This is a vent of sorts. Please hang with me (or don't...or get drunk, any of that will work).

I recently purchased Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2. My kind of game... popping caps into Mexicans to save democracy and all that. Actually, it's just popping caps into people that I dig, but that's neither here not there.

So... I pop the game into my cd-rom drive. Autorun comes up, I click install...autorun goes away...and that's about it. I'm a little perturbed. So I go to Shiny's box... autorun comes up, click install, installer works. I spent some time troubleshooting my box but couldn't figure it out so I said to hell with it and installed it on Shiny's computer.

Next Next Next, enter install key... invalid key? Ok...retype it. Invalid key. Retype again. All caps, all lowercase. Get shiny to come over and try it... same deal. So...screw it, bad key. I'm kinda irritated now.

So we hoof it back to the store and exchange it for another copy. Pop it into my computer, get autorun, hit install... nothing. Ok, fine, I expected that. Pop it into Shiny computer, get autorun, click install......... nothing. Now her box is doing the same thing that mine is.

There seems to be something in the installer that breaks the installer. I spent alot of time hunting down registry access requests and tracking file writes on the disk to figure out what it was that was doing it... I gave up. In the end I downloaded a preinstalled pirated copy.

So...Ubisoft... you screwed up. I couldn't install it. I couldn't play it. I couldn't even return it thanks to every store's jacked up policies regarding opened software. It was Saturday and Ubi's tech support is only open weekdays.

My guess is that something in the copy protection is buggy and caused the problem. I hope it doesn't affect any other software further down the line. It's just sad that I was forced to download a pirated copy of the software to be able to play something I legally purchased. I don't know if I'll ever buy another Ubisoft title.

Nice one

When copy protection is too protective, the company should ditch it.

That sucks, the AW series is great Thought I haven't gotten around to buying number 2, only played the demo.

At least It'll be on 360

yeah, when you cant even get it to autorun it doesn't leave you with much faith does it?