For some forms of copy protection you don't need a crack. You can make an image or mini-image off of your original disk and use that for the copy protection check. Safedisc protection for example can be imaged this way with Alcohol 120%.
The torrent is not too a cracked version of the game. It is a disc image including the copy protection which is then mounted via Alcohol 120%. Which means you need to have the DVD file stored on your hard drive, eating up space. Some recent copy protection has proved very hard to crack, so of course the pirates work around the problem. Sometimes they distribute "mini images" which are disc images only containing the protection components the game checks for. I know a lot of people think Valve's steam is a horrible thing, but at least I was able to buy it and download it and play. I'm still waiting for my Civilization 4 preorder to ship (the special edition wasn't available locally) from Amazon. Meanwhile, pirates are already enjoying the game.
"In 1984-5, if you liked video games, you owned a Commodore 64."
And thank god for that. I was a HUGE Atari fan and played that console like crazy. My family also has a monstrous, green screen, 32K, tape driven Commodore PET. We used to play the occasional game of horse racing on it when we could be patient enough for the tape to load, but the Atari was the cornerstone of gaming in our house. Then the market died. All most overnight Atari became a bad word on playgrounds everywhere. Admitting you played video games could be dangerous in certain circumstances. Enter the Commodore 64. Enter the world of much more in depth gaming. Ultima, Zork, Seven Cities of Gold, MULE etc. And while becoming obsessed with these great games, I also discovered programming and how much fun computers could be when you weren't playing games on them. If it wasn't for the video game crash, who knows? I might not have a job in the IT profession. I just might have ended up one of those console junkies and never learned the joys of Civilization (1, 2, 3 and shortly 4).
Re:Why does everyone hate E.T. so MUCH?
on
20 Years of NES
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· Score: 1
"C'mon, who EVER heard of Custer's Revenge when the Atari was big?"
I did. I must have been 8 or 9 at the time. They ran ads for the game in Electronic Games magazine (which I read religiously). I remember being confused as to what "Swedish Erotica" was. There was quite a number of complaints at the time about the game. I can recall letters complaining about the magazine having ads for pornography considering that it was widely read by children. Sort of the "Hot Coffee" of the time.
Snakes on a Plane! Snakes. On. A. Plane. With a plane. And snakes and Samuel Jackson. Samuel Jackson on a plane with snakes! You say his star power is waning? It's got snakes! On a plane!
Yeah, they are fans of the movie. The movie has pretty much become a cult classic. In a way it makes sense, the Warriors had to have inspired some of the '80s gang beatem up video games like Double Dragon and Bad Dudes.
Apple never comes out and says "we castrated this". Look at the iMac G5, they pitch the screen mirroring as a useful feature and ignore the fact that they are preventing the hardware from providing a more useful feature (driving 2 screens) that it is perfectly capable of.
"Apple does have a track record of balancing user's rights with profit"
What do you mean? User rights in the technical sense? Consumer rights in the business sense? Apple has historically imposed artificial limitations on systems it sells in order to arbitrarily stratify their product line and preserve profit. See for example the fact that it takes a firmware hack to allow an iMac G5 to extend the desktop to a second display. Never mind that the hardware is perfectly capable. Or the castrated Classic and Color Classic models (among many others). If MS would do as you say then they should be getting a kickback from the spyware vendors. I'm not aware of any evidence suggesting they are. I'm not an MS fanboy, the fact that many applications require admin access causes me plenty of hell on a weekly basis. I for one think that at least a real move to a sudo style authentication would be preferable to the current state of affairs.
"Till it's fanless I'll just stick with a shuttle or mini mac."
Implies that the key requirement was not having a fan. Or should I extrapolate - "I'd take a PC without a fan, or a Mac with a fan in my small form factor choices"?
I guess if implementing the sudo style User Account Protection mechanism is nothing, then Mac OS X must be doing nothing too. Consider that OS X uses the same mechanism when you need to do something requiring admin access.
No actually I don't care. Whether you like something or not is purely subjective. If you think cartoony things are childish and you are too mature for that - that's your opinion. And no I don't care who get's your dollar. You replied to my comment acting like an ass, so I respond in a like manner. All I was trying to say is the art direction and technical design are two different things. And having one side of the equation well done does not mean the other side will be. Look at Everquest 2. High powered engine, but it really has bland and generic art direction. And your blanket statement that PC gaming is about building the ultra uber system and pushing it to it's limits is retarded. I'm sure one of the reasons World of Warcraft is less detailed is specifically because they wanted to have a game that required less computing power to play. This way even the iMac users could play. This means more cash for them. Apparently it's worked as they have the highest number of subscribers. A number of the former EQ players on my WoW server didn't buy EQ 2 because the hardware requirements were too high. Graphics do not equal gameplay. And yes a game of Pong is still fun even with those crap graphics. Just as a game of traditional air hockey is still fun.
