PC Gaming Update - Metro 2033, Supreme Commander 2 Demo, and DRM - General Tech 2While a lot of attention has been given to Star Craft 2 in the past few days, the other “SC2” yearns for your love and affection too. Supreme Commander 2, is not far from release and Gas Powered Games has given us a demo to play with on Steam. The 1.6GB demo should give you a taste of what this game is all about. From what I’ve read so far, the game is an interesting extension of the genre and makes good logical improvements from the first Supreme Commander game. I’m excited to try the demo as I don’t know what to expect. Download it yourself on Steam and let us know what you think in our Gaming forum.

Metro 2033 is shaping up to be the FPS poster boy for PC shooters this year and the system requirements have just been released. The minimum is a 3GHz dual-core CPU, a DX10 GPU, and 2 GB of RAM. For the “optimal” configuration, you’re looking for a Core i7, a GTX 470/480, 8GB of RAM, and a fast / SSD drive. Move over Crysis, it sounds like the new question to ask in the coming days will be: “But can it run Metro 2033?“.

For those of you who haven’t been following this story, it’s a DX11 title with NVIDIA support. It follows a post-apocalyptic event and you play a survivor in Moscow living in the underground.

Finally this last topic is something I can rant endlessly about, and it’s Ubisoft’s boneheaded DRM scheme which requires a constant internet connection in order to play their games. Offline playing is not allowed, and if your connection drops suddenly, your game is stopped and you lose any saved data since the last save or checkpoint. It appears this kind of DRM makes games completely unplayable by service men and women in the military where government sponsored internet is expensive and controlled, or internet access is limited or unreliable.

According to a deployed solder in this Opposable Thumbs article: “I’ve had hit and miss success with some of the other download companies. Any kind of game that tries to call home, though, is generally more of a problem than it is worth. Especially ones that try to resolve your IP address with your version/purchase location.

Regardless whether you’re in the Service or playing at home, treating your users like criminals is not a very good business decision in my opinion and it just encourages and rewards pirating. Ironically, it’s the very thing DRM is trying to prevent. Other companies like Valve and StarDock have much more proactive and cooperative approaches which I think should be modeled by others.