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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Eons pass as you wait for this thing to get to where it’s going.

A small tangent:

I live in Australia. When it comes to video games, we’re the laughing stock of (at least) the English-speaking world. If you’re not aware, we don’t have an 18+ rating for games (while we do for movies), which results in a number of games getting neutered to be released here (Left4Dead 2 had the gore removed, for instance) or not being released at all. While the magic of the internet means that it’s not really a great practical problem, it’s still a silly situation that a hobby that is now largely adult is subject to laws that treat gamers like they’re children.

I started to write a (later aborted; it’s a long story) honours thesis in 2006, titled ‘Censorship in New Media in Australia’, focusing mostly on video game censorship, so it’s hardly a new issue, but as the list of banned or modified games grows, the need to examine our laws grows.

The long and short of it is we currently need unanimous agreement among our state Attorneys-General to even look at starting the process of changing the law, and there’s one vocal holdout: Michael Atkinson from South Australia (not my state).

There may now be some hope of a work-around, with the Commonwealth AG office releasing a discussion paper on an R18+ rating, and asking for public submissions. I await the outcome with bated breath.

Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming…

****

I pulled a game off the unplayed games pile last weekend, trying to reduce the height from ‘you will die and cats will eat your face off if it collapses on you’ to ‘you may only be seriously injured if it collapses on you.’ It was Bully: Scholarship Edition (yeah, I’m up with the latest and greatest, totally cutting edge here), which was essentially an extension of the GTA III -> San Andreas series, except set in a prep school. I would guess Rockstar hadn’t changed much from the PS2 version, as the graphics were a bit janky, but I enjoyed it enough to play through the whole game. However, one annoyance really

LOADING.

LOADING..

LOADING…

stood out for me – the amount of loading screens.

Admittedly, while there was plenty of them, Bully‘s loading times weren’t awful, and they weren’t every three steps like some games (Ugh, Postal 2). Also, they didn’t try to ‘hide’ them like Mass Effect and the infamous elevator scenes, which just served to highlight the ridiculous wait.

Those elevator scenes go something like this:

(The Mass Effect elevator starts. Eons pass. Stars go supernova before ejecting their material into the greater universe. Worlds form from the detritus. Life emerges from the primordial swamp in said worlds, evolves, and develops sentience.)

Insert your own favoured team members here, if you don’t like battle-armor covered curves…why don’t you like battle-armor covered curves?

Liara: ‘Even for a race that lives a thousand years, this elevator ride seems to be going for half my lifetime.’

Ashley: ‘You’re telling me. I think I just went through all of my menopause.’

(The elevator finally reaches it’s destination.)

Methinks I dost protest too much? Sure, for those who owned an 80′s 8-bit computer with a tape drive, today’s loading times are laughably small, particularly when loading from a hard drive and not direct from disc, but if you grew up with cartridge-based gaming, then it’s a case of ‘loading? What the hell is this loading shit?’

On consoles, CD-ROM games brought us innovations like full motion video and redbook audio. They also brought in the ‘magic’ of waiting for shit to load. And thanks to Namco owning the patent on loading-screen minigames, we can’t even do anything interesting in-game while the loading happens.

Such is the price of innovation, I guess. At least I get a small snatch of time to delete the emails on my Crackberry.

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This guy is why you can’t have nice things, Gears of War.

“HEY. YOU. FAT BOY. YEAH, YOU, CAPTAIN BALDING. You said you were gonna talk about the mistakes made by games, but it’s been four fucking posts and all you’ve done is waffle on about your unremarkable childhood and poor taste. Get with it, already.”

Alright, shaddap. The first common gaming mistake I’m going to tackle is mostly, but not exclusively, a problem with newer games. It’s one that’s been brought home to me as I play through Mass Effect again, procrastinating on getting to the game pile (aside: procrastinating on playing games, by playing a game you’ve already played, is that the absolute depths of sloth?) so I can refresh on Shepard’s world in anticipation for Mass Effect 2, and get in a Bioware mood for when my crappy download-limited Australian net connection rolls over to next month and I can download Dragon Age: Origins at a speed greater than 64kbps. Makes me a little misty-eyed, remembering that I put up with dial-up for more than 6 years past broadband’s introduction.

Oh, yeah, games. Right. I came to the part where you rescue Liara, at my leisurely sidequest-ing pace, about 8 hours into the game. Because I am terrible at both games and life, it took me about 5 attempts to beat that charging Krogan. Every frigging time having to make the same three or four choices. Again. And watch the dialogue. Again. While I could skip parts of the dialogue, I couldn’t skip the whole scene. And because after the scene you go directly into combat, I couldn’t save. So after I died again, I then had to make the same three…you get the idea.

(At this point I will say: I’m aware Negative Gamer, among others, talked about this first, but they talk about generalities, not specific games. Besides, I like Negative Gamer. They have a similar ethos to mine, but with actual talent.)

Now, one solution is to not suck so much, but most games (ie. not Ninja Gaiden 2 – which, incidentally, also had unskippable cutscenes) are supposed to cater for both the hardcore (you) and the terribad (me). Hell, you don’t even necessarily have to be in the game to have unskippable scenes, do you, Borderlands?. Not allowing me to skip the company logos that show up every time I start the game, not even after the first time I see them? Learn to play nice with others.

