Screw you, EA

Earlier, my co-blogger suggested giving EA games a miss, because of the annoying nonsense with DRM and EA Online. I'm now going to make a firm commitment: I'm no longer buying EA games. If they come out with something fantastic that I absolutely have to have, I'll buy it used, but until that, I'll be boycotting them.

Why? Because this stupid DRM nonsense has gone too far. We recently got a new XBox, and transferred all our stuff over from the old one. It was remarkably easy: take a normal USB "stick", let the XBox format it and use it to move profiles and save games. All the Arcade games and downloadable content you can easily re-download, because anything you've bought from XBox Live you can download again any time you want.

Except, that is, if you bought it from EA.

What we found was that first of all, we were unable to redownload the Dragon Age: Origins DLCs via the game itself. Having then moved them over from the old console, what we now found was that only the person who actually downloaded them can play them. The rest of us get told by the game that the extra content is "corrupt", and we can only access it through an idiotic workaround. All other DLC for other games works just fine. Thanks, EA.

Why on earth can't they just use the XBox Live system for managing downloadable content and user accounts? Why do they persist with this nonsense of separate EA accounts and their own DRM systems? It's damned annoying. In multiplayer games like Army of Two, online multiplayer is only accessible if you have an EA account. Why? What the hell is wrong with my XBox Live gold account? Why do I have to jump through additional hoops? And why can't they use the XBox DRM for downloadable content, which can handle moving from one console to another just fine?

Further, EA and Bioware have known about this problem for as long as it's existed, and haven't bothered to fix it. Also, one of the patches for Dragon Age broke a couple of achievements, which they also know but haven't fixed. Nice after-market support, guys.

This may seem like a small thing, but frankly, it pisses me off. As long as they persist with this stupidity, I'm not buying their games.

Traci Lords kicks ass

I understood from Traci Lords's Twitter that she's going to be releasing some music again this summer. You know Traci Lords, the famous underage porn star, who used to be really hot:

Heck, for all I know she's still really hot. I don't keep up. I recommend her autobiography, Underneath It All; it's a fascinating, if at times slightly grim read.

If she does release some music this summer, it won't be her first foray into the music business. Back in 1995, she released an album called 1000 Fires:

The album was produced by Juno Reactor, and it's through them that I can make the perhaps unexpected connection between Traci Lords and Laibach. On their 1997 album Bible of Dreams, Juno Reactor published a song called God Is God, which I can't embed here because YouTube is stupid. I have to admit that I'm more familiar with this version of the song:

So there. Didn't expect that. Perhaps an even stranger connection is that the female vocals on the Juno Reactor original are supplied by Natacha Atlas, and one of her songs is on the soundtrack to Project Gotham Racing 4 on the XBox, a game that I play like alot.

The first single from 1000 Fires was Control, which some of you may remember from Paul W. S. Anderson's movie Mortal Kombat. It's an awesome song with a great music video.

Lady Gaga? Fuck Lady Gaga.

Game review: Harms Way

Here's an XBox Live Arcade game that everyone needs to get. If only because it's totally free.

Harms Way is a really sweet little Live Arcade game where you play as either a shooter or a driver. There are four teams, one shooter and one driver each. The drivers race their cars around a circuit with the first one to complete three laps winning; the shooters jump from turret to turret and shoot them, with the one destroying the most cars winning. The winning shooter and winning driver get the most points, and the team with the most combined points wins.

The single player or split-screen co-op is fun enough, but when you take it online, it gets really sweet. We've spent a good part of the past week in Harms Way's online multiplayer...

Seriously, you can download the full game for free. Do that. It kicks ass.