Same here gave a corrupt patch and there was that stupid sad face. So I uninstalled and reinstalled.....seemed to work fine until I try new game. First the game show me the normal loading screen with the "tip of the day" info and after that dissapears it just keeps showing me the background image which "moves" or you rather sorta hower over it(It's loading screen background).

EDIT: So I deceided to install all patches(At reinstall I installed only 1.06) and the stupid sad face came back.....WHAT GIVES?!?

Yeah just tried this myself.....another lame a** security feature.....Thanks Stardock.

Interesting.

I have the same problem all the sudden and I assure you I do NOT have a pirated copy, if you wish me to send you the receipt I will if it'll help. The game was working fine the other day, I'm at 1.06 + hotfix. Now I get some silly sad face on my game with the game itself twirling around in black and white. I do not have the spare bandwidth to redownload this game as I only bought the digital release from Impulse so please don't recommend that.

I have logged in Impulse, I have tried re-activating the game, I've tried manually registering it with the key under "View Registration" even though the email upon purchase assured me it done that for me.

I don't know if that's the case, as my game should have checked out, perhaps suddenly my game has indeed become corrupt by some farce coincidence, but funny enough can still be played...just its all black and white and spinning with a giant red sad face so obviously whatever is wrong isn't so absurdly wrong that the game still runs. Is there some game integrity check I can run ala Steam to fix whatever may be wrong?

There is no phone home scheme in Elemental.

It will contact the servers to look for the latest patches so it can inform you about them and likewise it can contact the servers to provide the Impulse Reactor features like chat, friends and in the future achievements, but the game will run fine with no internet access at all (just without those features)

Did the copy in question have the large memory space aware patch applied by any chance?

I'm not aware of what a large memory space aware patch is sorry...trying the verification option now. Is it just a cff edit to allow more than 2gb of memory to be used? Sounds like that would be it, I've done that myself as I do with most games.

Ok that worked, so that was the problem? Great, so now I can play with more memory leaks. Hoorah! Least it's better than a spinning black and white screen with a very sad looking face staring at me with those piracy accusing eyes.

I'm glad that worked for you, Cantrip, but yeah. . .  back to the OOM errors.  Glad to hear that, Neil - thanks for the info.

Damn, I want to see a pic of that!!! (no, I'm not installing the memory thingy )

Let's make a quick summary of the problem then!

- The game is bugged to the core, making us Stardock fans to become Stardock haters.

- Then a fellow member of the comunity creates a way to adress one annoying bug of the game.

- But if you make the correction yourself, Stardock disaproves and your game stop working, so either you play the way they want you to - bugged - or you don't play at all. Or you can wait more days without playing the game you bought, waiting for the real release date, witch is 20 patches away from today, when you will finally have a game without so many ridiculous bugs.

Well done. This seems to be the worst game release ever.