"You can buy this. Only if you prove you bought it EVERY TIME YOU PLAY."
Everybody loves DRM, right? It makes the gaming world a Happy, Safe Place, free from those Horrid Dirty Pirates who do nothing but steal games and probably eat children. For fun. Not nutrition. Also, terrorism is probably involved somewhere. And I bet it was Horrid Dirty Pirates who knocked the wing mirror off my car that one time. Scum. The lot of ‘em.
Capcom, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that they would like to protect their latest PSN release, Bionic Commando Rearmed 2, from such a terrible fate. As such, they have resorted to Ubisoft-esque DRM measures to ensure that people playing the game have a legitimate copy.
Specifically, the game requires the player to be signed in to PSN before booting it up. If you don’t have an Internet connection at the time you want to play, you’re out of luck. Fortunately, though, it seems that the Internet connection is only required to start the game, not constantly be active during play. This alone makes it better than Ubi’s efforts on the PC, which kick you out of the game completely if your connection gets dropped—even if you’re playing single-player.
This system is the same as was used in Final Fight Double Impact, so those who owned that game will be familiar with it. Bionic Commando Rearmed 2, however, doesn’t include online co-op or a persistent online mode, so requiring an Internet connection to start it seems somewhat unnecessary.
Arguably, since the PS3′s recent “jailbreaking”, measures like this are going to become more and more common. Publishers need to be seen to be taking steps to protect their properties from illegal copying and hacking. Unfortunately, DRM systems are seen as the easiest, most efficient way to do that—for publishers, anyway.
Put it this way, though: at least we’re no longer required to do the early 90s thing of “please open your provided badly-written novella, turn to page 32, paragraph 4, line 6 and type the 10th word.”
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