Profile: baff
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• • Is Quake War a good game to buy or Doom 3 better ?

  • Doom3  plays like Doom 1.

     

    You walk into a room, the doors close behind you, the lights all go out and monsters all spring out from behind secret walls. It gives you a start.

    It's a single player and a good looking, if dark, one. The first time I played it, I didn't really get into it. It was just another tunnel run. Eventully I picked it back up again and this time I got into it. Run into a room get suprised by a load of hidden monsters, again and agian as oftern as you like with a few good boss fights and vehicle phases thrown in to break the repetativeness.

     

    Quake Wars is a rocking multiplayer, a space aged Battlefield. 

    It's superior to the Battlefield games in both theme and gametypes but essentially, that's the kind of game It is a team based online FPS player vs player romp.

    I love the voice acting and it has great kudos to the quake/doom universe.   

    Get both.

  • Posted: 5/10/08 5:30 AM
    General Discussion
• • Bioware - Mass effect PC - most drastic piracy protection to date !

  •  

    Originally posted by maskedweasel
    

     

    Originally posted by baff
    

    However if the game is very exciting I may buy it anyway. Or if the game has all the features I am looking for, the chances are I will buy it anyway.

    I could list any number of PC games that I had pre-ordered and cancelled once I found out about their protection schemes.

     

    As an IT consultant I strongly advise my corporate clients to install Windows from a pirated copy and not their original discs. I feel the same about games.

    Everybody has the right to hack their software to tailor it to their own specific systems. Both moral and legal. This is a right enshrined in software copywright law.

    What they don't have the right to do is hack it to steal the secrets of the code for commercial purposes, (educational is fine, adaptive is fine), and they don't have the right to reproduce and distribute it without the creators permission.

     

    @Masked Weasel, the only thing that is preventing me from buying Company of Heroes Op, is it's copy protection. Unlike Steam, it prevents me from installing the game on multiple machines and playing them on my LAN.

    Also the last thing I want to do is update my game everytime I log in. All I want to do is get it working, and then leave it well alone. I don't want to have to sit through an hour of "balance" patching when the game already works fine.

    My Steam games once installed are then set to offline mode. never again to be updated, never again to be authenticated.

    Oh, and I already don't need to have the CD in the drive, I've never needed to have the CD in the drive. I don't own an Xbox, I don't own a Playstation, I have a PC, (with a **gasp** harddrive). All the PC's I've ever owned have had a hard drive. Some of the early MMX games needed a CD in the drive to play the movie sequences from, but these days my HDDs are somewhat larger than the 170 MB ones.

    
    Okay number one, the items posted in red.  You must be the worst IT Consultant I've ever heard of.  You can't install Windows from a pirated copy, it's against the law, and any company you do this for can be audited and shut down.  I've worked for companies where employees called in software violations and not only are their IT people held accountable, but the people that call them in get money for it. 

     

    Pirated copies of Windows and actual copies of windows are two separate things. You can make a backup copy of a Windows disk, but you cannot pirate.  Thats what their Microsoft Genuine Advantage Tool does, and it will mark your installations as bad.  Thats fine if thats how you want to work, but I know one thing, any company that allows for shoddy installations like that to go on won't be around for long. The only way to install free and clear legally is from a volume licensing disk.  You have to pay for your licenses.  If you're paying and putting in legitimate licenses then you aren't pirating. Pirated copies of windows use bum CDkeys to activate without the 30 day warning.  If your doing this and not purchasing your licenses then you're in deep.

    Secondly, when you download a copy of a game you did not purchase, thats called pirating.  When you download code that disables software protections thats called malicious hacking.  You may as well be stealing.  If you own a game and use a NoCD fix, then that is okay.

    As for your hard drive "bit" it doesn't matter if you own a hard drive or not, some games still require you to have the original CD.  There are a number of ways to get around that, and believe me I know them all, but wasting hard drive space on an ISO or using a virtual drive is pointless.. or wasteful is more like it, especially with the size of games nowadays, and finding a NO CD fix that works correctly is 50/50, and if you're going to make a Disc Copy then you may as well use the actual disc.  And IF you know how to crack it yourself, then it shouldn't be an issue.

