EA can scan your hard drive and flog contents to advertisers

[lost_soul]

Speaking of EA, I just spoke to someone there again today. I called in reference to getting one of my favorite old games (NFS high stakes) that has a disk check to work on a netbook. The guys talked to me for a wile and eventually transferred me to a tier 2 agent. This agent looked around and then told me that they don't have information pertaining to a patch or solution for this old game. The guys also checked to see if this game was available on the Origin store for me, but of course it is not.

 

So, once again the honest customer gets ****ed over. There was nothing on the package indicating that a disk was required to be in the drive to play.

Should I try and escalate this to a manager?

Edited September 19, 2011 by lost_soul

[AluminumHaste]

http://www.gameburnw...ndv4.42NoCD.zip

 

EDIT: Also:

 

Need for Speed High Stakes Minimum System Requirements

 

OS: Windows 95/98

Processor: Pentium @ 200 MHz

Memory: 32 Mb

Hard Drive: 50 Mb free

Video Memory: 2 Mb

Sound Card: DirectX Compatible

Keyboard

Mouse

DVD Rom Drive

 

Also I seriously doubt you are running win 95/98 on that netbook, so you don't meet the sys requirements. Also netbooks did not exist in 1999, this has nothing to do with the honest customer getting shafted and everything to do with you running software on systems it wasn't designed for.

Saying that however I feel for ya man, I love those old games and NFS Porsche Unleashed will not work for me

[lost_soul]

Obviously any product that ships on a CD requires a CD-ROM drive *at some point* to install. Nobody would debate that. However, I expect the things I buy to not be artificially sabotaged. E.g. Windows requires a CD Rom to install, but it will run with out one. So will Quake, Unreal, Half-Life, Doom, etc. I can install these games to a USB thumb drive and then play it on the thing with no problems.

 

The real problem is that I live in a corporate craphole where I could potentially be sued for using "unofficial" methods to get this game to work. This is the primary reason I don't buy games anymore.

 

I'm actually trying to install Windows 95 into a VM right now... but I'm having trouble. It keeps hanging and causing disk corruption, making scandisk necessary. (just like on real hardware!)

Edited September 19, 2011 by lost_soul

[AluminumHaste]

Quake only ran in shareware mode without the CD to use the full game required the CD in the drive until it was removed in a later patch or when it when open sourced I can't remember. I know this because 6 months ago I installed Quake1 from the original CD and it needed the CD in the drive to play.

[lost_soul]

Yep, and I have no problem with that as long as they officially remove it when they "dump" support for the old game. None of the id games require a disk in the drive to play with official patches. None of the 3D Realms games did either. Neither did any of the older great Epic games like Unreal/UT/UT2004 after official updates.

[AluminumHaste]

Well EA is a shitty company they don't care about stuff like that.

[lost_soul]

They actually did have netbook sized machines back then, but they were about eight times as expensive, and ran at about 400 MHz. I remember playing with one at a Fry's and wishing I could have it.

[AluminumHaste]

That would not run the game. Also the ones released at that time ran at a max of 266 Mhz with no DirectX support.

[lost_soul]

I had a buddy tell me today that he is not going to buy BF3 because of EA's recent decisions. It is ironic and amusing that these companies try and try to get more control, yet push customers away.

 

"The more you tighten your grip, the more systems slip through your fingers."

[Jesps]

It is ironic and amusing that these companies try and try to get more control, yet push customers away.

 

Yea, you'd think they would have learned something from the music industry's failed attempts to stop piracy by annoying honest customers.