Crafty Buggers

The shrill squeal of utter delight that echoed across the Inner West was my friend Cmos receiving his StarCraft II Beta invitation, and it lasted for three days. Every time we passed the fire-blackened ruin that was his block of flats (reconstruction due to begin “soon”) we could hear that squeal, ululating long into the night.

Cmos, as constant readers will recall, has a sort of interesting relationship with luck, fortune and karma. They all seem to hate him: he can’t go an hour without breaking or burning or at the very least badly blistering part of himself.

Yet, perhaps to make up for it, his virtual fortune is sublime. Any Beta he throws his gmail at, he gets on. Any pre-order he makes at our local games emporium gets upgraded for free to the collector’s edition because of an SKU error.

So whenever we gather at our local trendy all-day breakfast cafe - the Grapefruit Moon - to bitch and moan about how some DRM has ruined our music collection, or how Securom ate our master boot record, or Games for Windows Live just sits there smirking every time we want to play an actual game, Cmos just looks at us in pure bafflement.

“Guys,” he was saying on this particular occasion. “I just don’t get it. All these online matchmaking services, GFWL, Steam, they’re all awesome. I mean, I go on and play my games, and in the corner I get these cool little pop-ups about which of my friends are playing too. The system handles all the patches and updates automatically, I can get my DLC without even quitting out of the game, it’s awesome.”

The rest of us stared at him with eyes like gimlets.

“That’s because,” Vic bit off in pure bitterness, “the bloody thing works for you. Do you know how long it took me to save up for BioShock 2?”

“Since you borrowed the money off me, the answer to that is probably mathematically indefinite,” I said. Then I felt like a bit of a prig for saying it.

“Whatever,” said Vic. “Point is, all I want to do when I come home from a hard night stacking supermarket shelves is play some BioShock 2. But first I have to log in to GFWL, then I have to get some stupid update. But the update never works! Never! It just sits there and then it tells me the connection to Live failed! Failed!”

Cmos just shook his head. “What can I say fellas? It works perfectly for me. Um… does anybody else’s Pancakes Benedict have bits of foil in it?”

“You think you’ve got problems,” said our rich friend Silver, who for the last ten minutes had been half-listening to our conversation and half admiring photographs of his needlessly hot girlfriend on the Google Nexus One he’d imported from the US even though it was a locked handset and couldn’t make calls. Instead he just used it to take pictures of his needlessly hot girlfriend.

“Yes,” said Vic, “I do indeed think I have problems. Because I can’t play BioShock 2. Or rather, I can only play the opening over and over because I can’t save it. Because unless you’re logged into Live, you -”

“Yeah yeah,” said Silver, putting away his awesome phone. “How about you spare a thought for me and Assassin’s Creed 2? You need an active internet connection all the time to play that. And my copy keeps crashing, and so it gets out of sync with my save file or whatever, and I have to keep starting again.”

“You know what this is all about of course,” said the Guerrilla Gamer, from the dark and smoky corner that the proprietor of the Grapefruit Moon made him sit in because he was driving away too many customers. “This is all about how we spent ten years complaining that games were too short.”

There was a pause while we all thought this over and Cmos picked foil out of his Pancakes Benedict.

“Nope,” I said after a bit. “I don’t get it.”

“Well think about it,” said the Guerrilla Gamer. He stirred inside his foetid leather jacket and I realised the chef was right: he did make the place smell funny. “Old games, as in classic platformers or whatever, were insanely hard. Think of all those games in the 80s or early 90s where all you really did was play the first hour over and over. Because there was no save, and you had three lives. This modern trend in DRM is just bringing back that classic experience.”

“Hey you!” said the chef, poking his head through the likewise classic plastic strips over the kitchen door. “Shut your trap, you’re scaring the nursing mothers!”

“Mate,” said the Guerrilla Gamer, “why did you call this place the Grapefruit Moon anyway? Isn’t that a skin condition you get from wearing too many adult diapers?”

“Well whatever the fate of this latest DRM trend,” said Cmos, “all I can say is that the StarCraft II Beta is awesome.”

At this, Vic collapsed sobbing into his bacon oatmeal, Silver folded his arms and stared out the window at his A3 cabriolet, and the Guerrilla Gamer retreated into his hideous nest. Me? I just felt really, really sad. Because none of us had got on. The Beta that is.

“What did I say?” asked Cmos. And that’s when a giant decorative plaster grapefruit fell on him.