I was on the outer fringes of a piracy ring, and had left school by the point floppy disks came out anyway. A friend of a friend of a friend would download stuff from BBS (and over the university internet hookup when the scene started using the net), he'd get them on disks, pass them to a friend, who passed them to my friend, who passed them to me. Never an original in sight, and we often wound up with stuff weeks before it was actually released. (And in some cases stuff that was never commercially released for whatever reason.)
I remember when FAST, The Federation Against Software Theft started busting folk. The friend of my friend buried all his disks in his garden, and my friend gave me all his disks to look after until the heat was off. (I wasn't a "name" in the scene. He was, albeit a very minor one.)
One would hope after the Mass Effect debacle they'll dump the 3 activation thing.
Curious how it's going to work with the direct download version. That's the one I'll probably buy (unless I want to wait god knows how long for any store near me to get the damn thing) but I'm going to wait and see what restrictions there are as I have 3 computers I want to install it on. (My desktop and laptop, and the kids computer.)
Fair point. It's not "buying" software is it. I don't buy as much as I used too. I almost NEVER buy from brick and mortar anymore. You never know what viral payload it may come with. (Starforce etc...)
Oh absolutely. I mean the old "enter serial number" and then you're done... Awesome. Anything beyond that adds more wrinkles, each one of which can screw over the user.
Look at all those poor saps who bought music from Microsoft's service that's shut (or shutting) down. They won't be able to relicense what they've paid for.
The end user is the one who suffers. I spent several weeks unable to play Neverwinter Nights due to the copy protection not liking my CD drive. Wound up having to get a crack just to play what I paid for.
Another great example is Starforce. I have GT Legends here. Came free with GTR2 (which didn't use Starforce). I daren't install it given my last system suffered damage from Starforce. So I've got this great game I really want to play, but daren't risk installing it. Starforce is so woven into the program that it can't be removed.
All this protection does is stop casual copying. Stops me running a copy off for you or whatever. Yet nobody I know who pirates ever did that anyway. They've download whatever they wanted. First it was BBS's. Then FTP's. Now torrents etc... Even when I was pirating stuff years and years ago it was NEVER directly copying the original from a friend.
Finally, there is the ultimate rip off. You buy a game and the copy protection won't play nice for you and you can't load the game, so you take it back to the store... But they won't give you your money back because it's open and you may have copied it...
And they keep making the protection worse and worse... This 3 activation thing... Is that just on the disk based? Or download version as well? Really hope this potentially amazing game isn't going to be ruined by its copy protection.
I've used a variety of DRM'ed products over the years. One thing that concerns me is Spore, the direct download version, is using Digital River. Now I've had two VASTLY different experiences with them.
A couple of years ago I bought Worldwide Soccer Manager from them and the game was unstable as all hell, I couldn't install etc... Had tons of issues. All of which were fixed with a no-cd crack. The game was, in it's shipping state, damn near unusable.
Then I bought a couple of games recently through the service that merely used serial numbers and have been trouble free.
Now I am really excited about Spore, but using Digital River has me on the fence as to whether to buy it.
And apparently the Spore Creature Creator installs a Securom driver from what I've read. Yes, the free demo version of the editor.
Wish they'd just use Steam. I'd pre-order this second if they were using that. Steam is awesome for the publisher due to the protection it offers, and more awesome for the customers. Rather than muck about with finding disks, CD keys etc... I just choose which games to install and let it do it's thing.
I ran SWG before I got WOW, and the difference was night and day. SWG just performed horribly. I wrote off WOW at the time figuring as it was newer, it'd run worse. Not sure what finally made me give it a try, but I still play it now, and made the fatal mistake of introducing my wife to it. (I am now a WOW widower.)
City of Heroes wasn't too bad when I tried that. Certainly looked nice. Handled nice. Had a few nice touches. Nothing immediately leapt out as me as being awful.
