The case against Starf****

Yes, Starf**** is a swear word, and I'd rather wash my mouth out with soap than utter it's dirty name on my lips. It creeps insidiously onto your computer with the legal purchase of a rather pricey game, and relegates your DVD drive to a stone age hack. My fairly new DVD-CDWriter combo has now got the capacity of a 4x CDRom (at least, I think so, I got bored of timing how long it takes to copy a CD after an hour. Yes, an hour. No, not a DVD, a CD.

So I uninstalled the drivers, using a very handy little app from some hackers. Thank god for them, who else would we turn to? I don't think my Drive has recovered fully yet. I suspect only a clean install of my machine will wipe the scourge completely off my beloved.

So now I use this name as a swear word... and avoid like the plague any game that comes with it. Hey, it actually is helping with piracy - I won't even pirate a game with its protection. How fantastic is that? I'm sure the publishers are thrilled that using Starf**** results in loss of sales AND piracy. What a solution.

What brought on this tirade? I sat down this evening to enjoy a few demos that I got with PC Format. I thought I'd start with Spellforce 2, and move onto X3:Reunion. Spellforce wants me to install Starforce. Ah ha, ah ha, ah ha ha. Copy protection.... for a DEMO. (Damnit, another coin in the swear-jar.) I didn't even bother with X3. Stuff that, let me go and play Heroes4 a bit more.