Now you can play all your favourite Pop Cap Games for free, but only if you are in Singapore, Malaysia and possibly some other South-east Asian countries. PopCap – the guys behind casual game hits like Plants vs Zombies, Bejewelled, Feeding Frenzy, Zuma, Peggle and more – have launched a special beta just for this region.

Just go to www.popcap.com and the website automatically identifies your location based on your IP address and a pop-up window will appear to ask you to join the beta. When you are in the beta, you will be asked to download and install the PopCap World beta client and from there you can play the games.

I have no idea what is the business model but it looks like some social networking and games plan. But so far, everything has been going for free for me!

The Licence2Play gaming and electronics fair at Suntec this weekend from 22nd to 24th May may have been touted as the 1st consumer electronics fair offering wholesale prices to the public (no trade buyers and wholesalers allowed), but as a gamer I was far more interested in the gaming than gadgets.

After all, we already have tons of different IT shows already every quarter like Comex, Sitex, and IT Show, and we’ve grown used to cheap electronic fairs — it is part of our Singaporean geek psyche. This show is also a lot smaller than the previous IT Show, occupying only part of floor 6(Hall 603) on Suntec, whereas IT Show covered 5 floors.

Gadgets aside, however, the gaming aspect of the show is rather fun. It may not as big and established as Games Convention Asia — Licence2Play, set up by SPH subsidiary Sphere Exhibits, is running for the first time this year — but the atmosphere at the fair when I was there yesterday afternoon was buzzing, and there looked to be a roster of fun events running throughout the three days.

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First it was Dawn Of War 2, and now it is Empire Total War. War is out in the open, but the battle it seems is against piracy.

ETW is the second game I have reviewed this month that also needs a Steam log-in, and therefore Internet access, to activate and play the game, even if you are just up against the computer AI.

This is a big problem for users who do not have regular broadband access as it can take several hours just to update the first round of patches, and that’s on my 100 Mbps line. After you activate the game for the first time via Steam, you can choose to run the game in “offline” mode which then lets you run the game without Net access but you will still need to have the game updated to the latest patch for this to run. In other words, you cannot quite play a Steam-enabled game without Net access.

The good thing about Steam is that it handles all your game patches automatically so your game is always updated to the latest patches. Steam is also a form of anti-piracy tool since you always have to log-in before you start the game. The really cool thing about Steam however is that you all the games you have purchased, whether as a direct download or from retail shops, can be downloaded into any other PC although you can only play on one at a time.                

There has been some discussion lately about Dawn Of War 2 and how it is sucky becoz we have to install Steam to play the single player campaigns even. Here’s something I wrote recently on this issue.
IT JUST does not make sense that a single-player PC game, which you play on your own, would require you to have an Internet connection for you to play against the computer.

However, that is exactly the case with the just-released Dawn Of War 2 (DOW2).

As I was tearing the shrinkwrap off the box of this THQ-published title, I was surprised to see these words in red: Internet Connection Required.

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Yes. you heard it right. Even if you are playing a single player campaign or a 1vs1 skirmish against the computer. You need to first launch Steam and log in to Steam for the game to even launch. And this is not just for initial activation, but for subsequent plays. So when I tried to run the game without logging into Steam, nothing happens at all. The game doesn’t even launch. I log into Steam and the game loads.

It’s quite obvious what these guys are trying to do – they are trying to fight piracy. But they end up alienating the users. I have played RTS since the first Dune 2, and I have never had to go online to fight against the computer. In fact, I have never played a PC game that requires me to do this, unless it is an MMOG like World Of Warcraft.

I understand that piracy is really killing the PC business, but in an environment where console games are outselling PC games (revenues for console games are about 8x more than PC games worldwide) and beating the shit out of them, you don’t want to make you legitimate PC gamers angry.

And what about selling to the countries without much of a Net penetration? Or have they given up on these countries altogether?

Update: Some forumers are asking if this will work if Steam is running in offline mode. I will try that tonight. Another issue is whether you need to have a Windows Live account logged-in to play. Will also test that tonight. But having played this game for about 6 hours, I do like it a lot.