I remember the copy protection of Gunship, on Atari 520ST. The program was displaying a random image of a military vehicle and you had to identify it. The list of available vehicles was about 20 items long and it probably never occurred to the game designers that most players were really good at vehicle recognition. Though I had a legit copy of the game, I never had to open the manual to answer the copy protection question.

“At least it gave the error at the start of the install instead of”… after 45 minutes of installation like Bioshock did (sorry, distracted by coworker)

short story from me:

I bought Portal because it was ‘cheap’ (AU$25) and I didn’t want the whole Orange Box (in the US, $40, in AU, $90. bastards)

Took it home. Had a net connection. Nope, no good, won’t activate, Activation servers are down.

wait wait wait wait

Next day in the afternoon, oh, look, now it’s activated, I can install it!

nope

“steam servers are currently too busy, try again in a few minutes”

I have the CD. I have an ‘activated’ account. Why should it be trying to use the servers?

try try try

try try try

try try try

Couple of days later, I have a bioshock-epiphany. In Bioshock, it was the presence of DaemonTools that stopped the damn thing.

Uninstall DaemonTools – oh look, ‘magically’ the steam servers are no longer ‘busy’ and I’m now able to install the program from the purchased disc onto my activated account.

Several things to take away from this in my opinion:
1) Why the hell say “wait for the servers” when the problem is actually “we don’t like your installed software”. It’s not even remotely the right error message. At least it gave the error at the start of the install instead of
2) Why the hell do “only pirates mount .isos” in Windows? Every other OS allows this natively, because it’s so damned useful.
3) The steam knowledge base is fucking awful
4) Portal took 3 hours to finish, not including the ‘challenge’ levels. I spent more time trying to get it installed.
5) Bye bye steam

Thanks Kenny! I added it to the post. :)

Part of the hut escape is available on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XH9Kf-mjxU

[quote post=”2444″]The step four, listed as “???” is “Then a miracle occurs”.[/quote]

Actually the ??? is a reference to South Park but I LOL’d at the cartoon. :)

[quote comment=”9009″]Cool!

Hope it helps drive the point home.[/quote]

I did repeat that phrase like 4 times in this post, didn’t I? lol

[quote post=”2444″]I recall playing games in the late 80s that required you to look up word #34 on page #15 of the game manual to even start the game.[/quote]

LOL! I remember these times. If you would look through my collection of Amiga games you would notice that each and every single one of them had a cool intro created by a cracking group at the time. When I was growing up in post communist Poland we had no copyright law that would apply to software – and piracy was the only way to get the good western games. So for several years I believed that most games simply came with the silly intros and built in trainers (press F1 for infinite lives). :P

Eh, the good old days. But yeah – this stuff never worked. Once I even got a game that was supposedly very hard to crack so it was simply circulated with a xerox copy of the key pages of the manual. :P

HAH! I suck. I left out the link to the post referenced above. Here it is:

http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/post.aspx?postid=303512

You can’t beat the guys who tirelessly crack software. The “problem” of stopping piracy has been going on for many many many years. I recall playing games in the late 80s that required you to look up word #34 on page #15 of the game manual to even start the game. No matter how hard a publisher or developer tries to stop these guys, it won’t work. Hell, I know a lot of people that download no-CD cracks for games just to prevent the everyday wear and tear on games they legitimately own.

Now, we face the issue of DRM (Mass Effect for PC anyone) that requires constant connection to a network to even play the damned game. Hasn’t anyone learned from Microsoft’s failure with DRM? I like being able to play old games from 10 years ago when I want. In 10 years, those DRM servers will be a lost memory.

Here’s an excellent related post by someone at Stardock (Sins of a Solar Empire and Galactic Civilizations) who talks about the issue of piracy and software from a business perspective. I think it’s an excellent read.

The step four, listed as “???” is “Then a miracle occurs”.
http://www.webamused.com/blogosophy/archives/002064.html