Oldschool Hard

You didn’t actually want to be free to own the games you bought, did you?

I’ve started to backup all my files in anticipation of finally installing Windows 7, which I’ve had sitting here for about a month. It’ll be an interesting upgrade, considering I bought XP the week it came out, and have kept using it through a number of different computers, skipping the maladies of Vista entirely. I have years of crap on my hard drives, so it’s taking hours to catalogue and properly backup everything.

The upgrade seemed necessary, though. Partially it’s because I want to actually use all of the 4GB of RAM I have and not have my graphics card use a big chunk of assignable memory, partially because I’d like to see what DirectX 10 can do for my gaming, and mostly, honestly, it comes down to WoW ONCE AGAIN not patching properly for me, whether I use a downloaded or disc installer, different versions of the patches, install under safe mode or to a different folder, or any of the other suggestions that a google search throws out. Blizzard suggests my problem relates to system restore, which I have never used, just like last time I had a patching problem they suggested it was due to a problem with Dell computers. Pity I’ve never owned a Dell in my life…

While that’s a game-related annoyance, it’s only related to one specific game. As part of my process of backing up my files, I stumbled upon a far more insidious problem: shitty copy protection. Using the oft-mentioned Mass Effect as an example, yet again, I remembered that because it uses SecuROM, I had to ‘de-authorize’ my computer or risk losing one of my five ‘licenced installs’, a ‘generous’ upgrade from the three installs that accompanied the game when it was first released on the PC (it also phoned home every 10 days). To do this, I couldn’t do anything in the game menu or in it’s uninstall program. No, I had to download a seperate tool, which scanned my system, gathering god knows what information before determining that Mass Effect was installed, and making me download another seperate tool to give me back one of my precious de-authorizations. Spore is another game requiring a similar process.

A few questions came to mind as I was going through this process. What if these authorization servers ever get taken down? Will there be a effective way to play the games you bought in a few years time when they’re no longer available at retail? Are you even considered to own the copies of games you buy under copy protection like this? The sad fact is, SecuROM doesn’t even seem that bad next to StarForce, which acts a lot like malware, making disk performance worse, opening your system up to security flaws, similar to a rootkit, and installing its own device drivers alongside game installs, that, up until the latest version of StarForce, didn’t necessarily get uninstalled when the game did.

Copy protection, like many things in gaming, isn’t new. Back in the day, there were code wheels, references to certain letters, sentences, or clues in user manuals that you had to match, symbol sheets (some printed on red paper so they couldn’t be legibly photocopied), deliberate errors introduced into the manufacturing process to prevent physical copying, and plenty of others which I either never saw or currently escape me. Sure, some of these methods are onerous, too, and kinda bullshit, but I’m not against people trying to protect their income from their work. But assuming your mother didn’t throw out your game boxes, and that you have hardware still capable of playing these old games, you have the physical capability to get through this copy protection by legimate means, and the only thing the copy protection affects is the game it’s meant for. This won’t necessarily be the case for any games you purchase with current forms of copy protection.

What I ask for from any copy-protection is for three simple rules to apply:

1. Don’t phone home. If you can’t authorize a game using the physical medium or downloaded file which I posess, don’t make me need to authorize it at all. Sure, the internet is basically ubiquitous, but that doesn’t mean your company or the game authorization servers will be around forever. I should have everything I need to play the game available straight out of the box or download.

2. Don’t limit reinstalls. I might forget to ‘deauthorize’ it…I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO ‘DEAUTHORIZE’ IT. I PAID GOOD MONEY FOR THIS GAME. Again, while I might be able to call or email for fresh installs, that doesn’t mean you’ll be around forever. Or the customer service rep might be a dick and not help me out. And also, checking how many more installs I’m ‘allowed’ means phoning home, again.

3. Don’t screw up my computer. Copy protection should exist within the game itself and affect the game only. It shouldn’t install anything seperate, it shouldn’t have any access to anything not directly related to the game it’s for, and it shouldn’t have any impact on the performance of my computer.

Am I asking to much by wanting to own the games I buy?

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Frustration with the gameplay style of other people is nothing new, as my friend’s N64 controller-throwing tantrum of a previous post has shown. As least back in the day when your friend, little brother, or neighbourhood aquaintance made a dick move you could punch him in the arm, because he was sitting right next you on the couch or the floor. Yeah, there were controller hogs, fighting game idiot savants, and jerkwad Oddjob players, but you had recourse.

Stole the powerup you needed in Contra? Punch. Sent a homing shell at you in Super Mario Kart? Punch. Hogged the controller when you were meant to be taking turns? Punch. Pulled off an 80-hit combo you couldn’t do anything about? Punch. Moved their selection cursor even close to Oddjob? Punch. Most bad behaviour was either self-correcting or someone was gonna get a hurt. If your gaming session involved Bomberman and a multi-tap, there could be so many chokeholds and windmill punches it’d look like Wrestlemania.

