GameDrive 8.0

Rating:
Summary: Stick up for your rights!
Review: A lot of the cons mentioned about GameDrive are true. You don't =really= know whether any given game will work on GameDrive. Of course, with Windows PCs, you don't really know whether any given game will work =without= game drive. That's an unfortunate hazard of being PC gamer. And, because of the leap-frog nature of copy-protection vs. copy-protection-circumvention, there's going to be a lag between the time the newest games with the newest protections are released and the guys at Farstone (or anywhere) are going to be able to circumvent them.

First and foremost, this product strikes a HUGE blow for consumer rights. By putting my games onto my hard-drive: 1) I don't risk damaging them and having to replace them--which is a serious problem in any household with children, or in any household where a wide variety of games are played at once; 2) It's like getting all your games back!

I can't stress the latter enough. Maybe, in the past, we'd keep half-a-dozen games by the PC. If you wanted to play something not in that stack, you had to go to the CD rack, find it--and if it wasn't there (because not all games come in jewel cases)--you'd have go to the CD notebook and find it there--bring it back, replace one in the stack by the PC (so that the stack didn't get too big and you ended up toppling them all to the floor), etc. The net result: A lot of games were forgotten. Games you were still interested in got lost in the shuffle as new games came in. Now we've got over 100 games at our fingertips, and we can switch from Diablo II to Dungeon Keeper 2 to Battlezone to Ghost Master to whatever.

I've had GameDrive for about a year, and here are my experiences:

-- At least 95% of the games I've tried worked. I say "at least" because there are about 4-5 games that I haven't gotten to work =yet=, but I'm sure I'll be able to. In the case of older games, not being able to get the game to work often has to do with the game assuming the CD drive is "D:"--a very tacky practice, but not uncommon for old games (and there are ways around it, usually). The only game I've tried that absolutely seems to refuse to work on GameDrive is Dungeon Keeper =1=.

-- It can make your games run faster/smoother. The physical hard-drive I use to store games is a rather slow external storage device, so I don't get the boost, but when I kept them on a fast internal hard-drive on the network, they were very speedy indeed.

-- In the past year, Farstone seems to have adopted a 1-year-subscription policy for purchasers. Initially, it looked like I was going to have to keep buying GameDrive to keep up. But with the new subscription, I have to pay, at most, once a year. A lot rides on how much this is going to cost, obviously.

-- GameDrive is the cheapest user-friendly solution available. Alcohol can cost double. There are open-source, freeware CD copiers, but they are much harder to install and use. (The freebies' main advantage being that you'd never have to pay for updates.)

-- There's no real GameDrive community. The GameDrive database, for example, says that Dungeon Keeper works. I can't seem to make it work, but I have plenty of games NOT in the database that I can make work. There's no good way to trade info with other users.

Where does this leave us? There is an unfortunate battle being waged against consumers by copyright-holders. While professional pirates rip software, music and movies off to the tune of billions, the digital rights management (DRM) crowd are working hard to make sure that basic rights protected by copyright law (the right to make backups for personal use, for example) are being squashed.

This crowd works hard to make sure you and I can't enjoy our honestly bought products without hassle, but they can't stop the $1 bootlegs of the latest game/movie/music from popping up on auction sites or free FTP. They're willing to make it impossible for you to protect yourself, but unwiling to provide the necessary customer service to assume that responsibility themselves.

GameDrive is a chance for you to get a little of your own back--legally.

Take it.

Rating:
Summary: gamedrive8 a disappointment
Review: i spent $30 for gamedrive 8.0 (farstone). i wish i could take it back. it messed up my desktop, the quick-launch toolbar had a black background, and all the icons shifted to the right, over by the clock, instead of being near the start button. also the bar accross the top of the favorites folder turned black. i tried installing it on another computer and got the same results, so i know it wasn't the computer. i tried reinstalling video drivers, changing desktop color schemes, nothing would fix the problem until i reinstalled internet explorer. that got rid of the black background, but the icons are still over to the right. i reinstalled internet explorer on the other computer, and got the same results, no more black background but icons still to the right. i tried reinstalling gamedrive8, and sure enough, the problem was back. i had to reinstall explorer again to fix it. beyond that, i've only been able to get it to work with one old game, need for speed 3. i couldn't get it to work with railroad tycoon 3, or max payne.