What do these titles have to do with eachother?
Well; the main answer one would get is, "They're both made of Epic Win". But nay, my fellow gamers, the reason they are together here in unholy matrimony is due to anti-piracy, aka stupid corporate people trying to stop something they can't.
In a new batch of stupidity, Maxis, the makers of Spore, and Bioware, the makers of Mass Effect, are using a new form of copy protection called SecuROM.
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In a bioware forum post, a Bioware producer spoke about the new copy protection that requires you to
go online at least once every ten days so the game can check for CD key validity
or the game will deactivate itself
This sort of bullshit, especially for an 'offline' game like Mass Effect, just makes legit consumers jump through hoops while pirates just find a new patch to disable the copy protection.