"If I wanted to look at graphics that would run on my PS2 I wouldn't buy computer games. And that's what pc gaming is all about. It's about the dude that wants to build a high end blazing computer. And World of Warcraft just doesn't push mine to any kind of limit."
Um, having cool graphics that make your video card heat up is what pc gaming is about? How about "fun"? Have you heard of that? Do you think maybe, just maybe the fact that WoW is dealing with a huge number of active objects at any given time is the reason the texture detail and model level is lower than in say Doom 3? How many monsters do you ever see in one room in Doom 3? Do you think an MMO with Doom 3 level graphics is feasible at this point in technology? Do you think maybe the style of game places demands on how the resources are used? I would really, really like to see a huge world the size of WoW's stream into seamlessly into a PS2 at the same level of detail. Give me a fucking break. You should maybe think about scale of the game and game mechanics before you make comments like that. There was a reason that Doom 3 didn't support the 32-64 player online multiplayer that was common in games that came out earlier than it (i.e. Battlefield 1942). You couldn't store the graphics, textures and geometry for such a map in a current computer's memory, nor could you render 64 Doom 3 characters in real time with anything approaching a playable framerate. Does that mean that 64 player online FPS games such more than Doom and aren't fun because they have lower grade graphics? I guess you sure won't be playing Civilization 4 because it won't push your uber graphics card to the limit. Or just about any strategy game. Does that mean they suck? I have a sneaking suspicion you would suggest that, yes it does. How often when running around in Battlefield 2 do you kick back, and just wander around going "wow, graphics are so uber in this game". Probably not long - if you do "BOOM! HEADSHOT"! Respawn for you. Games are about playing and having fun, graphics complement that. When I say a game has good art direction versus technical superiority I'm not saying I don't appreciate an advanced graphics engine. Of course the most whiz bang graphics engine can you be used to make completely uninspired boring ass graphics. But hey if all you want is some game to make the fans on your uber video card (or cards I should say, as you better be running SLI 7800GTXs in order to get your most uberness performance or else you are just some pc gaming noob) whine and scream for mercy, good for you. Just impying that PC gaming is about high end graphics is totally stupid. That's one thing you get with newer games, but for most people gameplay is the deciding factor. And you're right WoW does look cartoony. Warcraft 1 looked cartoony. Warcraft 2 looked cartoony. Warcraft 3 inspite of the move to 3D graphic looked cartoony ON PURPOSE. World of Warcraft looks cartoony because it is a Warcraft game and Warcraft games have a consistent cartoony look. I bet you hated Zelda Windwalker because it used cell shading too. Of course other people have different opinions on World of Warcraft's look:
"World of Warcraft's brilliance is in eschewing realism and building a whole world in a storybook/cartoonish style, so playing World of Warcraft is like strolling through a fairy-tale picture book with eye candy around every corner. The animations are smooth and weighty. Subtle lighting effects set the tone and mood for each area. And the little details -- like seeing your breath in the snow-covered peaks -- make this unreal place feel real."
"Proving once again that crafting a unique look and feel depends on much more than polygon counts and technology, Art Director William Petras and his Blizzard team built a colorful, varied virtual world in which every environment, location, creature, character and item seems like it naturally b
Nah it's so wankers like me who don't have time to do 40 man raids will be able to 10 man MC at level 70. Then all of you who have been running MC and BWL for ages and are bored of it get to go tackle the new lvl 70 instances that require 40 man teams. Or something like that.
I kind of like my Paladin. I can get completely hammered so that I can't see straight and yet still wander about whacking mobs and leveling. The worst that will happen is a forget to give someone a stupid 5 minute buff and they yell at me. (Seriously, a difficult fight for a pally does take some keyboard kung-fu, but not much compared to other classes)
I play World of Warcraft and was just thinking about this today. Last night I installed Quake 4, which has some pretty amazing graphics and I got to thinking. While the Quake 4 (and Doom 3 for that matter) graphic technology is amazing, the art direction is surprisingly generic. Everything from the drop ship sequence to the interior of the human space ship was rendered very similar to Aliens. What World of Warcraft has is not the number of polygons or realistic imagery, it has a consistently crafted and distinctive look. So while it may be "low tech" it's very well conceived and quite beautiful to look at.
