misleading advertising
Seth sent us this screengrab of an ad he found on
Fark in which
Electronic Arts is offering games for less than $20. Problem is, none of the games pictured — The Sims 3, Need for Speed Shift and FIFA 10, hot, recently-released games all — can be had for any cheaper than $40 at the
EA Store or any other retail venue other than the back of some guy's van.
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video game baby fighting
If you took some college lit you're probably familiar with the
Divine Comedy, or at least its Cliff's Notes. So you'll remember well that the author/narrator Dante was a musclebound regeaholic who slaughtered demons with his trusty, powered-up scythe, and it's only natural that the upcoming Electronic Arts video game — set for release in 2010 — would tell it like it was.
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above and beyond
Mike had an increasingly rare experience with
EA Games tech support: the customer service representative listened, empathized, and made an exception to the rules in order to please a customer.
spore
Earlier today, about 2200 reviews of the game Spore disappeared from the product page on Amazon.com, almost all of them negative. Did Amazon censor the reviews because of their
anti-DRM nature? Amazon says no, that it was a technical glitch, and they restored the reviews by the end of today. An Amazon spokesperson
told Ars Technica, "Amazon doesn't censor or edit customer reviews based [on their content] and we'd only remove a review if it fell outside our guidelines." Spore's rating is back to a single star, and it's #5 on Amazon's video games chart.
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backlash
Spore, the long awaited new game from SimCity creator Will Wright, has been
critically well-received, so what's up with its Amazon.com score? As of this posting, the game, despite being #1 on Amazon, has 1,494 one star ratings from gamers who are upset about the game's DRM. Here are some excerpts from the angry reviews:
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mass effect DRM
Reader jk writes in to let us know that EA's sci-fi epic
Mass Effect is
still having DRM issues on the PC platform. This time, instead of requiring gamers to maintain an internet connection and activate their game every few weeks, paying customers (allegedly) get three "activations" of the game and that's it. Uninstalling the game doesn't "give back" an activation.
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backlash
If you'd like to play the PC version of Bioware/EA's hit XBOX 360 title "
Mass Effect," you'd better have an internet connection. Why? Because in order to remain "activated" the game will need to reauthorize itself via the internet every 10 days. Go 11 days without checking in and your game won't work until you do. Some gamers are saying that this requirement makes them feel like criminals, and doesn't make a lot of sense for a game that otherwise doesn't require an internet connection.
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readers
Seriously what is up with people putting porn in boxes and returning them to the store? A 14 year-old kid in Utah bought Madden '07, opened it up and found porn. EA has apologized and both they and
Circuit City are looking into how porn got into the Madden game.
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Consumerist
marketing gimmicks
free video game
