Re: No free DW games for outside the UK
Just to expand upon what pisses me off about this, I repeat what I said earlier is I was not surprised to see this happen. We never got to see Attack of the Graske or the Comic Maker or any of the other stuff. It's one of the reason I consider the BBC's Doctor Who page to be functionally nonexistent and I usually ignore it.
But the advance publicity -- including reports by BBC America and other sources -- gave the strong impression that the games would be available for free everywhere. There was also no indication that this was a "licence fee" situation - I thought I even saw a reference to sponsorship, though that was probably an error just like the reports the games would be available internationally.
The second thing is if we're going to be asked to pay $20, $30 for a game that people report completing in a single sitting, where's the point in that? Even $5, $10 is too much.
Also, I'm now seeing reports the game is pretty buggy. While the potential is there that the commercial release may fix that, I'm not confident they'll bother for us heathens.
It also annoys me because the BBC forgets once again that the year is 2010 and if people want something they'll get it. Granted, I hear that the installer "phones home" so going the "creative route" right now probably doesn't work (and before the mods cringe, that "creative route" includes what I had planned to do which was have a friend in the UK download them for me - my ISP long ago blocked anything that starts with a T). But we all know someone will work out a hack before long.
It's frustration over lack of clarification that is at the heart of my comment about the BBC screwing us over. The BBC should have indicated back in April that this would be a UK-only release. They should already be telling us how much the international version is going to cost. As it is, I really have no idea if the game will even play on my Mac when (and if) the Mac version is made available internationally as I can't seem to find any system requirement information -- there's probably some on the download page, but the Internet's built-in censorship function sends us to that non-UK page. Do they even have Intel Core Duo Macs over there, because if this isn't a Universal Binary I might be out of luck, regardless (my current Mac doesn't have functioning Bootcamp and I can't upgrade to Snow Leopard without losing access to certain work-required software, so I'm in a glass ceiling situation).
Alex