Wish LOTRO ran better as I probably would dump WOW for a while and head off to Middle Earth. Perhaps in a year or two when my system is probably going to be better I'll give it a go again. (Assuming it's still running then.)
Don't get me wrong, LOTRO's engine is pretty nifty. I really liked the game too. Were it not for the graphic engine issues I had I'd be a customer now. However the engine isn't as optimized as WOW it would appear. And the fact is even if WOW is less detailed, does it matter? I can't say I ever look at WOW and think "Man that looks crap". Blizz have always been good at writing engines that scale nicely IMO. Used to run WOW on a god awful laptop. Comparing LOTRO and WOW, WOW just looks much MUCH better than LOTRO. I did crank LOTRO up to maximum detail and it looked amazing, but I couldn't play it sadly as the FPS was in the low single figures. (Looked gorgeous though:))
Not tried Age of Conan.
Tabula Rasa... Much worse than LOTRO. Had lots of weird graphical glitches in it. There were other reasons I didn't buy the game. (Didn't bode well when the quest text was broken for the very first quest I found, telling me I needed to "collect 20 ????".) I liked it, but I felt it was a good six months away from being out of beta. (This was back in December or so.) I don't care what the packaging says:)
Only other recent game I have that hits the hardware is The Orange Box, and the games runs astonishingly well, even on the six year old system I have. (That has what it had from the start in it, except an upgraded graphics card, which is massively hampered by the rest of system bottleneck.)
One more thing about WOW: Running it on my laptop, NOTHING seems to make the laptop run hotter than that game. Most of the time I can touch the laptop etc... Run WOW for any length of time and the underneath gets uncomfortably hot. No other game does this that I've found. (Not had the laptop long so there may be others. LOTRO sure as hell didn't heat it up that much.)
Wasn't this done years and years ago? There was some software in the late 90's that did just this. I remember it being advertised in PC Gamer and the like. I think it used CART racing data, or possibly Toyota Atlantic. Can't for the life of me remember the name though.
And it's easy to beat Lewis Hamilton. Just make it out the pitlane in one piece.
Which means the game has been sensibly designed. It always amazes when devs fuck that part of game design up. Lord of the Rings Online for example. On a system that can run WOW with all the gorgeous eye candy on, LOTRO looks like utter crap in comparison and can't run at full detail. I spent more time on my trial trying to get the game to run nicely. And even when it did, it had nasty stuttering (on multiple systems).
Was worried when I clicked the link, but having read the specs, my six year old Dell can run Spore. Not very well probably, but can run it.
My newer boxes should work great. Even my laptop.
Really excited about this game. Look forward to the editor demo. (Be damned if I'm buying the editor when they release it. I can wait for the game for the full thing.)
What with Spore coming out in some fashion on the iPhone too, could wind up as game of the year. (I mean legitimately. Not one of these that wins a random GOTY award.)
1) The mere suggestion that my friend was using driving aids would get you punched rather hard by him. Even back when we were using keyboards to control Crammond's games, he turned them all OFF! He never uses driving aids.
2) No, I've never played Sony's F1 games, because they never released them in the US market when they had exclusivity. I've heard they were fairly dire though. Not sure how this is relevant to a discussion on PC F1 games though.
Crammond's controls were always sublime. I loved F1GP and GP2. GP3 was okay... GP4 was horrid. Looked awesome but everyone I know had some sort of issue with the game, from it not working at all, to not playing nice with their wheel, crashing for no apparent reason etc... rFactor and GTR2 are my drug of choice right now. Still play GPL and NR2003 from time to time. Not a fan of NASCAR, but racing Daytona in NR2003 is an awesome experience.
Codemasters getting the F1 license is a disaster if you're a sim junkie. They may as well have no bothered giving it to anyone. You KNOW the people who made the decision have NO idea what sort of games they actually produce. Codemasters wouldn't know a decent race sim if it came and punched them in the face. They should stick to pissing away their time filing cease and desists against people sharing their stupid 8-bit Dizzy games. Seriously, Codemasters last decent race game was Colin McRae 2, and that was no sim.
