Let me tell you a little story about Red Alert 3.
I went out and purchased two copies of Red Alert 3 the day it was released. One for myself and one for my friend, who's birthday had just come around. We were super excited about this game because we had just given up on playing EA's previous entry in the Command and Conquer series. That game, Command and Conquer 4: Kane's Wrath, had two halfhearted attempts at patches that still left the game broken and unplayable online. Losers could half-disconnect, stalling the game for everyone else while it tried to reconnect them. The loser would then walk away from his computer, and upon all his enemies rebooting their computers, he would be awarded a victory. This made the game unplayable online, because you never knew if you were going to get an DC'er. EA knew about the problem from day one and promised to fix it, but months later they fired the staff or moved them to Dragon Age: Origins, and officially stopped supporting the game.
So I get home, tear the shrinkwrap off the game, and go to enter my CD key. The problem? The CD key was one character short. I called my friend to tell him that we weren't going to be able to install the game, let alone play it, and he began to laugh. He laughed so hard he cried, because there was nothing else to do. EA had screwed us again. Eventually EA posted a fix online: enter as much of the CD key as you could, and then brute force the last character. This would have been a better solution if the DRM didn't kick players off for using the same CD key online, but hey, that's only a problem if you logged online.
Which the game required you to do upon booting up.
But always online wasn't the real DRM. That was just an added layer of security against pirates. The actual DRM on Red Alert 3 literally went around crashing processes that it thought might indicate the game had been pirated. I use Daemontools to create seven virtual CD drives so I never have to swap CDs to play old games, and RA3 crashed Daemontools AND Red Alert 3 every time until I uninstalled it.
To be fair, Red Alert 3 was a great game from a great studio... which was more or less closed down by EA after Command and Conquer 4 bombed. Why did it bomb? Because it strayed waaaaaay too far from the C&C formula. And why did they choose to do that? Because the studio realized EA was making them put out a C&C game every year, and they couldn't release the same game over and over again every year.
EA just has a way of ruining everything it touches.
That said, the demo was entertaining and I'm interested in possibly buying the game. It seems like it might be what the Fable series promised, with less overreaching to mess it up. And as turning off post-processing fixed the graphical glitches I was experiencing, there's really no reason for me not to if reviews are positive.
R anecdote below if you're interested.
