Valve have recently added GTI Racing and Xpand Rally to their Steam library of games. I've a bit of a love/hate relationship with Steam - it's rather convenient and most of the games are well priced, although it's very slow to load and offline play is best avoided. However, it does make things easy to obtain, track and does away with CDs in drives and other such copy protection. Or at least I thought it did...

One of it's current problems is that with most of the third party games demos are conspicuous in their absence. And so I downloaded the demos for both, only to find Xpand Rally wouldn't run on XP x64. Why? Starforce copy protection. And in a demo at that.

For those who don't want to know, Starforce is a copy protection scheme that does nasty things in Windows - it sits at a level very close to the hardware and has large amounts of problems attributed to it. Interestingly, it's the only copy protection scheme to gather such a large anti-following, and perhaps that's because most of the others don't rely on the driver-level to do their thing.

What's worse is that this is present in a demo. Why? And it did get worse - GTI had a newer version and both the Steam games appear to have it in place. Why? It's certainly ensured I won't be purchasing a copy.

On another interesting note, Xpand Rally seems to be written in Java. Most intriguing...