DRM. Awesome, isn’t it? The way it’s killing piracy. The way it empowers consumers. What a miracle of the modern world it is. But just occasionally things go wrong, as owners of the PC version of Gears of War discovered this week. An expired Windows digital certificate is preventing players from loading up their copies of their legitimately bought-and-paid-for game, presenting the following error message: “You cannot run the game with modified executable code. Please reinstall the game.”
Needless to say, reinstalling the game does diddly squat. However, if you are affected by the bug, there are two ways around it. First, you can change your system date back to before the Windows digital certificate impolitely expired, so any time before the 28th January, 2009 will do.
For a more convenient, long-term solution, you’ll just have to wait for Epic to fix it. There’s no indication of when that might be, but it is aware of the problem and has informed players that the company is working with (read: shouting angrily at) Microsoft to get it resolved.