A friend and I were talking about this today and he said he's going to post on their forums and demand a true sim like many others are doing, just so when they don't listen and deliver their usual arcadey crap he can say he did something. I said I wasn't going to bother, simply because when Codemasters release their title, we'll be in the same boat we are now. Still waiting for a decent F1 sim on the PC.
Said friend picked up "GRID" this weekend, Codies latest race game. He figured he'd give them a chance with this F1 news. "A blend of arcade and sim" is how the game is billed. When he was able to drive around in a Formula 1000 car at Spa using only his gears to slow down, never once touching the brakes, and still win the race... Well that right there, my friends, is all you need to know about Codemasters ability to write a decent racing game.
Anyone giving them the benefit of the doubt is clearly either naive, or has never played any of their titles. Having played pretty much every racing game Codemasters have made since the late 90's... Satan will be going to work in a snowplow before Codemasters make a decent sim. They just can't do it. End of story.
Except all Blizzard do is add new content for the bloody endgamers. Fuck everyone else. We got thrown a bone when they added a slew of new quests to Dustwallow, but other than that, Blizzard ADD NOTHING of use to anyone below level 70. The one time they tried, they A) announced it in advance (the big floaty pyramid thing whose name escapes me) so there was no "HOLY SHIT!" moment when it appeared. And then they utterly fucked up various elements of it and wound up getting rid of it.
Blizzard are the latest MMO company out there. NOTHING ever changes in the game. They may add new content, but so what? My wife grinds out the same daily quests every day. I'm running round with about my 20th character trawling through all the same shit I've done a hundred times before. You'd think there wouldn't be any fucking gnomes left in Gnomeregan now, but oh no, those refugees still come running up that slope.
By being popular, WOW is cursed, because Blizzard are so terrified of any major changes, they just sit on their arses and do NOTHING. The game outside of Outlands, aside from a few minor additions (Dustwallow quests for example), is identical to the one I started playing three years ago.
Nothing evolves. Nothing changes. I think WOW will lose a good number of PVP fans when Warhammer launches. Ask any hardened PVP'er and they will tell you that PVP in WOW is utterly broken.
What amazes me is it says about searching iPod's for illegal content... And in Canada currently it's LEGAL to download music. (Despite the CRIA's objections.)
For so long I've been proud to live in Canada, but with that fucktard Harper at the helm they're trying more and more to make it America 2.
but to say it's "just a movie" is like saying "the Bible is just a book"--perhaps in some literal sense it's "a book," but it's one that has shaped the course of human history.
Yeah, and in the case of The Bible, not for the better.
And I love the way you name ONE ACTOR from the trilogy who went on to success... Because there aren't any others, and Harrison would have been a star with or without Star Wars I think.
Yeah. I mean everyone knows it's a type of orange...
Sorry, couldn't resist. Any action movie fan worth their salt knows what Mandarin is.
There's an easy way to check the TV broadcasting in the western world anyway. Use some of the P2P video software like Sopcast etc... All of them carry all the CCTV stations live, as well as other Chinese stations.
Oh I'm fully aware it's Usenet and stuff like that. It just kills me that the people who release to the torrent sites can't spend just 30 seconds unarchiving it. It's not so bad with TV shows, but anything else where you may want to pick a choose (say one song from an album) you can't.
And before anyone leaps on me for downloading music, it's legal here in Canada currently due to the levies we pay on certain blank media etc...
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The scream the aliens here is me finding out the missus is pregnant...
Imagine a beowulf cluster of... Wait, nevermind...
I was on the outer fringes of a piracy ring, and had left school by the point floppy disks came out anyway. A friend of a friend of a friend would download stuff from BBS (and over the university internet hookup when the scene started using the net), he'd get them on disks, pass them to a friend, who passed them to my friend, who passed them to me. Never an original in sight, and we often wound up with stuff weeks before it was actually released. (And in some cases stuff that was never commercially released for whatever reason.)