When you grew up a little and were either trusted to take the family PC along to a LAN night, or could afford to buy and take your own to play some Quake or Doom (or for my LANning era, more likely Counter-Strike and Battlefield 1942), it was a bit more anonymous, but generally by standing up, yelling out “HEY, STOP SPAWN CAMPING YOU FUCKING SPAWN CAMPER,” and watching who smirked, you knew where to aim your stale pizza crusts. More difficult and less satisfying than just punching them in the arm, but at least you still had dick-move recourse.

LAN parties weren’t really a satisfying solution to large-scale gaming though, as by the end of a long night, the smell of BO and grease clings in the air, but we put up with them as they were the only way to get your game on with so many people at once. Fortunately, internet connections got better, and cheaper.

Unfortunately, internet connections got better, and cheaper.

Now, you can game with many other people from the comfort of your own house, BO free. All you need to do is log on to just about any game on XBox Live for a dose of screaming tweens, mouth-breathing frat boys calling everyone ‘fag’, people proudly displaying their shitty taste in music by having it blasting through their microphones, inane chatterers, stoners who leave their mics on so you can hear the rolling-boil noise of their bongs and references to how stoned they are, and a significant group of northern Americans making fun of your accent if you’re either from the southern US or anywhere else in the world, via one of two lame jokes or banal references that form all they know about your part of the world.

If that doesn’t strike your fancy, you can play an MMO (most likely World of Warcraft) and deal with gold sellers, gear beggars, Chuck Norris jokes and the same question repeated a hundred times a day. If you devote enough time to it to get to max level, you can then increase your fun by raiding with a large group, and dealing with the chronically clueless, loot whiners, 1-plys (ie. one wipe and they’re done), and time wasters. ‘BRB, 5 minutes’ from someone in a key role is a sentence that still sends chills down my spine, from the 40-man days of WoW raiding. 40×5 = 3 1/3 man-hours wasted waiting for one guy to finish rolling a joint. Yeah, I love WoW, but it’s a conditional love, and some days are worse than others.

Sure, there are friend lists and party chat, and ways to play with people you actually want to play with, but that only works if they’re all actually online at the same time, unlike when you were a kid and you knew exactly when everyone finished school and would be available to play. Sometimes you can’t deal with the logistics of getting your friends online, and just want to play. And it’s either stupid computer bots or an unholy combination drawn from the motley crew above.

Anonymity breeds stupidity. I’ve posted a link to this before, but I think showing you is very important:

Don’t be this guy.

Image from Penny Arcade.

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This shouldn’t ever been seen in a PC game.

PC games have long been rushed out the door to meet a deadline without everything being tested 100%, leaving in bugs and glitches, some minor, some crippling. Most crippling bugs are at least confined to breaking only the game itself, like in the legendarily buggy Arcanum, but one heinous example, Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor (nb. not the awesome gold box game), after being uninstalled (usually for being a buggy piece of crap) not only nuked the game install, but your entire Windows installation. Ouch.

This sort of bugginess was pretty bad back in the days before the internet was common, but generally you could wait for when a PC magazine with a covermount came out and use a patch on the disc to fix it. When the internet became commonplace, it was even less of a problem. Oh sure, some games (S.T.A.L.K.E.R.) are still so broken that a patch renders all your previous save games unplayable, but at least the patches are there.

Old console games had no such luxury. Not to say they were 100% bug free, or that there were no broken games, and of course the seal of approval didn’t mean jack when it came to the actual quality of the game, but at least a game could usually be finished, if you were good enough to beat the Nintendo Hard gameplay. They had to be tested thoroughly, if only because recalls are incredibly expensive. Towards the end of the last console generation, though, online play started to creep into view for XBox and PS2 users, and this has helped create a slippery slope.

The latest generation of consoles all came out with built-in online ability. While it’s definitely been positive – the ability to update firmware and games means that your console can be become more useful, sometimes for free, online play (on games where strident 12 year olds don’t serve as your main opponents) adds to the experience, and the PSN and Live stores allow games with a smaller scope to be commercially viable – it’s also had its downsides.

Now, console games are being released with bugs because of the assumption of internet capability: “Ah, we’ll fix it in the patch.” It’s PC syndrome, only the games are more expensive, unmoddable, and you can’t tweak anything if they run like shit. While Fallout 3 was a fantastic game, there were some incredible bugs in it. How many people lost Dogmeat for the whole game because of him glitching out somewhere?

