Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

When Electronic Arts finally came to their senses last month and released their recent catalog on Steam, one of the titles I was happy to find on the service was Mass Effect.  I had a retail copy of the game, but had issues with the SecuROM that was on the disc.  Because of that DRM issue, I had played little of Mass Effect on my PC.  So I dutifully bought Mass Effect, again, and found out that the free DLC that had been available for Mass Effect, would not work with the Steam version of the game.

As you can guess, this did not go over well with people that bought a copy of Mass Effect on Steam, as their was no warning that the DLC would not work with the Steam purchased copy.  Uproar ensued on both Steam and Bioware’s forums, with many wanting refunds.

The good news is that Bioware has come through, and had released a good version of the “Bring Down the Sky” DLC for Mass Effect on Steam.  There are a couple of things you will need to know to get this DLC to work properly.  First off is that unlike most Steam products, this is not an automatic update.  You have to register your Mass Effect key, which can be found in the Mass Effect Configuration Utility.  From there, you will download the “Bring Down the Sky” DLC patch in the form of an installer.  Yes, you have to install the Mass Effect DLC on Steam, outside of Steam.  It seems weird, but Dennis French, one of the Bioware guys, has stated that this came about due to Mass Effect never being developed to work Steam.

Before you install the DLC, you need to start up Mass Effect and load a game.  Then exit the game, and run the installer.  This should get the DLC installed properly.  There is an error that pops up at the very beginning of the install, but you should be able to ignore it and move on with the install.

It is very cool of Bioware to come back to a game nine months later to make sure that its DLC works properly.  It would be nice if you did not have to go through so many steps to install the DLC for Mass Effect, as Steam is really suppose to update these things on its own.  However, I can understand that when Mass Effect was ported over to the PC, the EA Store was the only way to get downloadable games for your PC.