Below is a copy of an email that I sent to Telltale support and sales. It was also sent to The Adventure Company, who published the retail box. They are so nice as to not have any way to contact them except through a small web form, which I had to submit multiple times in order to send my complaint to more than one person (so that both tech support and marketing would know how customers feel about this).
My name is Michael Cook and I want you to know just how incredibly dissatisfied I am with Sam & Max Season One DVD that I just bought today at my local Best Buy. There is a VERY good chance that I will be returning it tomorrow as defective.
I played and enjoyed the original Sam & Max: Freelance Police game when it was released in ~93. I still have my CD of the game from 14 years ago.
So I saw recently that a collection of all of season one was released. I’m not a big fan of downloading software, so I went out and bought it.
Let me start by saying that I use a Macintosh. I love my Macintosh. I’ve been using them for year. I hate the fact that so many games aren’t released for the platform. In fact I buy basically no computer games because of that fact. I stick to consoles. I was willing to break that rule for this game. Now I seriously regret that.
I just want to play the game. I want to play it in Parallels so I can see if it runs well enough. I hate rebooting into Windows. Between startup, shutdown, and all the stuff I have to go through it wastes about 20 minutes of my day between booting into and out-of Windows.
But I can’t run the game without the disc. It doesn’t mater that you took up 1.5 gigs of my drive. I still need the disc. That irks me enough right there. But I put the disc in.
But SecuROM (a program that is notorious for security flaws), won’t let me. Either it complains I’m not playing with the original disc (I am, and I am allowed to have backups by law, so it shouldn’t matter), or it says it times out (accessing my CD drive?).
I realize that these are caused by using Parallels. But you know what? I don’t care. If you allowed me to play my game the way I bought it, I wouldn’t have a problem.
Of course, if I just downloaded a torrent of the collection, I wouldn’t have this problem.
Thanks for an enraging experience. I can’t run the software. I can’t download the downloads and run those (which wouldn’t check for the CD) because they require a key (which I don’t have, since I bought the retail version). You have done nothing rather than manage to royally piss me off and remind me why I don’t like buying computer games.
I won’t be buying season two. I intend to return this product as defective tomorrow.
No longer a customer,
Michael Cook
