So I got my girlfriend Grand Theft Auto IV for Christmas (well… among other things), and we finally got around to installing it last night.
What a pain in the behind! It wouldn’t activate online, so we had to go online (spare me… I realize how redundant that sounds), and use their CD key challenge and response system.
Fine, that’s not too bad, I’ve seen worse.
It then asked me to install “Social Club”. Definitely a raised eyebrow from me there, but the gf dutifully presses “yes” and “I agree”. We decide to spare the extra time and skip the Social Club registration.
The game takes forever and a day to install (but that’s to be expected… 15 GB and all…)
It was around this point I realized that SecuROM had made its way onto her computer. Cold feet, I hadn’t had much experience with it, but I had heard enough stories about SecuROM going wrong on legit customers to be wary.
The installation’s finished, we double click the icon…
“Disk not in drive”.
:dubious:
We replace the install disk with the play disk.
“Wrong disk in drive, please insert the original Grand Theft Auto IV disk into Drive D:”
Now would be a good time to mention that my gf has two CD/DVD ROM drives on her computer. SecuROM doesn’t like that, because it means the customer in question has the capability to be a pirate.
Worst case of “guilty until proven innocent”, hm?
Girlfriend’s swearing intensifies.
We swap CDs around willy-nilly until it starts working, for some reason. I still don’t know why.
Social Club opens and asks for us to log in. We skip this screen (after all, we didn’t register, right?), and press “PLAY”.
No dice, the game needs to update. Fair enough, we download the patch, install, and try again.
No dice, apparently, we need Games for Windows installed to play. Girl friend begins to whine because she wants to play. We are an hour into installation.
Games for Windows is installed, we don’t know what it does.
No dice, the game wants us to register for social club.
We click the link, expecting us to hand over credit card information, when the game decides to work. I can (sort of) understand when games REFUSE to work because of some security concern, but when there’s a security issue, and the game DOES work? Very shoddy coding.
Alright, so the game works…
Turns out the graphics card is much too slow. Girlfriend has a laugh over how laggy the controls for driving the cars.
We exit and uninstall the game. Girlfriend becomes frustrated and plays Scribblenauts (another xmas present - no headaches there!) instead.
I uninstall the game, hatred seething from my very pores. Thankfully, the game uninstalls without issue.
SecuROM remains. On googling, I find out that SecuROM has a removal tool. I download it, and run it, and restart.
I find now that my second dvd-drive no longer opens. After all, I need the install disk back, so I can burn this motherfucker into a piece of molten plastic.
Google-fu comes to my rescue, and I end up having to run SecuBeGone and CCCleaner to restore functionality to my downed drive.
I don’t know how any normal person could have dealt with this. I only knew what to do because I knew what to google, and what was happenning (since I was reading up on SecuROM while the game took a day and a half to install).
SecuROM, fuck you… in the urethra. Your worthless code deserves to be decompiled in front of your eyes into zeros. Many many zeroes. Your “social club” program is a useless ad-delivery system that pretends to be like Steam. Your insistence on having to register online for a single player game makes me sick. Fuck you.
Say, who wants GTA IV for the PC?