I'll admit, I've been guilty of this myself sometimes

The Failure of Videogame Companies to Understand Piracy - An Ubisoft Case Study

Internet piracy is rampant for many forms of electronic media, including movies, music, and videogames. One common method for companies to try and prevent piracy is to put something called Digital Rights Management, or DRM, on their products. As time went on, pirates continued to get more resourceful at getting around DRM restrictions - in the context of videogames, this is often referred to as "cracking" a game. As pirates got better at cracking, videogame companies developed more and more complex systems to keep them out. An important point to keep in mind is that the pirates have always won. To date DRM has never fully prevented the cracking of a game, just delayed it (caveat lector though, I haven't researched this in depth). This brings us to today's topic - Ubisoft's DRM system in Assassin's Creed 2 (or AC2), a recent port of a popular Xbox 360/Playstation 3 game to the PC.

Steam for Mac?

Steam is a content delivery system made by the videogame company Valve. Valve has been responsible for some of the most popular PC games in recent memory: the Half-Life series, Portal, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead. Up until now, their primary method for distributing the games, as well as the games themselves, has been Windows only. However, Valve has as good as confirmed recently that they will be bringing Steam and their games to the Mac with a series of 6 images featuring Valve characters in parodies of Mac advertisements. They released one image each to a number of online news outlets, along with a subtle suggestion that there were other images to be found. Not only is it a cool ad campaign, but it draws in iconic Mac advertisements from throughout Apple's lifetime - very cool, Valve! The announcement will probably coincide with the Game Developer's Conference next week, a traditional time for companies to break big news. Personally, I can't wait. The last piece of the current (incredibly good) Half-Life story arc is due to come out sometime soonish hopefully; Valve hasn't been very clear. I'd love to be able to play it natively on my computer, so fingers crossed!

If you only play one video game in your life...

Make it Braid.

What is Braid? If I wanted to be Wikipedia, I'd call it something like a 2D platforming/puzzle game with some time manipulation elements, but that doesn't really tell you much, does it? Braid is much greater than the sum of its parts, much like another wildly popular recent game: Portal. WARNING: Spoilers within for Portal.