Don't be fooled by a pretty face

First off, the highly anticipated action match-3 game DragonStone is finally available on the maker's website. You'll notice I'm not linking to it. That's because they're another of those JERKS who think it's appropriate to charge $30 instead of $20 to me just because of where I live. So instead of getting my $20, you will get the $6 or whatever that a portal gives you as your cut of a sale, all because you were greedy and thought you could squeeze an extra $10. If I buy the game at all (see my Jojo's Fashion Show adventure for another story of how this sort of nonsense around turned a sale into no-sale. Although that may be changing!)

Beyond that, though, the game did some nasty things to my computer. When I tried to launch it, at first, nothing seemed to happen. After waiting quite a while and thinking that maybe I'd failed to actually double-click it, I tried again. A few moments later I get an error message telling me that I can't run two copies of the game at once. Okay... So after closing that, finally my resolution twists and changes, indicating the game is trying to launch. A few moments after THAT, the screen finally blanks out and the game splash screens start loading.

Sort of. See, they're very flickery. Bits of other programs areshowing through. And there's no sound. It turns out I'm not properly tabbed into the running program (because of the two copies thing, I expect) but it's controlling my display drivers anyway! So everything is a flickery mess. I keep trying to alt-tab so that I can get to the game to shut it down, but I can't see the alt-tab dialog because the game overwrites it as soon as it appears. I can't even see the task manager.

FINALLY, with much frustration, I get switched into the game. And it is a nice-looking game. It's very very pretty, and has a cool fantasy overlay around its match-3 elements. It is much more my kind of thing than Puzzle Quest was.

Except that because of the business practices of the sellers, I can't buy it. So there's not much point in playing more than the five minutes necessary to figure out what the game's about.