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Early Alone in the Dark reviews upset Atari
Author: Joe MartinPublished: 20th June 2008
Atari has threatened legal action against several review sites it claim have based opinions on pirated code.
According to gaming blog Kotaku readers tipped the site off earlier this week that a pirate version of Alone in the Dark for the Xbox 360 (piracy on a console?! - Ed) was available on many torrent sites. Shortly afterwards the first reviews for the game started appearing online. Atari was immediately suspicious as review copies of the game have been closely guarded and handed out only to specific sites (we didn't get one, no).
GameReactor in Scandinavia was one of the first sites to put a review up, panning the much anticipated title with a 3/10, but Atari were quick to respond and said that press copies had only been sent out 24 hours earlier, so it wasn't possible that the site had had chance to play the game and write the review properly. The review was promptly pulled down as a result of these alleged shady dealings, but later reposted with the same score.
There is some confusion here though as there were other major European sites which had reviews go live this week and gave higher ranking scores, yet appear to remain unmolested - Eurogamer for example published their review on Wednesday, scoring it as a 7/10 game.
4Players' Jörg Luibl, who scored the game as 68 percent, is also being threatened with legal action from Atari as the publisher has no idea how the site got hold of a copy that early and suspects foul play. Luibl is claiming that while the site did not get a copy through Atari, neither did they use the pirated version. Instead 4Players claims it got hold of a copy through a 'trusted dealer' - i.e. someone working in a local GameStation who handed them a copy of the game before it launched.
Other sites are now also coming forward and claiming that they too have been threatened with legal action by Atari.
As Kotaku astutely points out, it does seem weird that Atari would be so worried of sites reviewing a game which may be based on a pirated version, unless they know that the pirated version is based on incomplete code. If that is the case then it seems strange not to call the sites out by citing an example of how the pirated versions are broken. Maybe Atari is just looking to drown out negative reviews?
Have you played Alone in the Dark yet? What did you think of it? Let us know in the forums.
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Comments (28)Stats: 0.029 seconds
Yeesh.
Even GTA IV was released to torrent sites before it was released.
Umm, you haven't met the average gamer obviously, the one who goes into nerd rage because Twilight Princess only got 6.8 or whatever, they people who never buy a game if it scores below 8 on IGN.
I've played the first portion of the game and have just got into central park, I struggle to see how this game would score under 7.
Sigh, I was being sarcastic. ;)
Another DRM infection. This time with a twist:
To install the game on a different computer, players must revoke the serial number when uninstalling from the first machine (this is an automatic option during the uninstall process).
So, next time you format to reinstall the OS, dont forget to uninstall all the DRM games that have this option before the format.
Makes a lot of sense...
PS: That would mean that you only get an installation credit???
As far as I can tell, yeah, it's still pretty 'eh'.
Definitely not worth the money I parted with for it.
Better than a 3/10, but not going to make the replay list..
Even earlier than that mate, there was alot of piracy with the snes by using a special floppy drive and running the cart games off floppys. a friend of mine had one when I was at school and had every snes game released at that time.
I knew that :) but still there are some that dont lol
which console had a tape drive?
What was the question?
I think Atari is well within their rights to take legal action against reviewers that obtained the game through other channels regardless of what their rating ended up being. Unfortunately, the lawyers as usual will end up being the only true winners with the money they will rake in from both the winners and the losers of the lawsuits.
http://forums.bit-tech.net/showpost.php?p=1678229&postcount=12
The C64 had a tape drive
you didnt know? there's far more console pirates out there than you'd believe, PC piracy can be accounted to arround only 60% of pirated games :P and whilst some pc pirates actually do buy the games afterwards, console ones don't give a damn about it and just burn away
It's called "tongue in cheek humour" basically because there's been a huge move towards having console exclusive releases before games are released on PC they reckon it's more secure.
Well, not all people but I suppose most kids who's dad got their console chipped by 'a guy at work' would do