cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/44122961
After decades of living in a linux-FOSS world, I noticed these games at a 2nd-hand street market:
- Starcraft (few different versions/themes)
- Age of Empires (few different versions/themes)
- Civilization
They were a dollar each, so why not. I grabbed. Got home, installed win7 on a machine someone dumped on a curb, but could not install any of the games b/c I live offline. Fucking hell.
When I last played Starcraft well over a decade ago, I lived online and probably thought nothing of it. But it seems clear this shitty requirement is an anti-sharing policy because these games do not inherently need Internet. You can play against the machine or on a LAN. It’s not just the elitist exclusive WAN requirement that pisses me off… there’s a privacy issue too. And what happens when I enter the product key of a used CD? They probably have a tolerance on how many times that can happen, perhaps dependant on whether the hardware changes. Fuck the nannying.
Also consider that Blizzard and Microsoft servers are not going to run forever. They can pull the plug at any time and then no one can install their game. Should be illegal to make installation needlessly dependant on a service. Forced obsolescence.
Some of these games also require a CD to be inserted, which means you must have a fucking noisey CD drive attached at all times. Back when these games were made it was no big deal because all laptops and desktops had CD drives. Not anymore. I’m mostly annoyed by having to insert the disc, wait for it to spin, then I have to hear the loud spin as I play which also wastes power. So I installed Alcohol 120 to image the Warcraft 3 disc (which I still had from yrs past). It has 3 different versions of the crack for the particular shitty scheme used on WC3. None of the images work.
Obviously if I want to play these games I will need warez versions. How good are those dodgy distros these days? I can imagine some are just the original content but you still enter a product key (which I have anyway). But if they still need a WAN that won’t cut it for me. Do the warez versions overcome all these issues? Are they still in circulation?
Alternatively, I should ask, have there been any versions of these games repackaged and re-released for the retro gamers which don’t impose the shitty protections and server dependencies?
If not, I must say unlicensed cracked versions would be the most ethical ones:
- designed obsolescence thwarted
- privacy kept
- more inclusive (offline ppl and those without CD drives)
- better UX (no fiddling with discs and hearing the spin)
UPDATE
I am surprised about how much attention this thread got. The versions of software I experienced are as follows:
- Age of Empires III
- Starcraft II Wings of Liberty
- Starcraft II Legacy of the Void
- Civilization V
AoE does not require Internet… sorry for any misinfo I implied on that. AoE did not install because of a graphics driver issue that caused the installer to detect 0mb RAM on the video card. It ran fine offline after fixing the driver. The only fault w/AoE is the perpetual demand for a CD to be inserted.
The other three games certainly require Internet. It’s in fact written on the boxes so they covered their asses legally.
Sorry for necro but your ideology is fascinating. It sounds like you believe offline people deserve the same benefits as online people. Why do you believe this? Why shouldn’t the world move towards an expectation of online existence?
If I were to guess, your goal is not offline existence, but privacy, and doing things offline guarantees privacy, the same way that high-security environments use airgapped machines. But that’s just a means to an end. There are other ways of achieving privacy, like using vetted open source software that take privacy seriously, for example a fediverse client running in Tor browser. Privacy does not necessitate being offline. Going to a cafe to download articles to read offline, is not really offline either. It’s just an intermittent internet connection
Not in the case at hand. But yes, I do believe offline ppl are entitled to the same benefits w.r.t. public services. E.g. our human right to healthcare and education is not preconditioned on being online. It’s inalienable.
W.r.t software sold on the private market, it’s more about standards. Standards of privacy, quality, functionality, and pro-consumer. With the video game, I’m not sure if I am more annoyed by the needless dependency on a WAN, or the anti-consumer way of doing business in general, which entails using the money of paying customers against them. Paying for deliberate anti-features and product crippling rewards corporations for being proactively anti-consumer… biting the hand that fed them. And so I oppose the idea of feeding enshitification.
In Europe there is a battle emerging whereby some gov offices have decided it’s okay to exclude some people for being offline. Note that those same excluded people do not have a right to opt-out of taxation.
Privacy is one of many factors. Another factor, for example, would be that if I boycott Microsoft and the gov uses MS for email, I effectively lose my boycott privileges if email is the only means of communicating that the gov accepts.
Another factor is convenience. I find CAPTCHAs inconvenient, so I boycott them. My boycott against CAPTCHAs goes so far that I am willing to undertake a greater inconvenience in order to carry out my boycott against CAPTCHA pushers. And note that CAPTCHA is just one insideous¹ form of inconvenience. A local gov publishes their PDF community newsletter through some shitty 3rd party that animates the PDFs with JavaScript, so you can graphically see a visual of the page turning. That shitty protectionist js-forced service blocks people from simply downloading the PDF file. And I’ll be damned if I am going to support that kind of protectionism, so I insist that someone hand-delivers a paper newsletter to my door until they become competent. It’s unlikely that they will become competent in my lifetime.
Even if they manage to make the PDFs downloadable, they will fuck something else up. E.g.
wgetwon’t work because they would arbitrarily decide to take an anti-bot posture without cause, and without realising that humans run wget.¹ “insideous” because it puts humans to work for machines doing uncompensated labor which is potentially involuntary servitude in some cases. And performance of the labor often still results in DoS if the CAPTCHA is broken or if it discriminates against the incapability of the user.
Yes. In fact, well implemented tech gives more privacy than analog methods most of the time (cash payments being a notable exception).
It does if the other party is too incompetent to get it right. The gov is not competent enough to publish a public key. It is not competent enough to maintain a server that allows Tor connections. It is not competent enough to design a webform that does not make email and phone number required fields.
The problem is not lack of possibilities. It’s lack of competency.
The fetching is online (though not necessarily); the reading is offline. If I have a LAN with AP and no uplink, a friend or someone near my home could connect to the LAN and upload content, which would be an offline means of getting content. There are also ways to get info via SMS. The gov who uses a protectionist 3rd party to block PDF downloads and limit distribution to those running some proprietary JavaScript effectively blocks offline reading by someone like myself.
I suppose my ultimate thesis is that the gov should only be rewarded with digital participation if they competently deployed a service. An analog mechanism is always needed as an escape from the tyranny of poor design. Without an analog mechanism there is little incentive to implement a good design. Analog methods serve as an important quality control mechanism.