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Vuvuzelas Blare On Pirated Copies of Music Game
An anonymous reader sends this quote from Wired:
"A novel anti-piracy measure baked into the Nintendo DS version of Michael Jackson: The Experience makes copied versions of the game unplayable and taunts gamers with the blaring sound of vuvuzelas. Many games have installed switches that detect pirated copies and act accordingly, like ending the user's game after 20 minutes. Ubisoft has come under fire multiple times for what players have seen as highly restrictive anti-piracy measures that annoy legitimate users as much or more so than pirates. But some more-mischievous developers have used tricks similar to the vuvuzela fanfare to mess with pirates. Batman: Arkham Asylum lets unauthorized users play through the game as if it were a normal copy, with a single exception: Batman's cape-glide ability doesn't work, rendering the game impossible to finish — although you might bash your head against it trying to make what are now impossible jumps. If you pirate Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, brace yourself for an explosion, as your entire base will detonate within 30 seconds of loading the game."
The Black Sunday hack. Apparently not an urban legend.
For the lulz?
About 15 years ago a friend of mine had a game called "Settlers 2". Pretty standard RTS in a medieval/fantasy setting IIRC, quite cute.
The CD it came on had visible pattern burned into it that would screw up reading the disc very easily. Using various blind copiers I managed to get a decent iso image off it. Of course the burn patterns weren't just to stop you reading it....
If the game code did not detect the burn patterns in the CD it was running from it was very clever. Tricksy.
In the game you had an economy based on a few things, one of which was iron. Another was pork. You needed farms to get pigs, and an abattoir to turn that into ham. The ham was then used as food for the settlers. Specifically the miners. They ate ham then went mining for iron ore, and the foundry turned out iron which you could then turn into weapons and other soldier equipment.
After about half an hour of playing I tried to figure out why I had no army. After a lot of squinting it turned out that the iron was coming out of the mines and being carried to the foundry, which was producing.... pigs.
I just had to laugh and mentally congratulate the developers for that.
I found one of these when I was a teenager. Freaking subtle. Brilliant.
Steve Jackson's OGRE, for the Commodore 64.
I bought it. And did what any good geek would do. Made a backup and played that. And I could never beat it. But I did eventually screw up that disc - the old 5 1/4 discs did mess up fairly often. Especially in the 1541 drive.
So I played the original. And beat it. Made another backup. Couldn't beat it. A light went off.
I did a statistical analysis. All I did was fire at treads for several games. They're supposed to be hit 33% of the time regardless of weapon or circumstance. On the backup copy, it was close to 17%. On the original copy about 33%.
They built a single column shift into the game if it detects its a copy.
EVIL.
Especially seeing as how - wait for it - I was a paying customer. Thanks guys.
On the plus side, I did get really good at that game. You had to be playing at a column shift disadvantage.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I don't know, maybe it's just me, but right now, after reading your post (and many before, as well as the summary and, of course, the tittle) I just can't seem to remember the name of the game.
The only thing in my head is "vuvuzela".
M$ should add removeing the old DRM systems that don't work in X64 to the MS malware remove windows update.