Real smooth, EA. Some copies of Red Alert 3 appear to be missing characters in their installation codes, meaning of course that you can't install the game you just bought. While this could be potentially frustrating, Electronic Arts has come up with an absolutely ingenious workaround -- guess the missing character.

"There is currently a work around that may allow you to bypass this issue. Since you have the first 19 characters of the code already, you can basically try "guessing" the last character. To do this, simply enter your existing code, and then for the last character, try the letters A-Z, and then the numbers 0-9. You should eventually get the right combination and be able to play the game."

Wow. Just basically guess. I really wish I could add to that with sarcasm, but I think nobody could send that up better than the way it's written. So, let us just sit back and marvel at it, shall we?