People who don’t follow video game news may not have heard about the controversy surrounding the DRM for Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed II. The short version is that Ubi requires an always-on connection to their authentication servers in order to play the game on the PC. If the player disconnects from the internet for any reason the game freezes and becomes unplayable until a connection can be re-established and any progress made since the last save point is lost.

Well yesterday the event that everyone knew would happen sooner or later happened and Ubi’s authentication servers went down preventing anyone trying to play Assassin’s Creed II from starting the game. Initially Ubi officials posted on their official forums (which also appear to be down at the moment) and said that the outage was the result of “higher than expected demand”. As the situation progressed updates on Ubi’s Twitter feed stated that their servers had been “attacked” and that the outage was limited to a period of about seven hours between 2:30 pm and 9 pm Paris time (Ubisoft is based in France). They have also claimed that “95% of players were unaffected“.

The merits of DRM in general can be debated but I think it is clear that this particular scheme has some very serious issues and one hopes that this incident may prompt Ubi to re-think their strategy. There is no guarantee that their servers will not experience similar problems in the future even, or perhaps especially, if this outage was the result of a denial-of-service attack and the only people that will be inconvenienced are the people who actually bought a legitimate copy of the game. As one commenter on the Slashdot thread discussing the problem said, “let’s not lose sight of two simple facts: The only people who can play the game right now are pirates. The only people who are blocked from playing the game right now are those who legally purchased the game. Which group would you rather be in?”

More news under the fold

Comics

• From the “news that made Shannon make a frowny face” department comes word from DC Comics that longtime Wonder Woman writer Gail Simone will be leaving the title. Simone, quoted by Comic Book Resources had this to say about her departure;
  

  I’m sad to leave but very, very proud of the work we did together and delighted to have been a small part of Diana’s ongoing epic saga. It’s really been a joy. And I have to say in complete honestly, I am genuinely thrilled by who is taking over the book. It’s someone who is going to rock this book like there’s no tomorrow, and I could not be happier with this choice. They got this one 100% right. I think it’s going to be a new era of greatness for our princess. People are going to freak and that makes me smile a lot.

  The writer taking over the book was announced this morning as J. Michael Straczynski who is currently writing The Brave and the Bold for DC and has also written for Marvel on Thor and Amazing Spiderman. Gail Simone will be finishing the current story arc for Wonder Woman and Straczynski will be taking over in July.

Movies

• The Academy Awards were given out last night. You don’t need me to tell you who the big winners were. They’re all over the tv, radio and internet. Just in case, here is a link to the official Oscars site.
• A new trailer for Iron Man 2 was released over the weekend. Enjoy!
  

Video Games

• Unsurprisingly, Nintendo has announced that developer 5th Cell is working on a sequel to the hugely popular Scribblenauts for the DS. Details (including the official title) are still mostly absent but website Go Nintendo has a cover shot of the yet-to-be-released issue of Nintendo Power Magazine which will have a bit more information.
  

• As we mentioned in last week’s podcast, Valve was clearly gearing up for a big Portal-related announcement and they have finally come clean. The official announcement of Portal 2 came through Game Informer who is also reporting that the sequel will have a multiplayer section! We also got word from our source at Valve that interested parties should keep an eye on the mysterious BBS that fans were able to access using clues added to the original Portal in a patch earlier this month. Apparently there will still be new material being posted there occasionally.
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