Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Quasi-Free Ubisoft Games

By Jim Rossignol on September 3rd, 2007 at 9:15 am.

Disclaimer: Only “Americans” can get free stuff.

Ubisoft have decided to release three of their older games for free, albeit with a few adverts tacked on for good monetary measure. Get them via these games via these Gamershell links: Far Cry, Prince Of Persia: Sands of Time, and Rayman: Raving Rabbids. You also need a free Ubi.com account to get the buggers working. RPS recommends both Far Cry and Sands Of Time, but we’re a little less enthusiastic about the mouse-spasming mini-games of the Rabbids.


A freed game, yesterday.

Gosh, PC publishers have realised that they can generate good will (and a meager ad revenue) by giving away the old games they no longer have any use for, instead of carefully ignoring them and making loud noises to distract us from their existence. Hurrah for the PC’s infinite back-catalogue.

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24 Comments »

  1. 200th post!

    We’re old hat.

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  2. Kangarootoo says:

    It says here on GamersHell that I need to live in the US to download Farcry. I guess I can lie filling in the registration form, but its probably worth mentioning in the blog post.

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  3. You will need an Ubi.com account and you must live in the U.S. to play the game

    Man is annoyed by this.

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  4. I’ll download and see if there’s a way for Euros to bodge this stuff.

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  5. Feet says:

    I downloaded FarCry on saturday from FilePlanet, it was linked directly to me by a mate on MSN so unless he did some jiggery pokery with the link, you should have no problem downloading it from there.

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  6. Did you actually get it working ok though? I don’t think it’s the download that is an issue, rather the Ubi.com activation?

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  7. Alec Meer says:

    Rabbids isn’t even a year old yet, so sales must have been truly catastrophic. Understandable – my fingers still hurt from reviewing it last Winter.

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  8. Acosta says:

    The US only thing for internet is extremely annoying and is spreading fast.

    I should leant to use some type of proxy because this is getting “dangerous”.

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  9. Feet says:

    Ah, no I didn’t install it yet – so maybe it doesn’t work then. I assumed it was a download only available to the US.

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  10. You can indeed sign up to Ubi.com as an American and install these games.

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  11. So, after a quick try with POP…

    Ugh. It runs, but it’s… shit. It doesn’t recognise the 360 wireless controller, and the keyboard controls are twitchily awful. I wonder whether it’d recognize the wired 360 USB controller.

    Also, it keeps playing one, awful, McDonalds ad over and over again. *Between cutscenes*. Oh no.

    And most unpleasantly of all, it starts with this really patronising lie about the game being provided as a “courtesy”. No, it’s being provided as a rather cheap act of prostitution. Let’s no kid ourselves here.

    In summary, it’s awful. Blech. POP:SOT does not deserve this treatment.

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  12. Feet says:

    PoP SoT only ever worked with Thrustmaster pads on the PC I think. I couldn’t play it with my PS2 pad (using Play.com USB converter thingy) which was a terrible decision as I too found the keyboard and mouse substitute terrible.

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  13. Hur hur.

    You said “thrustmaster”. Titter.

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  14. I also use a Thrustmaster.

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  15. I AM the thrustmaster.

    KG

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  16. Charles Cecil gave me his Thrustmaster. Does that make me corrupt?

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  17. I’m afraid so, John. Go to the back of the internet.

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  18. What’s the over/under on when Alec will post mentioning the bloody rabbit?

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  19. Donna says:

    The reason for being US only is usually to do with copyright and international laws that deal with giving things away. It’s terribly annoying, but until the laws change there’s nothing we can do about it and the companies are jsut covering thier asses.

    Of course there’s nothing stopping us from lying and downloading it anyhow. Unless it has some kind of IP tracer that checks your location then we should be fine.

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  20. Alex Hopkinson says:

    The retail version of Sands Of Time worked fine with the 360 wired pad the christmas before last. Does it truly not work with the wireless version? That seems a bit strange.

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  21. Pod says:

    anyone got this working? It complains about my us-ness when i try to install :/

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  22. linkman says:

    does anyone have a proxy or something for playing not in u.s, i tried making an account at ubi.com but it still says that i need 2 be in u.s 2 play, i even made an american hotmail add for ubi account sign up but it sill didnt wrk!

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