Macrovision’s new copy protection (based on the FADE protection used in Operation Flashpoint) will cause a game’s performance to start to deterioriate after time.
This would be fine and fair if Safedisc actually worked properly more than 80% of the time.
But I can just see it now… You buy a new game, start playing it a few hours a week, and then three weeks later things start going wonky. Huh… Bug in the program? Copy protection error? Whatever the cause, it won’t matter, because it’ll be too late to take it back.
Not quite following you, did macrovision make FADE? Buy it? Come out with something similar?
Fade didn’t bug me w/ opflash, I’ve never even seen macrovision actually work, except anecdotes about people seeing green instead of a recorded image, but I never met anyone personally that had that issue making a copy of a dvd or tape.
It was slashdotted today. It sounds like Macrovision is just licensing Fade.
I’m with Denny. If the copy protection scheme for a game is going to fuck up on my CD-ROM, I’d rather know right off the bat than two hours into the game, when I’m not sure what the hell is going on.
I remember trying a CD crack on Operation Flashpoint and being pretty amused at how Fade kicked in. But I certainly wouldn’t find it amusing if it happened due to circumstances beyond my control.
So if I’ve got a whacked CD drive that doesn’t transfer the magic pattern, I’m screwed, but I can’t tell for sure if it’s the copy protection or the four beers I had before playing Operation Flashpoint? Thanks. NOT!
between crap like this and the sunncomm article I posted, I am getting to the point where I am just going to start pirating all my music and games. Why not? they are going to screw me if I wait, I might as well screw them first.
It is like during the blackout this summer, we figured if the ghetto near us didn’t start a riot and looting by Friday afternoon and the power was still off, we might as well go into the ghetto and start looting, preemptively take what they could take back later. Sadly the blackout went away and I was not able to test my theory of preemptive looting, but I guess I can test it with gaming now.
I really don’t get how this is meant to work. If my gun sudddenly broke in a game, or I was mysteriously unable to kill the big boss, my first thought would be that the developers had chipmunks living in their heads. I’m not going to go out and buy an original copy, because by this point I think their game sucks, and they’ve probably lost me for any sequels too.
Anyway, the idea’s been done better before. How about Sim City? It would let you keep playing if you screwed up copy-protection, but it flat out told you “Here comes the Wrath of God, Jim-lad!” and promptly cycled every disaster in its collection down upon you until you ran weeping from the computer. It did the same job providing a teaser, even for the pirates, but never left you in the position of thinking that you were screwed because of bad coding.
I would hope to see the game mags expose this idiocy in such a way that companies will be hesitant to use this protection.
It’s such a bad idea, I’d argue that boxes should have Macrovision warning labels. And since we know companies won’t do that, then reviews should have a red flag when this protection is used. Not just to create a stigma for this stupid protection idea (although that’s not a bad thing), but to warn people with Macrovision-sensitive hardware to avoid the products.
And I can see the suits of those mags getting very nasty phone calls from game publishers ranting over the unfairness of such reporting and how it’s damaging their potential game sales.
Oh, I’m sure it would happen. But that wouldn’t phase the editorial departments.
Got quite a few angry calls over the years… Caused a couple of major advertisers to pull out of the mag for a while, even. That never once affected our future editorial decisions.
Do you really think they care that much about what the game magazines say? Game magazines have been railing for years about buggy games, crap copy protection, etc. What makes anyone believe they’ll listen to anyone now?
I hate the notion of copy protection, but I must have the magic system because I’ve never had a single failure with Macrovision or its ilk. My current $50 Lite On DVD/CDRW runs everything, and so did my Plextor, a Toshiba, another Plextor, etc.
Do you really think they care that much about what the game magazines say?
CGM must be magical. You guys have never been bitched at by a game company over something you’ve run?
I agree in principal though – magazines and fans complaining about copy-protection doesn’t seem to concern game companies. I suspect when they hear gamers complaining about it, they assume the gamers are trying to play burned CDs.
Yeah, yeah, I know… I was typing at high speed because Carter had woken up from his nap and I needed to go get him. So I made a homophone typo…
Geeze, correcting spelling on a message board… That’s just vicious, Loyd!
Unlike my “professional” writing (insert your jokes here), I don’t tend to re-read my posts before submitting them, particularly when I’m in a hurry. This is conversation, not prose.
What brand does Dell mostly use these days? We’re most a Dell workstation shop at work and the CD drives that ship with the systems have a higher failure rate than any other part.
