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."

Comments

It needs copy protection?

[plover]

Seriously, people would copy a game playing Michael Jackson? Seems like the vuvuzelas are redundant.

Re:It needs copy protection?

[hairyfeet]

More like you've been struck by...a total idiot. While this particular "trick" is obvious to anyone NOT what the real game is supposed to be like, one of the things that helped to kill the developers of Titan's Quest on the PC was their frankly insane copy protection. It would make a "pirated" game glitch, skip, and be all around unplayable for any length of time, but of course word quickly got out that "The game is a buggy POS" and people avoided it like the clap. It didn't help that the developers were so damned paranoid that ANYONE that complained of a bug was automatically labeled a pirate by them.

It is a damned shame I didn't somehow save the chatboard because me and one of the developers got into a nasty argument over that, with me going so far as to show him a pic of the game box sitting on top of my local paper with the date visible and he STILL accused me of being a pirate, saying I must have photoshopped the thing in the under 15 minutes it took me to take the pic and upload. Needless to say the next pic I uploaded was one of me chunking the POS game in the garbage, along with a promise to slam the game wherever it was being sold online (which I did).

So they really have to be careful with the anti-piracy crap, and they ought to give us something in return for putting up with their shit. Personally I think there ought to be a rule that after 2 years or the developer stops pushing patches, whichever comes first, a DRM removal patch should HAVE TO be released. That way those of us that buy our game fair and square don't end up having to hunt for cracks because their &^$%&^%$&$ DRM doesn't work on modern systems, or even worse have our new machine shit itself and die because their ring 0 crap is designed for x86 and we've moved on to X64.

A FINAL WORD OF WARNING...ALWAYS be sure to back up your machine BEFORE installing any older game on X64!!! Because I have found out the hard way that there are certain version of Starforce, safedisc, and SecuROM that will happily install on X64 but WILL NOT UNINSTALL, even with their supposed removal tools, and will cause all kinds of hell on your system! We are talking inability to hibernate or shutdown properly, random glitches, screwed up burns on your drives, it is a mess and the ONLY way I've found to fix it is to either boot into a second OS and remove the files, followed by a safe mode reg cleaning, or a full wipe and reinstall. Frankly I don't see why those damned Ring 0 DRM creators can't be busted just like malware writers, because they sure as hell can cause just as big a mess. Oh and be careful if you have both Starforce and either Safedisc or SecuROM, because certain versions will NOT play nice with each other and cause system instability! It is sad that it has gotten to the point that I just get a pirate version of my older games rather than using the discs, simply because the pirate version is less likely to mess up my X64 install.

Re:butbutbutbutbut

[BadAnalogyGuy]

It turns it into a demo, which could lead to an actual game purchase.

False premise

[russotto]

The vuvuzela noise isn't a copy-protection technique. It's just that the South African version of the game was the first to be cracked; it's in the legit .za copies as well.

Re:Detection = failure

[Locke2005]

The thing to remember about warez crackers, is they tend to be more skilled than the people who release the games. Trying to outsmart them is a fallacy.

Then why don't they try, I dunno, maybe writing their own games instead of leeching off the work of others!

Re:butbutbutbutbut

[jackbird]

The Black Sunday hack. Apparently not an urban legend.

M$ should add removeing the old DRM to malware rem

[Joe The Dragon]

M$ should add removeing the old DRM systems that don't work in X64 to the MS malware remove windows update.

Re:Old school trick

[Anonymous Coward]

Steve Jackson here, posting as Anonymous Coward. Fnord.

I had not heard that story, but it could be true. Origin was under no obligation to discuss copy protection stunts with me, so "I didn't know" /= "It didn't happen." Still, if this is the first I've heard of it in 20-odd years, it held up pretty well.

A column shift on the whole CRT would have been trivially easy to detect, as attacks that should hit 1/6 of the time will now hit exactly never. A good player will wind up making some of those 1/6 chance (1 to 2) shots every game, unproductive though they are, just to use up odd bits of firepower. So perhaps, if this is really going on, it is a shift only on tread attacks, or only on attacks with odds of 1 to 1 or better?