(although I sure wish they would allow more modifications to the characters body shape, size and facial features ala City of Heroes)
Re:This suggests a great Linux-boosting strategy
on
Quake 4 Linux
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· Score: 1
And seeing as id is the developer of one of the most popular engines used for multiple games throughout the industry, as long as they keep using OpenGL Microsoft is going to find it hard to just get rid of it. Honestly, supporting the Mac would make more sense to me from the standpoint of diversity (and I'm sure Q4 will most likely hit Macs at some point, seeing as Doom 3 did). Supporting Linux the way they do now, with a client and server release directly over the Internet to Linux users makes sense as the current Linux user base is a very net-savvy and tech savvy group of people. I think it's very cool that id does this, I think it would have been even cooler if the client had been included on the in store CD. It may not have been because the distributor doesn't want to deal with technical support issues for Linux users. That's the biggest difference between a full blown Linux release and a "stealth" one like with Q4.
Maybe, but maybe not. The Xbox 360 was built with procedural texture rendering in mind. This means that a lot of textures (especially environmental ones) are rendered on the fly via an algorithm versus being stored as bitmaps. The biggest use of space in game installs is do to graphics (textures) and pre-rendered movies. If you look at current PC games which offer much higher resolution than the current consoles, you will see that full game installs are usually less than 4GB. Now storing tons of pre-rendered HD quality video will suck up a DVD space quickly, so you probably won't see as much of that. I myself usually prefer game engine cutscenes - and the graphics in the latest systems are good enough to do this quite effectively. The Quake 4 introduction was very effectively done using the game engine.
First played was the original Civilization (on the Amiga). Favorite has to be Civ 2, perhaps just because of all the additions that were made to the game. I always think Colonization was excellent and in sore need of an update. It makes me a little sad to think about all the great turn based strategy games of the past and how few remain today. Master of Orion 3 was a big disappointment.
Console games are also designed for less precision aiming. There is more leeway when aiming in a console fps - so you don't need to be spot on with your shots. On a pc, a good player can potentially get a killing head shot on someone who is so far away that the head itself is just a few pixels on the screen. Which is why so many of the good player crank up their screen resolution at the expense of graphical detail. Boom! Headshot!
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For some forms of copy protection you don't need a crack. You can make an image or mini-image off of your original disk and use that for the copy protection check. Safedisc protection for example can be imaged this way with Alcohol 120%.
Good point.
The torrent is not too a cracked version of the game. It is a disc image including the copy protection which is then mounted via Alcohol 120%. Which means you need to have the DVD file stored on your hard drive, eating up space. Some recent copy protection has proved very hard to crack, so of course the pirates work around the problem. Sometimes they distribute "mini images" which are disc images only containing the protection components the game checks for.
I know a lot of people think Valve's steam is a horrible thing, but at least I was able to buy it and download it and play. I'm still waiting for my Civilization 4 preorder to ship (the special edition wasn't available locally) from Amazon. Meanwhile, pirates are already enjoying the game.
"In 1984-5, if you liked video games, you owned a Commodore 64."
And thank god for that. I was a HUGE Atari fan and played that console like crazy. My family also has a monstrous, green screen, 32K, tape driven Commodore PET. We used to play the occasional game of horse racing on it when we could be patient enough for the tape to load, but the Atari was the cornerstone of gaming in our house. Then the market died. All most overnight Atari became a bad word on playgrounds everywhere. Admitting you played video games could be dangerous in certain circumstances.
Enter the Commodore 64. Enter the world of much more in depth gaming. Ultima, Zork, Seven Cities of Gold, MULE etc.
And while becoming obsessed with these great games, I also discovered programming and how much fun computers could be when you weren't playing games on them.
If it wasn't for the video game crash, who knows? I might not have a job in the IT profession. I just might have ended up one of those console junkies and never learned the joys of Civilization (1, 2, 3 and shortly 4).
"C'mon, who EVER heard of Custer's Revenge when the Atari was big?"
I did. I must have been 8 or 9 at the time. They ran ads for the game in Electronic Games magazine (which I read religiously). I remember being confused as to what "Swedish Erotica" was.
There was quite a number of complaints at the time about the game. I can recall letters complaining about the magazine having ads for pornography considering that it was widely read by children. Sort of the "Hot Coffee" of the time.
Well... David Chapelle plays World of Warcraft.
No longer cool?
Snakes on a Plane! Snakes. On. A. Plane. With a plane. And snakes and Samuel Jackson.
Samuel Jackson on a plane with snakes!
You say his star power is waning?
It's got snakes!
On a plane!
Yeah, they are fans of the movie. The movie has pretty much become a cult classic. In a way it makes sense, the Warriors had to have inspired some of the '80s gang beatem up video games like Double Dragon and Bad Dudes.