This convergence of PC and console hasn’t just led to a lazy attitude about bugs being in a shipped console game, either. There are some truly shitty design decisions in PC ports of console-led games – like limited graphics tweaking options, control schemes and complicated nested menus clearly designed to work on a controller with limited or no options for remapping, save points, and patching exclusively through Windows Live, that may or may not work.

Specific examples? Oblivion‘s inventory and menu system – clearly meant for a controller. Shadowrun‘s deliberately fuzzy aiming so PC users with a mouse and keyboard (the way an FPS -should- be played) couldn’t get an advantage on their console competitors. The save points lazily left in Far Cry 2 when in the PC version, you can save anywhere. GTA IV not being optimised for the wide variance in PCs, and chugging like a steam train on anything other than a quad-core system (though, to be fair, GTA IV chugged a bit on the 360, too.) Modern Warfare 2 with no dedicated servers, handing a distinct advantage to the game’s host, and no user-created maps or modding allowed – when the previous game in the series had dedicated servers, user-made maps, and modding. Don’t take away what you’ve previously given us, Infinity Ward. That makes you an Indian giver. And a jerk. You say it’s because you’re trying to make people play the experience you’ve created, well, I like playing certain types of games on a console, certain types on a PC. Whatever I choose, I should be able to take advantage of the upside(s) of the platform.

Edit: My host, lord, and master, Kingfox, pointed out that the console-led bastardization of PC games started out around the time of Deus Ex: Invisible War. Good for me, the only thing I really remember about that game is that it isn’t good enough for me to reinstall to remember more about that game. I believe it fits perfectly into my category of the “aggressively mediocre.”

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“What other things?” I hear you ask with bated breath. Well.

Things like the ‘having to wait for the hint book’ thing I mentioned in the last post: what the fuck was that all about? Sure, you can still buy a guide, and for complex games, pictures might be handy, but at least now there’s alternatives. Also, ridiculously arbitrary game rules were everywhere. Limited lives and continues based on an arcade (remember those?) game paradigm. Bottomless pits. Bullets flying from out of nowhere. Uneven difficulty curves (not that that has been completely eliminated, but I’ll get to that.) Bullet hell – I’m still not a fan of either horizontal or vertical scrolling ship shmups to this day. If that precludes me from entry to the UK, spiritual home of the shmup, so be it.

Now I sit in comfort in my loungeroom when I want to game, playing on a wireless, force feedback controller, in high definition, on a 50” widescreen. Or alternatively in front of my computer running approximately 120 times faster than computers back when I first started gaming, in raw gigahertz terms, and several factors more once graphical and other capabilities are taken into account. If I want a new game, I can download it at broadband speed, paying using my credit card. I don’t even have to put on pants. I don’t have to beg my parents and then go down to the store. I can use the same broadband connection to play a multiplayer game at any time of the day or night, and don’t have to worry about my friends being grounded, or having homework to do, or having to go to Grandma’s.

New games have bigger budgets, wider scope, better graphics and sound. The potential for more depth and the ability to add new content into a gameworld I love without needing a whole new game or having to wait years for a sequel (unless you’re Valve, Left4Dead 2 notwithstanding.) If I’m stuck in a game, and generally games are now designed so that that’s fairly rare, I can get on the internet and have the solution in a matter of seconds. Games, like computers, are cheaper – games were 70-100 AUD in 1990, were 70-100 AUD in 1995, except for a few outliers with extra chips and such in the cartridges, and are 70-100 AUD now and, thanks to the wonders of inflation, in real terms that’s a lot less. By most objective measures, new games are bigger, brighter, and better, at a cheaper price.

And yet, new games are often not subjectively better. Big budget games often lack creativity. While there’s perhaps more genres commercially available than ever, each genre gets flogged to death (WW2, anyone?) And there’s a lack of those little things like ‘just one more go’ x-factor – it certainly still exists, in browser games and little downloadables like Puzzle Quest and N+, but it’s not often in the AAA forefront. It can at least be argued that the mistakes made in the early days of video games were made out of naiveity, the personal quirks of programmers in single-coder games, or the lack of prior experience. New games don’t have that luxury. They may not make the same mistakes, but they make mistakes just the same.

I’m not some crusty curmudgeon (well, I am, but not about games) clinging to the superiority of 8-bit against the barbarian invaders that are new games, don’t get me wrong. These last couple of months alone there was Scribblenauts, Batman: Arkham Asylum, and Borderlands that I enjoyed, and I’m yet to get to Forza 3, Uncharted 2, Tropico 3, Brutal Legend and Dragon Age: Origins, among others. There’s plenty of good stuff coming out. But nothing is perfect. I may not know everything about games, but I have a long enough history to see the evolution of mistakes. I’m not negative about games; I love games. This is why I have to ask – why can’t we learn from history?

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