Again proving my terribad-ness, if I have to watch a helicopter flyover of General RAAM in Gears of War one more time, I think I’ll snap the disc. I beat the game, got my crappy 100 achievement points, and I doubt I’ll never put it back in the drive again. Too Human was another game which ‘punished’ you for dying by making you watch the elaborate half-minute death sequence over and over again. Not quite right in a game where you there’s no actual gameplay-based penalty for dying. I was already being punished by playing your good idea wrapped up in a crappy implementation, Silicon Knights, please don’t punish me any further. And I know there’s a heap more examples of this in gaming – this is only what I can reel off without having to actually tax my brain by trying to actively remember or my fingers by going past 750 words.

While older games didn’t necessarily have as many/any cutscenes, they tended to manifest the ‘unskippable’ problem in another way – inappropriate save points. One of my PS2 controllers still rattles from me hurling it to the floor, after about the 10th time of doing the half hour run from the last save point to Sin in Final Fantasy X, and watching as a Marlboro (or similar) again cast ‘Confuse’ on my whole party. What drove me to hurling the controller down was not my party dying, but having to SIT AND WATCH for 10 minutes while they killed each other before the game would give me the courtesy of a game over screen. At least the cutscenes were skippable in this one. And it’s a less nerd rage moment than a friend of mine who hurled an N64 controller through a wall. I can’t remember why, specifically, but I bet it had something to do with Oddjob in Goldeneye multiplayer…

Picture again shamelessly ripped off from IGN.com. I still cropped it myself.

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Mmm, River City Ransom. “BARF!”

My last post probably gave you some idea of what sort of games I like.

So you can get even more idea of where I’m coming from, and can decide now if we’ll never agree and you can thus make a graceful exit (door opens outwards), here is a list of my top 25 favourite games. There’s a few that are stiff to miss out, but this is basically it. I originally drew up a huge list of my favourite games on each platform, it was long and boring, and I won’t subject you to it.

Bear in mind a few things: I keep both a literal stack of unplayed games that I get cheaply, and a figurative stack of digital files from steam weekend discounts, impulse sales, and so on, and the pile is currently up to about 80 games. Also, I could only own one console per generation before becoming an adult and being able to buy as many systems as I want, so I may have missed your particular favourite. My exposure in particular to non-RPG PS1 games, XBOX games, and Sega games post-Megadrive is limited, because I never owned the systems. Lastly, these are my personal favourites. I may have played -better- games, but sometimes something about a game just sticks with you.

River City Ransom
Crystalis
Mutant League Football
Shining Force 2
Snatcher
Shadowrun (SNES)
Super Mario Kart
Zelda: A Link to the Past
Planetfall
Wasteland
System Shock 2
Knights of the Old Republic
Vampire: Bloodlines
Planescape: Torment
Deus Ex
Fallout 3
Grim Fandango
Psychonauts
Baldur’s Gate/2
World of Warcraft
Super Mario 64
Shadow of the Colossus
ICO
Rez

Why yes, I do like cyberpunk, post-apoc, Tim Schafer, and Bioware. Why do you ask? I generally like moody FPS games, western RPGs, quirky adventure games, the unique, and anything with some form of experience and/or loot grind. Mmm, purplz.

This month, all going to plan, I will sit down with Brutal Legend, and Dragon Age: Origins, both of which have the potential to be in there, based on my usual preferences. Something like Diablo 2, Mass Effect, Majora’s Mask, Okami, Metal Gear Solid 3, Half-Life 2 or any of a host of other Infocom text adventures could be in there if I wrote this on a different day.

But I didn’t.

So they aren’t.

What about my least favourite games? Well, I don’t really have the patience to tackle JRPGs anymore, unless they review very, very highly. It’s not active hate, I just don’t love them the way I did as a kid, when the longer the game, the more the value.

Real Time Strategy is another genre I don’t have much love for – I enjoyed Company of Heroes and World in Conflict, but I tried to play through Warcraft 3 to get more of the World of Warcraft background story, and I just couldn’t do it. The style of play seems foreign to my gaming skill set and just not enjoyable to me.

I don’t like 1 on 1 fighting games, either. I don’t want to remember a million moves, I don’t enjoy the blocking techniques, and I don’t like getting my shit fucked up by a guy hitting an 80-hit combo that I can’t do anything about.

Perhaps my biggest pet hate crosses genre lines: aggressively mediocre games. I’m not talking about the truly crappy like Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust, E.T. or Altered Beast, but the games like Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, that have a framework of competency that leads you to believe they could have been something good, but have all the life sucked out of them.

My least favourite game? Halo. I’m not fond of FPS on a console at the best of times, so take this with a grain of salt, but I found this game massively uninspired. It had a colour palette like it was CGA all over again. Its way of ‘extending’ the game (and thus the value) was to make you run back through the levels, in reverse. And this was the company that made Marathon. They had a good track record. They knew better. Of course, it sold by the truckload and has a devoted team of fanboys. The series sells massively. It rated well. What do I know?

Picture shamelessly ripped off from IGN.com. If it makes you feel any better, I cropped it myself.

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