Razor1911 said their release would work like a legit copy if you enter a legit key, at least that's how I understand it.

P.S. Owners of legit game keys may use our keytro in just the same way in order to prolong their offline activation period indefinitely

Reloaded is nuked for borked singleplayer. 

Hooray for Steam!

Except for the fact that they didnt get Starcraft 2.

Hooray for Amazon! 

Fucking Daz, getting the game from fucking Tesco, for fucking �32, which is fucking cheaper than fucking Amazon. I bet they fucking stock it for �3fucking2 in the Morrisons 2 fucking minutes walk away, I could have got it and some fucking Scotch Eggs n stuff too. 

Scotch Eggs? Man, that shit is wrong. 

So if you get it from Amazon, then you win by price by �0.09p

On other notes, I waited for Borderlands to drop in price, and started playing that recently. First impressions are that its pretty good, no-nonsense shootin' action. Also I wasnt sure what I was going to think of the gfx, but it actually works better than I had expected! Very addictive. Maybe one day MW2 will drop to <�10'000'000'000.00p per copy, and I'll try that aswell! 

hugs! =) 

Scotch Eggs remain within your reach. Always a calming thought.

The above solution mentioned by Spirit seems the best idea. 

Keep fighting for a refund, fuck the game off, buy �35 worth of Scotch Eggs WINNER. 

or maybe just �35 worth of Scotch to help you relax. ;) 

Where's the PC rig thread, I thought there was one? Well i'm not creating a new one, but this is kind of related (since its a rig to play other pc games).

So I'm looking at getting the following:

� Intel Core i7 930 2.80GHz CPU
� Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R Motherboard (1366)
� 4GB Corsair CMX4GX3M2A1600C8 DDR3-1600 Memory Kit
� 1TB Western Digital WD1002FAEX SATA3
� Sapphire HD5850 PCIE 1GB DDR5
� 2nd video card: GeForce 8800GT
� 600w Vantec ION2 Plus Modular ATX2.3 Power Supply
� Microsoft Windows 7

Looking at about $2300NZD ($1600US). Can't really afford much more than that. Thoughts and suggestions??? 

What is the purpose of the 2nd video card? I hope you're not planning on trying to have both your HD5850 and 8800GT in at the same time! 

Sounds like a great setup, the only thing I'd really want to mention is the RAM - that CPU and motherboard supports triple channel RAM so to get the most out of it you'll want a kit with 3 DIMMs, 6gb is probably the best option (2+2+2).

You'll also want to be sure that power supply will be adequete, particularly if you intend to have multiple drives and video cards either now or later. (It may very well be, I don't know, but it'd be worth hitting one of those online calculators to see if you can get an idea of the power draw you'll expect to see with that.)

I'm also curious about the 2nd video card, are you intending to have more than 2 monitors? 

Got 2 pci slots, so might as well fill em both? I figured they'd both combine to help with gaming... or does it not work like that? If you only have 2 for a second monitor, then I won't bother.

I thought 6gb ram might be an overkill, but if you think it's much better then i'll go with that.

Calculated out at 430w, so I guess the 600w will be okay, just. 

Thats almost exactly the same rig as I would buy!

Have you got a nice Air cooler? For overclocking your CPU to >4Ghz??? Should be fairly easy with that motherboard.

I wouldnt bother with the 8800. I tried putting one in my rig as a dedicated PhysX card, but it was really just a pain in the neck to get the drivers working properly, and then it turned out that for the game I wanted to use the PhysX stuff, it was impossible to use both cards (Metro 2033).

The Radeon 5850 is a seriously speedy card, I would know, I have one!!! I was thinking of buying another, but since all of the games I play run maxed out, there would really be no point.

RAM thing: The socket 1366 motherboards are deigned for using DDR3 RAM in TRIPLE CHANNEL mode, which means you're gonna need 3 DIMMS instead of two. I would buy a nice 6Gb kit (3x2Gb) instead of crippling the motherboard by forcing it to work in dual-channel mode.

:D 

The thing about 2 video cards working in tandem is that they should both be the same card - and they definitely should both be either Nvidia or ATI, but not cross-brand baloney (balogna gives me a spelling error, weird.) The HD5850 is pretty rock solid, so you shouldn't need 2, but if you plan on getting a 2nd one, make sure your mobo supports Crossfire, and you might want to double/triple check that you'll have the space in your case to support both cards. 

