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It was some sort of "Defender" style game. Apparently cracking ("Cracked by the Nibbler") caused some obstacles to become invisible. You could play the game for a bit but you pretty quickly crashed into one of these.
Wish I could remember the name of the game. I would have liked to played a legit copy
My favorite copy protection scheme was where you needed to enter some text from the printed manual that came with the game. The disks were easy to copy but the manuals required significant effort. I also just really miss printed game manuals.
I played it on a B&W TV.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this functionally different from a typical license key or activation key?
It was effectively a "distributed" license key, broken into a large number of parts and structured as a challenge-response, so that it would be difficult to answer without a full photocopy of the manual. My favourite variant of this was F-19 Stealth Fighter asking you to do aircraft identification, which you could get from the manual .. or any library book on US warplanes. Least favourite was some game (TMNT?) which…
It wouldn't be out of place in a library.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since you mentioned "early Prince of Persia" being 2007, I thought I might blow your mind by pointing to the 1989 game :)
I had to re-read the post because I assumed it was referring to that one up until I got to "Ubisoft". I was like, didn't that one guy Jordan something do the whole thing himself? (Including the rotoscoping of the character)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was effectively a "distributed" license key, broken into a large number of parts and structured as a challenge-response, so that it would be difficult to answer without a full photocopy of the manual. My favourite variant of this was F-19 Stealth Fighter asking you to do aircraft identification, which you could get from the manual .. or any library book on US warplanes. Least favourite was some game (TMNT?) which…
Microprose games had awesome manuals. Typically more than a hundred pages full of details going well beyond explaining the game itself. For example, in a flight simulator it had details on every plane in the game, the historical context of the missions, dogfighting techniques, etc... It wouldn't be out of place in a library.
Not that I turned that knowledge into good results but that's another topic.
What a delight that game and its manual were.
Chris Crawford wrote in his On Game Design about a trick like this, that he implemented in Patton Strikes Back. Plus some other tricks. He claims that he never found a cracked version that had fixed the secondary checks. The result was a crash just before winning the game. This looks like an older version of the same text that he later edited into a chapter of the book (does not have the claim about only finding fail…
My favorite copy protection scheme was where you needed to enter some text from the printed manual that came with the game. The disks were easy to copy but the manuals required significant effort. I also just really miss printed game manuals.
It was massively annoying even if you had bought the game though. Also later games that wanted the CD to be in the drive to be played.
My favorite copy protection scheme was where you needed to enter some text from the printed manual that came with the game. The disks were easy to copy but the manuals required significant effort. I also just really miss printed game manuals.
It was massively annoying even if you had bought the game though. Also later games that wanted the CD to be in the drive to be played.
I remember an old Apple ][ game that someone had copied from somewhere and it got passed around by us jr high school students. It was some sort of "Defender" style game. Apparently cracking ("Cracked by the Nibbler") caused some obstacles to become invisible. You could play the game for a bit but you pretty quickly crashed into one of these. Wish I could remember the name of the game. I would have liked to played a l…