Apple never comes out and says "we castrated this". Look at the iMac G5, they pitch the screen mirroring as a useful feature and ignore the fact that they are preventing the hardware from providing a more useful feature (driving 2 screens) that it is perfectly capable of.
"Apple does have a track record of balancing user's rights with profit"
What do you mean? User rights in the technical sense? Consumer rights in the business sense?
Apple has historically imposed artificial limitations on systems it sells in order to arbitrarily stratify their product line and preserve profit. See for example the fact that it takes a firmware hack to allow an iMac G5 to extend the desktop to a second display. Never mind that the hardware is perfectly capable. Or the castrated Classic and Color Classic models (among many others).
If MS would do as you say then they should be getting a kickback from the spyware vendors. I'm not aware of any evidence suggesting they are.
I'm not an MS fanboy, the fact that many applications require admin access causes me plenty of hell on a weekly basis. I for one think that at least a real move to a sudo style authentication would be preferable to the current state of affairs.
"Till it's fanless I'll just stick with a shuttle or mini mac."
Implies that the key requirement was not having a fan. Or should I extrapolate - "I'd take a PC without a fan, or a Mac with a fan in my small form factor choices"?
I guess if implementing the sudo style User Account Protection mechanism is nothing, then Mac OS X must be doing nothing too. Consider that OS X uses the same mechanism when you need to do something requiring admin access.
The Mac Mini has a fan.
I had my Xbox crash several times. Of course I was running the homebrew Xbox version of MAME with a bad romset at the time...
No actually I don't care. Whether you like something or not is purely subjective. If you think cartoony things are childish and you are too mature for that - that's your opinion. And no I don't care who get's your dollar.
You replied to my comment acting like an ass, so I respond in a like manner.
All I was trying to say is the art direction and technical design are two different things. And having one side of the equation well done does not mean the other side will be.
Look at Everquest 2. High powered engine, but it really has bland and generic art direction.
And your blanket statement that PC gaming is about building the ultra uber system and pushing it to it's limits is retarded. I'm sure one of the reasons World of Warcraft is less detailed is specifically because they wanted to have a game that required less computing power to play. This way even the iMac users could play. This means more cash for them. Apparently it's worked as they have the highest number of subscribers. A number of the former EQ players on my WoW server didn't buy EQ 2 because the hardware requirements were too high.
Graphics do not equal gameplay. And yes a game of Pong is still fun even with those crap graphics. Just as a game of traditional air hockey is still fun.
"If I wanted to look at graphics that would run on my PS2 I wouldn't buy computer games. And that's what pc gaming is all about. It's about the dude that wants to build a high end blazing computer. And World of Warcraft just doesn't push mine to any kind of limit."
Um, having cool graphics that make your video card heat up is what pc gaming is about? How about "fun"? Have you heard of that?
Do you think maybe, just maybe the fact that WoW is dealing with a huge number of active objects at any given time is the reason the texture detail and model level is lower than in say Doom 3? How many monsters do you ever see in one room in Doom 3? Do you think an MMO with Doom 3 level graphics is feasible at this point in technology? Do you think maybe the style of game places demands on how the resources are used?
I would really, really like to see a huge world the size of WoW's stream into seamlessly into a PS2 at the same level of detail. Give me a fucking break. You should maybe think about scale of the game and game mechanics before you make comments like that. There was a reason that Doom 3 didn't support the 32-64 player online multiplayer that was common in games that came out earlier than it (i.e. Battlefield 1942). You couldn't store the graphics, textures and geometry for such a map in a current computer's memory, nor could you render 64 Doom 3 characters in real time with anything approaching a playable framerate. Does that mean that 64 player online FPS games such more than Doom and aren't fun because they have lower grade graphics?
I guess you sure won't be playing Civilization 4 because it won't push your uber graphics card to the limit. Or just about any strategy game. Does that mean they suck? I have a sneaking suspicion you would suggest that, yes it does.
How often when running around in Battlefield 2 do you kick back, and just wander around going "wow, graphics are so uber in this game". Probably not long - if you do "BOOM! HEADSHOT"! Respawn for you. Games are about playing and having fun, graphics complement that.
When I say a game has good art direction versus technical superiority I'm not saying I don't appreciate an advanced graphics engine. Of course the most whiz bang graphics engine can you be used to make completely uninspired boring ass graphics.
But hey if all you want is some game to make the fans on your uber video card (or cards I should say, as you better be running SLI 7800GTXs in order to get your most uberness performance or else you are just some pc gaming noob) whine and scream for mercy, good for you. Just impying that PC gaming is about high end graphics is totally stupid. That's one thing you get with newer games, but for most people gameplay is the deciding factor.
