You're Doing it Wrong

So, being laid up with my toofs all fucked up, I decided to find a nice timesink to help keep my mind off the donkey kicking me in the jaw.  A quick search revealed that people are going shit over a new game called BioShock.  I'll let Wiki explain what its about.

I'm a member of the Steam network, primarily because of Half Life 2, which is one of the best games to come out in the last ten years.  Steam is a "content delivery network".  It is designed to... deliver, uh, content.  And that content is primarily game related.  You can currently purchase and download Doom 3 for 15 bucks.  Not too bad.  If you like the dark.

So I saw that BioShock is up on Steam for fifty bucks.  I haven't bought a game in a long time, so for a little good karma I decided to go ahead, on the strength of its extremely high ratings and one video preview alone, and buy it.  A few minutes later and its downloaded on my machine and ready to go.

First thing I notice when I try and run the game is that I have to run an installer for something called SecuROM.  Oh, shit.  Turns out its some fucked up DRM program that puts shit all over your machine and, apparently for me, fucked up my DVD drive.  Now I'm starting to worry.  I start playing the game, which looks fine and runs about how I'd expect on my Dell XPS 1210.  However, after the opening cut scene, I lose all sound.  Some web searches and trying this and that reveals that there is no fix for this issue.  K.  Time for a refund.

So I go to Steam and start looking for how to start the refund process.  And thats when I find out that there is no way to get a refund for Steam purchases.  And they will suspend your account (and thus fuck all your working games) if you stop payment on them.

I'm what you would describe as being fucked.

So now I'm deleting my local content and researching how to unfuck my system from SecuROM.  I tried, guys, but I think I'll be downloading cracked games off Usenet BEFORE PURCHASING for some time to come.