It seems that some people just can’t handle that someone else made a good tool and want some credit for themselves. Today, I discovered that a person took poedCrack and claimed it as their own. They modified it slightly – to change the output file name – and added their own image to say that it is theirs.

I decided to call them up on it. To ensure that people knew that this person was actually stealing something that they didn’t make. I may have been a bit harsh in my response, but I personally think it was a very valid response. Instead of getting any form of communication, what I got was banned from the forum that it is posted on. I guess this idiot doesn’t want people to know that he can’t in fact do anything and that he needs to resort to stealing other peoples’ work in order to make people think he’s more than a lowly dung beetle.

Who is this person who stole my, and the creator of the GUI to go with it, andydam’s work? That would be someone who likes to call themselves SiNfulSS. This person runs a forum called Sinful iPhone. I encourage everyone who has any sense of respect for people who actually put in the work for the community to call this person out on what they have done. Let everyone know that this person can’t do anything for themselves.

Having said all that, there is a very well respected community out there for people interested in this kind of thing. This community is called Hackulo.us and I encourage you to join if you haven’t already done so if you are interested.

The problem all stems from the fact that this specific game uses the Steam distribution method to verify if it is a legal copy. When I put the DVD in my drive, it asked me to enter my CD Key, which I did. Once I pressed the Next button, the program just sat there saying it was activating the key. A few minutes later it said it couldn’t communicate with the server. I know for a fact there is nothing wrong with my network, not to mention all other parts of Steam work perfectly fine on this same network.

I tried again quite a few times. I sent a message to Steam support, which has been ignored. I sent a message to THQ, they told me to just go to Steam support. I tried to post a message on the Steam forums, but there seems to be some secret that I have yet to figure out to be able to post on that damn forum. I signed up as normal on a forum, went to post and was told Access Denied, no idea why. It was at this point that I responded to THQ saying that if the situation wasn’t resolved before tomorrow morning, I was going back to EB Games where I bought it from and returning it. I said they can thank Steam for a lost sale.

The funny thing about this is that when I had the pirated copy, I just installed it and was ready to play, no activation, no bullshit. Seriously, these kinds of things encourage piracy more than prevent it.

A simple message to all game publishers out there, STOP USING DRM. The only thing it does is encourage piracy.