I remember when FAST, The Federation Against Software Theft started busting folk. The friend of my friend buried all his disks in his garden, and my friend gave me all his disks to look after until the heat was off. (I wasn't a "name" in the scene. He was, albeit a very minor one.)
Good times:)
The Macrovision thing comes from Installshield, NOT EA. I Googled it. Vague info, but it's definitely Installshield related.
It installs a service without telling you (thank you, Winpatrol). I've disabled it. Nothing untoward has happened from doing so.
One would hope after the Mass Effect debacle they'll dump the 3 activation thing.
Curious how it's going to work with the direct download version. That's the one I'll probably buy (unless I want to wait god knows how long for any store near me to get the damn thing) but I'm going to wait and see what restrictions there are as I have 3 computers I want to install it on. (My desktop and laptop, and the kids computer.)
'That's not a penis! My species reproduces asexually! It's merely a defense mechanism that spurts a viscous liquid when we're threatened!
I'm SO using that line the next time I go clubbing!
Fair point. It's not "buying" software is it. I don't buy as much as I used too. I almost NEVER buy from brick and mortar anymore. You never know what viral payload it may come with. (Starforce etc...)
Oh absolutely. I mean the old "enter serial number" and then you're done... Awesome. Anything beyond that adds more wrinkles, each one of which can screw over the user.
Look at all those poor saps who bought music from Microsoft's service that's shut (or shutting) down. They won't be able to relicense what they've paid for.
The end user is the one who suffers. I spent several weeks unable to play Neverwinter Nights due to the copy protection not liking my CD drive. Wound up having to get a crack just to play what I paid for.
Another great example is Starforce. I have GT Legends here. Came free with GTR2 (which didn't use Starforce). I daren't install it given my last system suffered damage from Starforce. So I've got this great game I really want to play, but daren't risk installing it. Starforce is so woven into the program that it can't be removed.
All this protection does is stop casual copying. Stops me running a copy off for you or whatever. Yet nobody I know who pirates ever did that anyway. They've download whatever they wanted. First it was BBS's. Then FTP's. Now torrents etc... Even when I was pirating stuff years and years ago it was NEVER directly copying the original from a friend.
Finally, there is the ultimate rip off. You buy a game and the copy protection won't play nice for you and you can't load the game, so you take it back to the store... But they won't give you your money back because it's open and you may have copied it...
And they keep making the protection worse and worse... This 3 activation thing... Is that just on the disk based? Or download version as well? Really hope this potentially amazing game isn't going to be ruined by its copy protection.
I've used a variety of DRM'ed products over the years. One thing that concerns me is Spore, the direct download version, is using Digital River. Now I've had two VASTLY different experiences with them.
A couple of years ago I bought Worldwide Soccer Manager from them and the game was unstable as all hell, I couldn't install etc... Had tons of issues. All of which were fixed with a no-cd crack. The game was, in it's shipping state, damn near unusable.
Then I bought a couple of games recently through the service that merely used serial numbers and have been trouble free.
Now I am really excited about Spore, but using Digital River has me on the fence as to whether to buy it.
And apparently the Spore Creature Creator installs a Securom driver from what I've read. Yes, the free demo version of the editor.
Wish they'd just use Steam. I'd pre-order this second if they were using that. Steam is awesome for the publisher due to the protection it offers, and more awesome for the customers. Rather than muck about with finding disks, CD keys etc... I just choose which games to install and let it do it's thing.
I ran SWG before I got WOW, and the difference was night and day. SWG just performed horribly. I wrote off WOW at the time figuring as it was newer, it'd run worse. Not sure what finally made me give it a try, but I still play it now, and made the fatal mistake of introducing my wife to it. (I am now a WOW widower.)
City of Heroes wasn't too bad when I tried that. Certainly looked nice. Handled nice. Had a few nice touches. Nothing immediately leapt out as me as being awful.
