For Japan. But there's probably a ROM of it somewhere. I'm just not interested enough in it to find and play the thing.

I just fired up a bit of Alpha Prime last night, it looks pretty good although the character models are fairly poor.

I picked it up on Impulse because it was so cheap. Meridian 4 are not exactly known as purveyors of quality entertainment but Alpha Prime does look decent. Brutally hard though, seriously even the first enemies you fight are crack shots.

LOFL, you must now know a lot about DRM's. I wouldn't *take* a game for free with Securom in it. Hell, I wouldn't take a game with Securom if they paid ME.

The reason why people hate DRM just flies over my head.

Because its the cool thing to do. I dont like excessive or potentially damaging drm or something that could impare the games ability to run but in my experience securom has never done any of that to me.

Let me explain it to you in brief, with a link provided for reason #2.
Reason #1: I refuse to be punished for not illegally downloading a game.
Reason #2: I refuse to install malicious, nearly uninstallable software on my machine which takes higher-than-administrator access privaledges.
http://reclaimyourgame.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=56&Itemid=61
Additionally, I have no problem with a DRM that is less malicious, such as Steam. In fact, if Steam was to alter it's banning policy, I would likely buy 100% of my games from them again, like I used to, as opposed to the 0% I buy from them now.

I don't think something that gets installed that sits there and doesn't do anything is malicious.
Refused to be punished? That's funny. Since, y'know, it's ILLEGAL TO STEAL. I'd rather be punished by this alleged horrible instance against mankind known as SecuROM than sit in a jail cell for a year.

I can see why people don't like DRM (I've had a few sticky situations with TAGES myself) but overall, my experience with SecuROM and all that has been fine. Even Steam isn't too bad themselves, and almost no game I care about uses Starforce so no issues there. I think that if it's just passive and simply sits there, hidden while you play and no noticeable change in computer performance or activity, then there's nothing wrong with it.
But that's also why I'm a liberal.

Hell, I sure would. I'd love it if I got a free game and got paid for it.

You misunderstood, he said he refuses to be punished for NOT illegally downloading a game. In other words he doesn't want to receive punishment for something he has not done.
I have the same opinion regarding Securom as anjohl. I can't take Sony's PR word that Securom isn't a rootkit because of 2 reasons:
- It surely acts as a rootkit (it can't be uninstalled by normal means, it remains active at all times even when I'm not playing the game it is protecting, and it grants itself higher privileges than any other SW).
- Sony as a company has a history of lying to its customers and doing whatever they think they can get away with.
I took the risk and bought Alpha Prime because the deal was good and I like mediocre FPSs too. If it turns out that it does have Securom I'll simply not install it.

All DRM's are punishment because they add third party applications that are not nessasary to run the game. For that reason, the people who DO pirate a game get the "definitive" version, whereas the retail and digital customers get a shoddy version saddled with unneeded baggage.
And for the record, SecuRom installs in ring 0, just like a root kit.

Not all install third-party apps. Some are just a disc check included in the game's binary, others are a serial key for authentication to installation and/or online functionality. These are DRM schemes as well, but ones we much more readily accept in the face of the greater beasts.

I miss those days, honestly. It feels like a lot of games these days have to be patched (or you can't play it at all with some) or you have to have some stupid client running in the background which is hard on lower-end PCs, like my own. It was a pain having Steam running in the background of Portal. Or the stupid EA Download Manager uselessly running while I played Spore.

Steam uses a woping 5-20MB of ram and virtually no CPU to run (unless it's installing/decrypting a game obviously). I'm sorry but I honestly don't understand the "steam is a resource hog argument". It's not, stop whinnying.