One of the most fascinating blow-outs I’ve seen in recent weeks is the furore over the ending to massively popular videogame franchise Mass Effect 3. The short version is:
1) Game developers make lots of promises in relation to how your journey as the main character will pan out.
2) It all goes horribly wrong.
The upshot of all this is that the company responsible for the game are now doing something about the negative reaction, and we have a nice subject for scammers to sink their teeth into. While fans wait to see what Bioware add to the end of the game, some are filling the void with their own downloadable versions of interactive endings you can play around with:
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While this is all fine and good, look what bandwagon just rolled into town:
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“Mass Effect 3 New Ending Download”, 224 views since it was uploaded a day ago. The description reads as follows:
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“Last Mass Effect 3 Ending, was really bad, but here, you have NEW, EXCITING ENDING.
You only need, to downlad [sic], and run it, downloader will automacitally [sic] start, download, new ending files, you will like it!”
Nothing like an over-abundance of typos and excessive comma use to make me feel confident about a download. Jumping over to Rapidshare gives us a zip, and inside that zip is another zip (maybe they heard you like zips) and a password file:
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What does the text file say?
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“Password was added to file to protect my project from bots and piracy”.
Of course it was. Trying the download mirrors will present the end-user with a survey popup:
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That’s a lot of hoops to jump through just to make affiliate cash for somebody. Fans of Mass Effect desperate to get their hands on a “better” ending should be wary of anything claiming to be the real deal in the run-up to the Bioware reveal in April. Given that there even mods appearing related to the issue in totally unrelated games, it may well be impossible to keep track of everything ranging from “legit download” to “my computer is on fire and so is most of my carpet”.
Christopher Boyd (Thanks to Jovi Umawing for additional info)
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