Wish LOTRO ran better as I probably would dump WOW for a while and head off to Middle Earth. Perhaps in a year or two when my system is probably going to be better I'll give it a go again. (Assuming it's still running then.)
Don't get me wrong, LOTRO's engine is pretty nifty. I really liked the game too. Were it not for the graphic engine issues I had I'd be a customer now. However the engine isn't as optimized as WOW it would appear. And the fact is even if WOW is less detailed, does it matter? I can't say I ever look at WOW and think "Man that looks crap". Blizz have always been good at writing engines that scale nicely IMO. Used to run WOW on a god awful laptop. Comparing LOTRO and WOW, WOW just looks much MUCH better than LOTRO. I did crank LOTRO up to maximum detail and it looked amazing, but I couldn't play it sadly as the FPS was in the low single figures. (Looked gorgeous though:))
Not tried Age of Conan.
Tabula Rasa... Much worse than LOTRO. Had lots of weird graphical glitches in it. There were other reasons I didn't buy the game. (Didn't bode well when the quest text was broken for the very first quest I found, telling me I needed to "collect 20 ????".) I liked it, but I felt it was a good six months away from being out of beta. (This was back in December or so.) I don't care what the packaging says:)
Only other recent game I have that hits the hardware is The Orange Box, and the games runs astonishingly well, even on the six year old system I have. (That has what it had from the start in it, except an upgraded graphics card, which is massively hampered by the rest of system bottleneck.)
One more thing about WOW: Running it on my laptop, NOTHING seems to make the laptop run hotter than that game. Most of the time I can touch the laptop etc... Run WOW for any length of time and the underneath gets uncomfortably hot. No other game does this that I've found. (Not had the laptop long so there may be others. LOTRO sure as hell didn't heat it up that much.)
Wasn't this done years and years ago? There was some software in the late 90's that did just this. I remember it being advertised in PC Gamer and the like. I think it used CART racing data, or possibly Toyota Atlantic. Can't for the life of me remember the name though.
And it's easy to beat Lewis Hamilton. Just make it out the pitlane in one piece.
Which means the game has been sensibly designed. It always amazes when devs fuck that part of game design up. Lord of the Rings Online for example. On a system that can run WOW with all the gorgeous eye candy on, LOTRO looks like utter crap in comparison and can't run at full detail. I spent more time on my trial trying to get the game to run nicely. And even when it did, it had nasty stuttering (on multiple systems).
Was worried when I clicked the link, but having read the specs, my six year old Dell can run Spore. Not very well probably, but can run it.
My newer boxes should work great. Even my laptop.
Really excited about this game. Look forward to the editor demo. (Be damned if I'm buying the editor when they release it. I can wait for the game for the full thing.)
What with Spore coming out in some fashion on the iPhone too, could wind up as game of the year. (I mean legitimately. Not one of these that wins a random GOTY award.)
To answer your question:
1) The mere suggestion that my friend was using driving aids would get you punched rather hard by him. Even back when we were using keyboards to control Crammond's games, he turned them all OFF! He never uses driving aids.
2) No, I've never played Sony's F1 games, because they never released them in the US market when they had exclusivity. I've heard they were fairly dire though. Not sure how this is relevant to a discussion on PC F1 games though.
Crammond's controls were always sublime. I loved F1GP and GP2. GP3 was okay... GP4 was horrid. Looked awesome but everyone I know had some sort of issue with the game, from it not working at all, to not playing nice with their wheel, crashing for no apparent reason etc... rFactor and GTR2 are my drug of choice right now. Still play GPL and NR2003 from time to time. Not a fan of NASCAR, but racing Daytona in NR2003 is an awesome experience.
Codemasters getting the F1 license is a disaster if you're a sim junkie. They may as well have no bothered giving it to anyone. You KNOW the people who made the decision have NO idea what sort of games they actually produce. Codemasters wouldn't know a decent race sim if it came and punched them in the face. They should stick to pissing away their time filing cease and desists against people sharing their stupid 8-bit Dizzy games. Seriously, Codemasters last decent race game was Colin McRae 2, and that was no sim.
