games that i do generally just want to try
Never mind illegal, its immoral (it just is!)
I don't think it's immoral to crack a game that you have legitimately paid for. There is no technical reason why I should have to cart the discs around with me as every game performs a full install. There is no technical reason for them to ever leave the shelf other than for the first installation and for system reformats.
On that note, don't forget that EA like to pull stunts like the two installation limit, so if you have to reinstall Windows twice, you can no-longer play the game you legitimately paid for. You can't seriously say it's immoral to work around that.
It's ironic that in this day and age the pirates get a better quality product, games that you can install and have just work, films that don't force you to sit through trailers and studio logos, music that will work on any device you happen to own. None of the measures they put in place actually do anything to stop the pirates they just annoy those who bought legally. Surely that is immoral. At the very least it's stupid.
I'm not trying to defend people who pirate games that are readily available, but cracking your games, currently illegal? yes. Immoral? I don't think so.
For what it's worth, Alice was my first experience with EA's download manager, and sure while the app is a bit clunky and slow, like Steam was in the early days, it seems to work ok for the most part, and it let me install and run Alice on both my laptop and my desktop, so I guess it's fine.