On May 30th I made the decision to buy it, mainly because I prefer using keyboard and mouse to play games. Reading about the DRM scared me at first, but reading that I didn’t need to keep the dvd in the drive was a big plus. I have young kids and they just love to play with shiny things. Being able to lock up the discs was a big bonus!

So I bought it and installed it, and it was fun! But I was getting some strange graphical artifacts on my 7600 GT card. I thought it might be a driver issue or a Vista issue, so I decided to do a format of my PC and do a clean install of Windows XP with updated drivers straight from NVidia. It didn’t help.

By this time it was after midnight so I registered my game on the forums and posted for help. (See topic=631894, forum=127) The feedback I got was that my card was either going bad or ancient, and Mass Effect was just pushing it over the edge. So I went out and bought a new 8800GT on June 2nd and the game worked beautifully! I was so happy that I got it and couldn’t put it down – by the night of the 3rd I’d finished my first run through. Then I put the game down hoping the DLC would come out to give me even more new stuff to explore.

That was ten days ago. Today I decided to do another run through while waiting in order to try playing a renegade on a higher difficulty level. That’s when I got it. “The game can not start. For security reasons, only a limited number of machines can ever be licensed by a single purchase. This limit has been reached. Please purchase another registration code, reinstall, and then try again.”