Well the long awaited commentary video on our latest tournament, Super Smash Bros. Brawl is finally here and viewable by the masses.

Teclis, Biske, Nw Striker and Kaisuke join me as we watch and commentate on all the matches of the recent tournament. There are two parts to this, with the first part covering rounds 1 and 2 and the second part covering the quarter-finals, semi-finals and the finals of the tournament.

Download via Bittorrent

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (220.0MB)

Part 1:
[media id=115 width=565 height=318]

Part 2:
[media id=116 width=565 height=318]

I think it is only fair to give you guys an update on the current status of HPAW.

At the start of September Teclis and I (Mempf) have started University, WorldGone Awry is completing another year of school here and Nw Striker is working full time.

Because of this and mainly for this month we may not be on schedule (don’t expect to much this month). We hope to get things up and running again by October when I can better balance school and my other activites such as HPAW. We will hopefully NOT be ending HPAW come 2009 which should make most of you very happy.

That said hopefully we will finish the SSBB tournament this weekend and film it within a week of that.

Thank you all for your understanding and continued support. And to Blitz there are no hard feelings from the HPAW cast.

Oh one last thing, entries for the About Us page will end this weekend so get them in ASAP (note: there may be multiple winners or partial winners and the final about us page will likely be a mega version of the best of the best.)

HPAW is very against DRM and I hate to see a good game ruined by bad company practices but that is exactly what has happened yet again with EA (anyone see a pattern?). Spore has the horrid DRM “protection”

If you have been wondering whether or not to get this game here is something to likely make up your mind.

So what are the people complaining about? Taking a look at the review Amazon tagged as “the most helpful critical review,” it’s pretty clear. “First of all, the game incorporates a draconian DRM system that requires you to activate over the internet, and limits you to a grand total of 3 activations,” the disgruntled user wrote. “If you reach that limit, then you’ll have to call EA in order to add one extra activation. That’s not as simple as it sounds, since when you reach that point EA will assume that you, the paying customer, are a filthy pirating thief. You will need to provide proof of purchase, reasons why the limit was reached…”

Complete story at ars technica.

This same thing happened with Bioshock for the PC but 2K Games later removed the DRM. DRM does not prevent piracy, it forces people into it and thats just not right.