The Lesser of Evils

As a Sega fan of more than a decade, I was irate when Electronic Arts provided Sega with the ultimatum of giving them exclusivity to the sports genre on the Dreamcast or miss out on EA Sports' lineup entirely. To this day, I believe this was a thinly veiled attempt to avoid direct competition with the clearly superior 2K series of football games (There's always next year to beat ESPN NFL 2K5, EA). Obviously I don't mean from a sales standpoint, as people who don't understand the game of football drag their knuckles to GameStop every year like clock work to support the continuation of an inferior product. But from the important consumer angles, playability and authenticity, EA stood no chance.

Several years later, EA went even further and monopolized the NFL license in 2004. For those unaware, this deal was just renewed meaning more years without a good football game. I can't get my head around this decision from an NFL standpoint. How does a sports league not understand competition? Scratch that. These are the same clowns who instituted revenue sharing and a salary cap. Taking that into account it makes perfect sense. In any case, I'll hold tight to my aging copy of ESPN NFL 2K5 and my PS3 and 360 copies of All Pro Football 2K8, while looking forward to Backbreaker, the XBLA Tecmo Bowl remake, and the end of the EA/NFL deal, no matter how far away it may seem.

In short, I hate EA. The company that made the undeniably awesome NHL Hockey series on my beloved Genesis betrayed me, and full forgiveness is unlikely. But EA is not the villain of this tale. On the contrary, EA is the subject of the title, The Lesser of Evils. Truth be known, when I set Madden aside, EA has been on the up tick in terms of portfolio quality. Acquiring (and amazingly being smart enough not to ruin) BioWare was brilliant. Mass Effect was brilliant. As soon as all-DLC-inclusive Gold editions of Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2 are released, I am confident I will find them brilliant as well. EA also published Valve's Orange Box and Left 4 Dead titles for those too dense to buy them on Steam. It's hard to argue against a lineup that contains those two developers, even if I have to see an EA logo to get to the games.

So who are the villains you ask? Who could be beat EA at the hatred game? Believe it or not, there are two such entities. The first is Activision. Aside from their merger with Blizzard, I am not sure they have a redeeming quality. Hell, I am not sure they have had any since the release of Pitfall!... in 1982. Flash forward to the last year. Activision becomes the first publisher to try to fly the first $60 PC game, Modern Warfare 2. What did suckers who paid that get for their extra $10? The removal of dedicated servers and their associated mods. You've heard the saying "less is more?" Someone saw Activision coming.

Unfortunately, Modern Warfare 2 sold tremendously well on all platforms, proving that Activision was right; their customers really are that stupid. The votes, in the form of dollar bills, were collected and counted, and the message was received loud and clear. Activision celebrated by firing the two gentlemen largely responsible for the Call of Duty series. Nothing says "class" like sticking it to your customers and then your employees while your CEO whines during a public appearance. I'm not sure what my last Activision! purchase was (Enemy Territory: Quake Wars maybe?), but I know it's going to stay that way for a while.

When there is more than one party involved in wrong-doing, put your money on the french being one of the culprits. If you had, you would have won the bet, thanks to the completely fallible UbiSoft. I remember the days when UbiSoft was essentially Rayman, a wonderful Jaguar platformer that was ported to everything under the sun and followed by a great Dreamcast sequel. But those days are so long ago.

UbiSoft is now the second publisher in the $60 PC game club. In their case, the extra $10 gets you the most ridiculously punitive DRM on earth. Want to play your Assassin's Creed 2? Better stay connected to the internet. If you don't, your game will pause until you reconnect or until the well overdue repeat invasion of france takes the servers down for good. This "protection" will cover all releases in the foreseeable future, including the next entries in the Splinter Cell and Ghost Recon series. Maybe Tom Clancy can write a spy thriller about cracking UbiSoft's DRM. After all, punishing the innocent is the best way to stop the guilty. Maybe that could be the title. That's Yoshi, Mr. Clancy. Please spell it correctly on my royalty checks.

In a world where evil is relative, and the lower priority threats are often befriended to defeat the higher priorities, EA is no longer public enemy number one. Thanks to an attractive coupon, I even ordered The Saboteur (R.I.P., Pandemic) from the EA Store. So while I wait for the NFL license to free up, my money will still flow to EA. It will not, however, go anywhere near the house that Pitfall Harry built or france. Unless of course the cheese-eating surrender monkeys run from DRM like they do everything else.