15 minute trial, £16 near enough to buy and its GridWars in fancy pants with the balance slightly off.

I really hope they paid Mark up front for this, because I wouldn't want to be the one trying to sell it.

I bought it.. and it's a fun game to play.. But I _REALLY_ hate this trend towards DRMed distributions. This game is worth $20 if you can own it.. It's worth $5 if it's locked to your windows installation... In my mind thats not ownership- That's a rental until Windows crashes again. :)

I am so bored with these kinds of shoot 'em ups, not just the gameplay but these dull, characterless graphics. I sure wouldn't pay money for this. I'm all for using Dual Analogue joypads in games but I wish it occured more often in games that weren't abstracty shooter types that all look near identical...

"I bought it.. and it's a fun game to play.. But I _REALLY_ hate this trend towards DRMed distributions. This game is worth $20 if you can own it.. It's worth $5 if it's locked to your windows installation..."

Aren't Aza etc... an advergaming company? Immediately gets filed under scummers from me, that ;)

Don't get me wrong btw, it is fun...but its far too similar to GridWars and far too similar to gh0d knows how many freeware games out there now for me to even think about coughing up for it.

There's no way in my books that the upgrade is £15 worth of upgrade!

And 15 minute trial? Cooooome oooon, thats taking the mick.

As I say, I hope Mark got some cash up front because he's a talented guy and this, sadly, smells of cash in from a company who see's this as a way to get some inroads somewhere into a market they don't have.

It really is a re-skinning of his existing engine with polarity added. I don't mind that so much... but the 15 minutes really bugged me. Far too short, won't buy it.

Bill

I spent about 10 minutes trying to get it to read the right stick on my dual analog correctly.. (it was reversing one of the axis for some reason, and I'm just not brilliant enough to figure out how to rebind/calibrate it, it worked perfectly with GW)Well, by the time I gave up futzing with it and used the mouse/keyboard, I had what, 5 minutes to play.. Where's my 1680x1050 option? Not feeling the love with this one, sadly, and that activeMark protection stuff, that is vile. I'm sorry, I'll pass.

Fu*k DRM! That's very disrespectful towards the customer. I hope somebody rips it and puts it up on torrent. Too bad 'cause it seems to be really nice.

I'm passing because of the drm but that's awfully lame to say you hope it's going to be warezed.

"Don't get me wrong btw, it is fun...but its far too similar to GridWars and far too similar to gh0d knows how many freeware games out there now for me to even think about coughing up for it."

Yeah, infact it's quite lame the game. I've managed to make my Xbox 360 pad work in 1 minute so I had 'plenty' of time to test it but I uninstalled it 7 minutes later. Just not funny and no way I'm going to fork 23€ for it.

Plus is lacks a unch of options like changing resolution, XInput vibration (to make the X360 pad rumble), and good graphics... these are dull and boring comparing to Grid Wars.

As for someone warezing this game, I don't think so, activeMARK is a rock solid DRM and can't be cracked easily (or at all) and no hacker is going to bother about this dull game.

It might be lame to write that it should get warezed but it's basically the truth. In fact what Mark Incitti is pulling off here is probably the lamest thing I ever witnessed among such small independent productions. Not only is $20 way too much for this he also annoys potential customers by offering a lameass timelimited demo. The DRM just tops it.

I gather this was "contract work" though, so whilst easy to lay the blame at Marks door I'm more inclined to believe its Aza responsible for both the time limit and the ActiveMARK stuff and Mark wouldn't have a say in any of that.

Course, why *anyone* feels the need to implement Macrovision on an Indie (read:any) title is beyond me. I'm sure Introversion have just proved the best way to beat the warez game is to *play* the warez game.

DRM is a waste of time and effort. Whilst ActiveMARK may be more difficult to break, its like sticking a huge sign on a game that might have otherwise passed under the warez radar saying "CRACK ME".

Foolish in the extreme.

@oddbob:
Don't count on it, activeMARK is known for being hard as nails or even worse and AFAIK there's no way to crack it, at least no way that last more than a few days. It's in the lines of DeepFreeze for example, without complete physical access to the machine you just can't beat it, no way around it.

But yeah, DRM on a Indie game is silly, it's not like it will be warezed by every other leecher at [YourFavTorrentTracker].com or something.

It may be known as hard as nails, but its been broken before and will be broken again continually.

The more the DRM manufacturers change, the more the tools change and evolve.

What something like Polarity+ does in adding ActiveMARK is give the crackers an easy target to work with, rather than having to sift through a DVD's worth of files or whatever, they have a small 10/15 meg executable to analyse.

Offering it on a plate, basically.

Anyway, this is all getting far too Slashdot ;) I propose if we want to carry this on we nip off to the forum and leave this for Polarity comments :D

So it's GridWars2 with a timelimit and a silly pricetag? Pass.

Mark here...

This was a few weeks long contract job. I was given a design and did my best to work within the limits of what they wanted.

I also didn't know about the protection or the time limit. Sorry about that.