The Irony of SecuRom

After upgrading my PC, I loaded in Mass Effect which I've bought some time ago and installed it. The game has been idling in my room for quite a few months now, primarily because when I first bought it, my old PC wasn't good enough for the game.

But my new system is more than able to handle it, but then the installation was a crazy headache! The main issue lies in the security feature in the DVD which was meant to combat piracy. My DVD drive (being old) cannot read one particular file on the DVD and kept consistently giving my some read error. It's appear to be some sort of SecuRom protection, but whatever it is, it has driven lots of players pretty mad, such that the developers came up with a way to manually install the game.

This manual installation involves extracting some rar files and then running a few programs separately. Sounds like a load of hard work, and it did help some people but not me. It's the same old problem: my DVD drive cannot read one particular rar file! After hours of fiddling, it still didn't work.

Eventually, I had to bring it to school, use my laptop in my lab to copy out that particular rar file, put it on my thumbdrive and transfer it to my PC one week later. Luckily, this method finally worked and phew!... the game installed fine. There was a problem running the game, but it turns out to be an issue with all AMD processors and has been corrected in released patch.

So, finally, I can get the game running after lots of hassle. But this is really, really ironic. Many players who bought the game had plenty of headache with the installation, but those using the pirated version (which is typically cracked) has few issues with it.

Moral of story?