A friend and I were talking about this today and he said he's going to post on their forums and demand a true sim like many others are doing, just so when they don't listen and deliver their usual arcadey crap he can say he did something. I said I wasn't going to bother, simply because when Codemasters release their title, we'll be in the same boat we are now. Still waiting for a decent F1 sim on the PC.
Said friend picked up "GRID" this weekend, Codies latest race game. He figured he'd give them a chance with this F1 news. "A blend of arcade and sim" is how the game is billed. When he was able to drive around in a Formula 1000 car at Spa using only his gears to slow down, never once touching the brakes, and still win the race... Well that right there, my friends, is all you need to know about Codemasters ability to write a decent racing game.
Anyone giving them the benefit of the doubt is clearly either naive, or has never played any of their titles. Having played pretty much every racing game Codemasters have made since the late 90's... Satan will be going to work in a snowplow before Codemasters make a decent sim. They just can't do it. End of story.
Already did.
Except all Blizzard do is add new content for the bloody endgamers. Fuck everyone else. We got thrown a bone when they added a slew of new quests to Dustwallow, but other than that, Blizzard ADD NOTHING of use to anyone below level 70. The one time they tried, they A) announced it in advance (the big floaty pyramid thing whose name escapes me) so there was no "HOLY SHIT!" moment when it appeared. And then they utterly fucked up various elements of it and wound up getting rid of it.
Blizzard are the latest MMO company out there. NOTHING ever changes in the game. They may add new content, but so what? My wife grinds out the same daily quests every day. I'm running round with about my 20th character trawling through all the same shit I've done a hundred times before. You'd think there wouldn't be any fucking gnomes left in Gnomeregan now, but oh no, those refugees still come running up that slope.
By being popular, WOW is cursed, because Blizzard are so terrified of any major changes, they just sit on their arses and do NOTHING. The game outside of Outlands, aside from a few minor additions (Dustwallow quests for example), is identical to the one I started playing three years ago.
Nothing evolves. Nothing changes. I think WOW will lose a good number of PVP fans when Warhammer launches. Ask any hardened PVP'er and they will tell you that PVP in WOW is utterly broken.
A big fat shaft.
What amazes me is it says about searching iPod's for illegal content... And in Canada currently it's LEGAL to download music. (Despite the CRIA's objections.)
For so long I've been proud to live in Canada, but with that fucktard Harper at the helm they're trying more and more to make it America 2.
I'm sure if the media companies could go back and retroactively change the commands it would be:
And God said: Thou shalt not violate copyright, nor burn for thy friend thy latest Avril Lavigne CD.
but to say it's "just a movie" is like saying "the Bible is just a book"--perhaps in some literal sense it's "a book," but it's one that has shaped the course of human history.
Yeah, and in the case of The Bible, not for the better.
And I love the way you name ONE ACTOR from the trilogy who went on to success... Because there aren't any others, and Harrison would have been a star with or without Star Wars I think.
Yeah. I mean everyone knows it's a type of orange...
Sorry, couldn't resist. Any action movie fan worth their salt knows what Mandarin is.
There's an easy way to check the TV broadcasting in the western world anyway. Use some of the P2P video software like Sopcast etc... All of them carry all the CCTV stations live, as well as other Chinese stations.
Yes, it was called DIVX.
Did they break in with a sledgehammer?
I was going to post how awesome the "shockthemonkey" tag was. And you just made things even better.
Man, those must be some real big time thieves! Hope the cops don't give up on trying to catch them.
Reading all this just makes me think of "The Wire".
Oh I'm fully aware it's Usenet and stuff like that. It just kills me that the people who release to the torrent sites can't spend just 30 seconds unarchiving it. It's not so bad with TV shows, but anything else where you may want to pick a choose (say one song from an album) you can't.
And before anyone leaps on me for downloading music, it's legal here in Canada currently due to the levies we pay on certain blank media etc...