    All in all, everyone can do what they want with their own time. I know if I'm going to be playing a game it will be the full legitimate version, and it won't matter what kind of protection they use if I want to play it bad enough. 

    Downloading a copy of game you do not own is called pirating, yes.

     

    Disabling anti-piracy and the use of NO CD cracks is not malicious hacking. You can't maliciously hack your own computer.  Dur.

     

     

    I do have a hard drive, and I am not required to keep the CD in drive. A game manufaturer may wish me to be required to do so, he may even take steps to force me to do so, but I never have been, nor do I see any reason to be. Copywright law agrees and has a specific amendment enshrining my right to adapt any protected code for compatability purposes.

    This is the reason crack sites are legal. It is your right to use them.

    How I configure my computer an my software on my computer is nobodies business but my own. If a game's publishers don't like it; really, who cares?

     

     

    A game installation standardly uses the same amount of space on your hard drive whether you have the CD in the drive to play or not. I have not bought a game that runs from the disk in over 10 years. Placing the CD in the drive holds no benefits at all for the end user. Feel free not to do so. in fact I would advise you not to do so.

     

    Personally I find cracks to be 100% reliable. Something that I cannot say about the anti-piracy measures they remove. Again publishers love to blame pirates for making their games crash, but in actuallity it isn't the pirates. They just produced a buggy game. It's a cop out response from the marketing department. "our games not buggy, only the pirated versions." There is one born every minute.

    In my personal experience many many games are very buggy regardless of whether you run from disc or crack. However the addition of a crack is well known to cure the many widely experienced bugs found in common DRM solutions. 

    Once again DRM provides no direct benefit to the end user and is often problematic. It usually may be removed without compromising the purpose of the software and as long as it is relatively simple to do so, I advise it. 

     

    Windows Genuine Advantage can be turned off.

     

     

    If your company enters into a lisence agreement with Microsoft, it may well find itself buying multi-lisences and all the rest.

    However if your company buys the Windows software from a standard retail outlet, you have no lisence agreement with Microsoft whatsoever.  

    By default, You are under no mult-lisence/single user agreement unless you specifically contact a Microsoft representative and enter into one.

    Other than copywright, you have no legal obligation to Microsoft at all in a standard consumer relationship. Neither has Microsoft any legal obligation to you. Your contract of purchase is between the retailer and you alone. Most companies and most private individuals do not purchase direct from Microsoft.

    The deal you choose to make should depend on the size of your company and your IT dept, the price and the level of support you expect to require.

     

    Microsoft on the other hand does have contractual obligations with the retailers of it's products and typically does have a lisence agreement with them. The usual one is that Windows is not allowed to be sold without the computer to go with it. (An OEM copy of Windows is often sold very cheapily, as opposed to a retail version which can cost hundreds of pounds but be sold individually).

     

     

    Disgruntled employee's are a definite risk for any company and events I have had deal with in my work, if however that company owns a legitimate copy of their software they have nothing to worry about.

    You are either a scaremongerer or a victim of scaremongering.

    While very strictly speaking you are correct and you if you install from a pirated version you are breaking the law, this is something of a legal grey area since Microsoft will not be willing to publicly concede that it's End User Lisence Agreement has no legal basis in court. 

    Courts however are not provided for our entertainment. When the software manufacturer has already recieved payment for the software used, no judge is likely to respond kindly to an expensive suit for damages when no damages have been done and no jury will ever convict.

    I'm not aware of any cases of companies being prosecuted for using a downloaded version of a software they can provide the disc for.

     

    Essentially speaking anti-piracy measures included in many softwares have very questionable legality themselves. So far, whenever challenged in court, all games companies (and even some music ones) have been forced to remove them. We are not legally required to use the DRM in our games, in fact it is not especially legal to include many of them in the first place. As gamers and software users we accept DRM packages out of mutual self intrest, not legal precedence.