And you're right WoW does look cartoony. Warcraft 1 looked cartoony. Warcraft 2 looked cartoony. Warcraft 3 inspite of the move to 3D graphic looked cartoony ON PURPOSE. World of Warcraft looks cartoony because it is a Warcraft game and Warcraft games have a consistent cartoony look. I bet you hated Zelda Windwalker because it used cell shading too. Of course other people have different opinions on World of Warcraft's look:
"World of Warcraft's brilliance is in eschewing realism and building a whole world in a storybook/cartoonish style, so playing World of Warcraft is like strolling through a fairy-tale picture book with eye candy around every corner. The animations are smooth and weighty. Subtle lighting effects set the tone and mood for each area. And the little details -- like seeing your breath in the snow-covered peaks -- make this unreal place feel real."
GameSpy Special Achivement in Art Direction Award 2004
"Proving once again that crafting a unique look and feel depends on much more than polygon counts and technology, Art Director William Petras and his Blizzard team built a colorful, varied virtual world in which every environment, location, creature, character and item seems like it naturally b
The rumors state that the Blood Elves will have a racial drain mana talent. I dunno how that would work...
Nah it's so wankers like me who don't have time to do 40 man raids will be able to 10 man MC at level 70. Then all of you who have been running MC and BWL for ages and are bored of it get to go tackle the new lvl 70 instances that require 40 man teams.
Or something like that.
I kind of like my Paladin. I can get completely hammered so that I can't see straight and yet still wander about whacking mobs and leveling. The worst that will happen is a forget to give someone a stupid 5 minute buff and they yell at me.
(Seriously, a difficult fight for a pally does take some keyboard kung-fu, but not much compared to other classes)
"5 new archetypes for villains to play that are not rehashes of the hero archetypes"
Not exactly rehashes - but many of the power sets are the same or similar. I mean you can have a bad guy shooting fire just as much as a good guy.
I play World of Warcraft and was just thinking about this today. Last night I installed Quake 4, which has some pretty amazing graphics and I got to thinking. While the Quake 4 (and Doom 3 for that matter) graphic technology is amazing, the art direction is surprisingly generic. Everything from the drop ship sequence to the interior of the human space ship was rendered very similar to Aliens.
What World of Warcraft has is not the number of polygons or realistic imagery, it has a consistently crafted and distinctive look. So while it may be "low tech" it's very well conceived and quite beautiful to look at.
(although I sure wish they would allow more modifications to the characters body shape, size and facial features ala City of Heroes)
And seeing as id is the developer of one of the most popular engines used for multiple games throughout the industry, as long as they keep using OpenGL Microsoft is going to find it hard to just get rid of it.
Honestly, supporting the Mac would make more sense to me from the standpoint of diversity (and I'm sure Q4 will most likely hit Macs at some point, seeing as Doom 3 did).
Supporting Linux the way they do now, with a client and server release directly over the Internet to Linux users makes sense as the current Linux user base is a very net-savvy and tech savvy group of people.
I think it's very cool that id does this, I think it would have been even cooler if the client had been included on the in store CD. It may not have been because the distributor doesn't want to deal with technical support issues for Linux users. That's the biggest difference between a full blown Linux release and a "stealth" one like with Q4.
Maybe, but maybe not. The Xbox 360 was built with procedural texture rendering in mind. This means that a lot of textures (especially environmental ones) are rendered on the fly via an algorithm versus being stored as bitmaps. The biggest use of space in game installs is do to graphics (textures) and pre-rendered movies.
If you look at current PC games which offer much higher resolution than the current consoles, you will see that full game installs are usually less than 4GB.
Now storing tons of pre-rendered HD quality video will suck up a DVD space quickly, so you probably won't see as much of that. I myself usually prefer game engine cutscenes - and the graphics in the latest systems are good enough to do this quite effectively. The Quake 4 introduction was very effectively done using the game engine.
First played was the original Civilization (on the Amiga). Favorite has to be Civ 2, perhaps just because of all the additions that were made to the game.
I always think Colonization was excellent and in sore need of an update.
It makes me a little sad to think about all the great turn based strategy games of the past and how few remain today. Master of Orion 3 was a big disappointment.
Console games are also designed for less precision aiming. There is more leeway when aiming in a console fps - so you don't need to be spot on with your shots.
On a pc, a good player can potentially get a killing head shot on someone who is so far away that the head itself is just a few pixels on the screen. Which is why so many of the good player crank up their screen resolution at the expense of graphical detail. Boom! Headshot!