I feel the same way.
olaf
Sure, but to what effect? No one’s ever implemented any changes that I’m aware of. “Stop releasing buggy games, provide free downloads on your own site instead of pay ones, support certain hardware, don’t force people to upgrade”… I dunno. If they get a bad review, they whine. But that doesn’t mean they’ll never release another bad game.
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.
I’m not sure it’s that. The Internet has a tendency to make every problem appear much greater in magnitude than it may really be. I’d be curious how many people actually have problems with Macrovision; by message board traffic, you’d think it’s well over 50%, but I can’t imagine that’s the reality. You probably have more people who can’t get games to work because of video card drivers but people don’t really call for companies to stop supporting current versions of drivers or only write games for older videocards.
Operation Flashpoint had Copy Protection? I messed around with a ISO of it before I bought it and never noticed anything.
That’s because it had “Fade” copy protection that would gradually degrade the game until you got further and further into it, until it became impossible to finish. Ingenious, really.
No - I never got that and I played pretty extensively before I actually bought it (IE I got to the helicopter missions)
A friend of mine played through a cracked ISO without any problems.
What sort of degradation happens in OpFlash? I have a legit copy that I bought used and there are parts of the game that seemed outright broken to me. I chalked it up to buggy scripting and AI. Is it pretty obvious when the game degrades?
As for the cracked ISOs, well, duh, that’s what the “CRACKED” part means. The copy protection has been removed, so you won’t have problems.
I actually don’t know, Gordon, sorry. But your post is illustrative of what we’re in for if game companies embrace this idiotic protection scheme. To paraphrase Ella Fitzgerald’s announcer… “It the game broken, or is it Macrovision?”
What sort of degradation happens in OpFlash?
Good question. I thought the hackers had pretty much collectively decided that FADE was the copyright bogeyman - there to get people to wonder if their pirated copy was playing up instead of actually making it happen. I’ve never seen anyone comprehensively showing what happens when it goes nuts - and no, I don’t mean Codemasters wagging their fingers about it.
I think FADE was a load of crap myself.
Now, one of the Spiro sequels which I never played since I don’t have a console had a whole long writeup in Game Developer magazine about the copy protection scheme in that, which would do things like break the game halfway through.
If they’re going to do things like FADE, they need to make it REALLY obvious. Maybe have billboards that say, “Hey, would you please pay for this thing?”, then have the entire level explode or something. At least if you did actually pay for the thing, you’d have some explanation why the game was wigging out. (And yeah, that would suck. But so do pirates. And copy protection. And, er, game reviewers. Yeah.)