My Short Colin McRae: DiRT Review

[Gez]

Do really get a great feel and control on this game, get yourself a wired XBOX360 pad as their USB they plug straight into the PC and microsoft have even released a driver update for it to work, i thought id give it a try as i wasnt that happy with the keyboard controls and WOW!!!! its soo much nicer and better to use the Xbox360 Pad. Also can someone explain to me what starforce is and why so many people are against it? [help]

[Neeyik]

Also can someone explain to me what starforce is and why so many people are against it? [help]

http://www.star-force.com/ and http://www.star-force.com/protection.phtml?c=419
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarForce
http://www.glop.org/starforce/

[Mikael]

This is why a 360 is a good investment--for those games that either run crappy or have SF, you can play without worry. Not to mention the exclusives not on the PC...I was surprised the Darkness was not on PC, and that's another great game you guys are missing out on. I didn't try the PC demo, but it runs and looks great on the 360.

The 360 version has been critisized for running pretty slow in places. The fact that many 360 games seem to run so-so (even 30fps games are hardly pinned at 30fps), is one of the reasons I sold mine. On the PC, I can atleast turn off a few details to make it run fine all of the time.

[ajbarnes]

Great mini-review, Frosty. I agree with you on a number of points. In particular, I'm a bit sad to see the series turn away from the simulation aspect.

Regarding Starforce: at this point, no publisher is going to walk away from it. Earlier versions of Starforce copy protection could be considered very bad in terms of security, and I'm still not happy that Codemasters includes it in their products. It is something I should have mentioned in the review, however. Unlike previous versions of SF, the latest incarnation works on both 32- and 64-bit flavors of Windows. But in the end, there's no justifiable reason for installing a low-level hardware driver that has the potential to create conflicts on a user's system.

Does anyone have a definitive list of publishers who still use Starforce?

[FR0STY]

Just to comment on the starforce debate, I ran into installation errors due to the fact that i had an early verison of SF updating SF made my problems go away

[yamahonkawazuki]

well id be on a 360 IF they get the build issues taken care of, and if they were somewhat upgradeable. which appears to be not happening. until then illbe pc gaming

[PimpFoxx]

Wall of text crits for 15000.
You die.

[Batesd]

Great mini-review, Frosty. I agree with you on a number of points. In particular, I'm a bit sad to see the series turn away from the simulation aspect.

Regarding Starforce: at this point, no publisher is going to walk away from it. Earlier versions of Starforce copy protection could be considered very bad in terms of security, and I'm still not happy that Codemasters includes it in their products. It is something I should have mentioned in the review, however. Unlike previous versions of SF, the latest incarnation works on both 32- and 64-bit flavors of Windows. But in the end, there's no justifiable reason for installing a low-level hardware driver that has the potential to create conflicts on a user's system.

Does anyone have a definitive list of publishers who still use Starforce?

The boycott starforce list:

http://www.glop.org/starforce/list.php

[tda16]

DIRT is definitely better than the earlier CMR's but your computer must be good if you want to play DIRT with it. The others havent got that problem.

[Streifenkarl]

What pissed me off totally was the fact that even the demo came with Starforce! I mean I can understand why devs want to protect their full versions but why would you infest a demo with that crap? Same with Trackmania Nations. Its free but it comes with Starforce. Why?