The 5850 will slaughter anything released now and even within the next couple of years I'd imagine. As Zwiffle says, if you're doing any kind of Crossfire or SLI thing with multiple cards, they must be the same make and model and almost everybody says it's usually better to get the best single card you can afford anyway.

Almost all video cards come with dual DVI or at the very least a 2nd VGA connector. In other words any card you could buy would support 2 monitors anyway. You only need more cards if you want to do some kind of whacky triple or quadruple monitor setup. 

if that's the case, i'd most definitely drop the the extra video card in favour of more ram. i've found with 3gb of ram, i'm quite often running low and need to step down game settings. remember that w7 is a modern os and requires a lot of memory to function.
with 6g, you'd probably be set on ram for a good long while. 

Yeah, don't get stuck in the hole I am in atm, 2 ram slots on my motherboard died (its 5 years old) so now im running win7 on 1gb of memory :P

To be fair, stuff still works, but it can take an age to do things. Go for the 6b matched set of sticks, there are some nice deals around from the top manufacturers! 

sweet, thanks guys! definitely won't bother with 2 video cards then, and i'll get the triple memory pack.

i'm always behind in gaming anyway - it'll probably be another few years before i actually catch up and start playing the 2010 releases, by which time this one will be ancient.

i can finally play hl2 and quake4 maxed out though yay 

Crysis Warhead maxed out too.

Also the Radeon 5850 overclocks really well, infact the Catalyst Control Center that comes with the ATI drivers allows you to raise the core clock speed a bit, out of the box.
You can use "AMD GPU Clock Tool", (a different free util) to really overclock them. And they can take like 15-20% without breaking a sweat.

Also:

Borderlands is really very very cool. Far too addictive, and a lot more playable than I thought it was gonna be. The way that Co-op play works is really cool too - basically you just "invite" friends to join your singleplayer mission. All XP earned and items picked up whilst playing in your game, they get to keep. Character development works really well here too, seems to be endless leveling up. Even the AI is good. 

Rather than the hardware thread http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=21824&start=626

...and my saga of trying play (or actually now avoid) other PC games continues:

Blizzard non-customer non-support:

Thank you for your email. Unfortunately, we will be unable to provide you with a refund for your StarCraft II license.

Any queries, please contact:

Legal Department
Blizzard Entertainment Europe
Billing Support
TSA 60 001
78143 Velizy Villacoublay Cedex
France



Shambler:

That is not acceptable. I have not taken possession of the game (I only
managed to download 200 meg before finding the Battlenet Downloader utterly
intolerable). I paid the full price for the game before finding out it was
unsuitable to get it via Battlenet. I do not expect to have to jump through
hoops and be writing to people in France to have a perfectly normal action
of returning a game and getting a refund.

Given that Blizzard is very familiar with online gaming, there must be some
simple way to delete my account, cancel my download (and prevent any
attempts to re-download it via that purchase) and refund my money.

If whomever this email reaches is unable to deal with this issue, please
pass it on to your superior and get them to call me on 0********** or
0*********. I expect to receive proper customer service from Customer
Service, and my chance of being a Blizzard customer ever again (including
buying a physical copy of SC2 as I had previously intended) depends on that.

Is there any other area of a media purchase industry that takes this attitude to refunds?? If so, I haven't encountered it in my life previously. 

Prostitution, maybe. But then you probably never ask for refunds from your prostitute. 

Isn't regulated at all, so a lot of the time the providers will just shit on the customer if it suits them. It usually does.

I can condense what their reply was into something more honest:

'This is our policy so fuck off, you're not getting anything. If you think you're big and clever enough try fighting with our legal team in France.'

I suspect the phone number will have you jump through more hoops until you can find an English speaker who will basically reword the above and invite you to declare a civil action (whilst making a slam dunk action).

I had a similar experience with Steam recently. 

I might make a huge and previously highly undesirable break from tradition, and make my next downloadable content something I don't actually pay for.... 

That's a shame Shamb :( I've never used the blizzard downloader for anything besides WoW patches so I can't really comment on it.

is it not possible to leave the download running overnight or something while you are not using the pc? if it works the same as the WoW patcher you should be able to stop and start the download process without having to start from the beginning again every time.