    We do so by consent alone and not legal requirement.

    If you personally wish to be legally bound by the publishers terms and conditions all you need to do is get in touch with them personally and agree to do so. Verbally over the telephone would be enough, although in writing would be better for them. You then just need a written or verbal confirmation from one of their representatives that they have accepted your lisence application; and grats! you have successfully waived your consumer rights.

     

     I get paid as a percentage of the money I save the company, not by the hour.

    I'm not only fully accountable and responsable for the IT services I provide, I guarentee them. I'm more than willing to be held accountable. I'm proud to be.

  • Posted: 5/10/08 3:59 AM
    General Discussion
• • Bioware - Mass effect PC - most drastic piracy protection to date !

  • If this was a game I was even remotely intrested in, and it isn't, I would not buy it unless I had first found a crack and read that it worked.

    And that is the current Catch 22. Unless I learn for sure that I don't need to buy a game like this, I won't.

     

     

    However if the game is very exciting I may buy it anyway. Or if the game has all the features I am looking for, the chances are I will buy it anyway.

    I could list any number of PC games that I had pre-ordered and cancelled once I found out about their protection schemes.

     

    As an IT consultant I strongly advise my corporate clients to install Windows from a pirated copy and not their original discs. I feel the same about games.

     

     

    With regards to the post above, the producer has no rights to say how I use my software, if they don't like what I might do with it, they are perfectly within their rights not to sell it to me. I don't force them to.

    Once sold, it is no longer theirs. They have no say in what I do with it at all.

    Similarly, once they have accepted my money I have no rights to tell them how they may use it. If I have a problem with that, it is my right not to do business with them.

     

     

    Everybody has the right to hack their software to tailor it to their own specific systems. Both moral and legal. This is a right enshrined in software copywright law.

    What they don't have the right to do is hack it to steal the secrets of the code for commercial purposes, (educational is fine, adaptive is fine), and they don't have the right to reproduce and distribute it without the creators permission.

     

    @Masked Weasel, the only thing that is preventing me from buying Company of Heroes Op, is it's copy protection. Unlike Steam, it prevents me from installing the game on multiple machines and playing them on my LAN.

    Also the last thing I want to do is update my game everytime I log in. All I want to do is get it working, and then leave it well alone. I don't want to have to sit through an hour of "balance" patching when the game already works fine.

    My Steam games once installed are then set to offline mode. never again to be updated, never again to be authenticated.

    Oh, and I already don't need to have the CD in the drive, I've never needed to have the CD in the drive. I don't own an Xbox, I don't own a Playstation, I have a PC, (with a **gasp** harddrive). All the PC's I've ever owned have had a hard drive. Some of the early MMX games needed a CD in the drive to play the movie sequences from, but these days my HDDs are somewhat larger than the 170 MB ones.

  • Posted: 5/08/08 8:15 PM
    General Discussion
• • Spore to use secuROM

  • Always apply the crack before launching.

    A game is not properly installed until the anti-piracy has been removed.

  • Posted: 5/08/08 7:48 PM
    General Discussion
• • Crytek Abandons PC Exclusivity Due To Piracy..

  • Originally posted by Vampir
    

     

     

    its the same arguement as manual and automatic transmission.

    Its if you can drive stick you can, you love it, its fun, and it actually gives better performance and i can prove the performance.

    ......

    So if you think its better to play on console, the answer is its just less complicated.

    Basically you can't drive stick.

    
    Er no, the fastest and best performing gearboxes in the world are all automatic.

    Automatic gearboxes are so fast they banned them from Formula One becuase the driver had nothing to do, and even now they don't use stick but paddles.

    It might be more fun, you may love it, but you are fooling yourself about the performance part. Still iiving in the 20th Century.

  • Posted: 5/08/08 7:42 PM
    General Discussion