Last night I downloaded the trial/demo for F.E.A.R. It is a first person shooter that has been out a while. While I was playing the game for the first time, in the dark, in a quiet house, I scared the everlivin’ crap out of myself. This game is spooky and it totally got me a couple of times.

We were out today getting lunch and doing some general shopping. I ran to Best Buy and left the fam in the car while I ducked in to buy the game. I was going to get the DVD version, but all they had was the CD version. No big deal. I buy the game and use my 12% off coupon that Becky found in the mail.

We get home and after playing with the kids a bit and installing all the stuff we bought at Home Depot I decided to start the install of the game. I was not planning on playing it until the kids went to bed, but I did not want to spend my precious no-kid-time waiting for the 5 CD install to finish.

Well, probably because of some stupid copy protection Disk 2 has a read error of a very strange type. I looked online and sure enough there are about a gabillizion people with the exact same problem on the exact same file. So tomorrow I will try and exchange of the media. I already sent a problem report to the game company. *sigh*

If I downloaded a cracked version on a bitttorrent network I bet it would work fine…. The whole “treat everyone like a criminal” mentality that has infected all of the entertainment industry is pissing me off. I don’t download movies from the net. In fact I have a bunch of cheap DVD’s I bought at Sam’s Club yesterday sitting in the next room. Does anyone else (that is not downloading movies) get a little offended that there is a “pirating is stealing commercial” at the front of most DVD’s? And you cannot skip over them (well, unless you hack your DVD player). Between coding anti-piracy crap on the DVD’s so you cannot skip it, and making many games refuse to run if you have CD burning software or virtual drive software loaded is nothing short of calling me a criminal right after I have given them money. I bet none of the people who download movies on the net have to watch that anti-pirate commercial. Simple rule of selling to the consumer: If you degrade the customer experience and there is an alternative, then you will lose.