All right, I’m back from my trip out of state and have already started digging into Viola: The Heroine’s Melody, but first I need to rage about some games on my phone that proved to be utterly useless. Picture this: you’re returning from a necessary trip, the purpose and tone of which are best described by a long groan, only to show up at the airport and find out that you’re on another overbooked flight. You pay the extra money to bump up your position so that you can get ahead of the douchebag bragging loudly on the phone about how much money he makes (as well as avoid the very real risk of being bumped off of the flight) and finally make it to your seat, only for the person next to you to start coughing just often enough to be concerning. You put your phone in airplane mode as an awkward silence overtakes the night flight, with everyone quietly regretting the decisions that led them to that particular Southwest flight.
My brother seemed like he was bored, so I pulled out my phone that was packed full of games to pass the time. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is a game that both of us liked when it first came out, and the mobile port is pretty solid, so I tapped on the KOTOR icon and… nothing happened. Eventually, I was able to get far enough to reach the above “license check failed” message. Basically, I hadn’t played the Android version of KOTOR recently enough for its DRM to have a recent license check, so it assumed that I had stolen it and refused to let me play on the plane. The same was true of Scribblenauts Remix, which can be a great time-waster of a game when it works. Instead of opening up, though, it more actively accused me of not having obtained the game legitimately—I forget the phrasing, but it was insulting—and kicked me out.
These are Android apps. They’re phone games. And where do you have your phone? Everywhere, basically, including many places that don’t have access to the internet (or don’t have a good enough signal for 4G/5G). What the hell is the point of mobile gaming if you can’t use the games when you’re mobile?
Fortunately, several other games worked. The Tales of Illyria games seemed to work just fine. Planescape: Torment EE loaded up just fine, though I reviewed that one recently enough that it may just have a still-working license. Other phone games that deserve praise for working: Slayaway Camp (by the cool and attractive people who made Hypergalactic Psychic Table Tennis 3000), Kiwanuka (a puzzle game that ended up being one of the bigger hits of the flight), Rule With an Iron Fish, and Final Fantasy Tactics – War of the Lions (which was the biggest surprise given the fact that Square-Enix crammed always-on DRM into Chrono Trigger). To the developers/publishers of those games: thank you for not being restrictive asshats.
But seriously. I wanted to play some Scribblenauts and KOTOR. I bought those games. This is why mobile gaming is a joke. Normally, you buy something and it works without having to check a server. Most people and companies recognize that such a limitation would be a dick move that causes avoidable problems.
So to the person who decided to cram license checks into these mobile games: eat a bag of dicks. You’re why we can’t have nice things, and I hope that none of your stuff ever works when you want it to, either.
The KOTOR and Scribblenauts Remix apps are useless failures first appeared on Killa Penguin
