I was in my favorite big box retailer over the weekend when I did my usual drive-by of the jewel-case-sized PC game software section of $9.99 and under games. The usual Diner Dash’s and Bejeweled’s were littering the shelf along with repackaged Divine Divinity’s, but one new title that jumped out at me was Space Rangers 2. At just $9.99 I snapped it up and headed for the register.

While waiting on line I scanned the text on the outside of the box for any sign of StarForce. I wouldn’t see it, of course, or so the legend had it. The copy protection was never advertised on it and when installed it might cripple your computer, not just when running this one game but when trying to run anything else afterwords. It was evil with a capital E, but hey, ten bucks was ten bucks. I would take it home, do the research to see if it was repackaged without StarForce for the bargain software market, and work from there.

Sadly, everything I read online indicated that this version was no different from any other published on disc previously. It was still using StarForce, and would still never be installed in my PC. Back to the store it went. I’ll have to buy the game via direct download from TotalGaming.net for twice the price at $20 to live without StarForce. While everything I’ve read tells me that’s a very good price for what you get, it’s not in impulse buy territory so it’ll stay on the fringes of my shopping list, whiling away the hours until I get so bored with the PC games I have that I can’t take it anymore.