guess

I really should have known better then to put the