Ubisoft Won't Let You Play Their Games

 Okay. Here's the headline. From next Tuesday, Ubisoft are taking their Uplay servers down to move them to a new location, which means that a whole raft of their games with the abominable always-on DRM will be unplayable. The games that you bought will not – through any fault of your own – work. In single player. They're not saying when the games will be playable again.

 Settlers 7, HAWX 2, and Might and Magic: Heroes VI are affected for sure, but they're guarenteeing that Driver: San Francisco and Assassin's Creed: Revelations will stay up. The status of games like Assassin's Creed 2 are a bit more up in the air post-anti-DRM patching. This is, obviously, terrible and stupid. For a method apparently designed to stop the piracy of games to frequently provide a worse service than the pirates – or, as here, no service at all to legitimate paying customers – is an absolute disgrace.

Rayman Origins being released with virtually no DRM suggests that this attitude is not all-pervasive in the company, and that Ubi may be considering changing direction, but I'm not too sure. Driver: San Francisco recently saw the attempted return of always-on horribleness, before being changed to the still-not-good-enough always-needing-to-be-on-at-launch watered-down version, and the less said about PC-only Anno 2070's hardware-tied DRM the better.

You do wonder about Ubisoft's internal politics. Obviously piracy is a convenient straw man for all sorts of ills within PC gaming, but you can't treat it as a kill-or-cure cancer. It's the one case where this sort of cure won't fix the disease, and won't kill the patient, but could rebound and take out the doctor. It's not too hard to look at the record industry and see just that taking place. Until then, my advice is to vote with your wallets.

King of Payne: Max Returns

Male pattern baldness is a genetic curse. An affliction. Look at those poor men without hair. Do you think they want to be like that? Do you want to be like that? Cricket legend Shane Warne doesn't. But who is Shane Warne kidding? Bald men are cool. Just look at Sir Patrick Stewart. There is only one way to look even better than bald. Bald with a beard. Truly mankind has never looked more dapper. Join me in nodding appreciatively at Arsenal hero and statue /despicable handball cheat (delete the second if not Irish) Thierry Henry.

Max Payne understands this, because Max is, as André 3000 would say, ice-cool. For his next game, the first in nine years (it's been nearly a decade since the last Max Payne game. Think about that. Are you scared yet?), Max is shaving off his spiky locks and migrating that hair southwards. He's also added a bit of weight, and become a bit of a drunk. He'll have to be careful with those painkillers – hasn't anyone told him you can't mix paracetamol with alcohol?

This game is developed by Rockstar rather than Remedy (Rockstar were the publisher on the first two games) and from the first look it doesn't have the same big American city noir vibe that the first two so successfully exploited. Good – there's only so far you can take that, and I felt that by the end of Max Payne 2 the series had probably done it. Shifting the focus to the slums of San Paolo while keeping the noir plotting gives it a fresh lick of paint, and I for one am excited. Welcome back, Max.

The Witcher 2, Skyrim, Dragon Age 2: The End of Dungeons and Dragons

Welcome to the New World.

Better Not Let Him In

People die. That's hard to imagine for a kid like me. They die and we put them in the ground.

A young girl in a red cloak stands on a path through the forest. She is carrying food, and wine. Taking tentative steps, she walks towards the house that she knows lies at the end of the road. The path is asphalt tarmac, breaking into a mud track.

She sees a glimmer of light in the forest wilderness. She leaves the path. The glimmer is a flower, which she joyfully picks. She sees another in the distance, further from the bright safety of the road. It is dark in the forest. She runs for the flower, but in her haste she loses sight of it. She sees another girl though, taller and older than she is. She follows the girl.