Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Uncovering the mechanics of The Games: Winter Challenge

mrwint.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 114 posts

Re: Uncovering the mechanics of The Games: Winter Challenge

#91

Post by jerf »

watusername wrote: post #43

I always find official cracks* like this to be amusing and worrying at the same time. Worrying because it could mean that the current owners don't even have access to the source code anymore, and it's sad to see the source of those games lost to time. Tangentially, this phenomenon isn't limited to retro DOS games: Rockstar was caught shipping a pirated version of Midnight Club 2 [0], and Sinking Ship [1] is another e…

You can stop worrying, and move straight into... whatever it is on the spectrum from hangwringing to panic it is you are looking for, I offer no judgment here... because loss of source code and all build artifacts is the norm, not the exception. Completely normal. Unfortunate, but completely normal.

Re: Uncovering the mechanics of The Games: Winter Challenge

#92

Post by derwiki »

vladms wrote: post #11
g4zj wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this functionally different from a typical license key or activation key?

Besides not being a one time activation, it was not a "one key". The game would ask you for "N-th word on the M-th paragraph on P-th page", at each start for example. We are talking about an age where you would not have scanners or mobile phones with cameras.

That jogs my memory, I think “The Island of Dr. Brain” had something similar

Re: Uncovering the mechanics of The Games: Winter Challenge

#94

Post by jordigh »

hiccuphippo wrote: post #63

For a modern example I had a bad time trying to play Celeste using the family sharing feature in Steam. The game would slow down the jumping making it impossible to advance. I don't know why it would deem it as an illegal copy, I just deleted it and never tried the game again.

That sounds... odd. Was Maddy involved with that game?

ExOK is generally pretty tolerant of mods, re-distribution, fangames, and even reverse-engineering their code. I'm really surprised they would deliberately make the game awful to play even for pirates.

Edit: Just asked Noel on Discord. Celeste shouldn't be doing anything like that.

> The game doesn't have anything like that in it. The steam version makes sure steam is running before the game starts, but that's it. The itch version literally has nothing in it. [...] Yeah, we don't do anything to go out of our way to stop piracy. People have also decompiled and modded this game in pretty much every way imaginable (which I think is awesome!) so if there was anything like that it'd be very noticeable haha

Re: Uncovering the mechanics of The Games: Winter Challenge

#95

Post by brazzy »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #65
brazzy wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not blame GOG for that if even the official 1996 bundle release made the same mistake. The description in the article sounds like it was never officially confirmed knowledge that the game would become unwinnable if cracked incompletely. How would you check for something you don't know about? They probably tried the game and when they couldn't win they ascribed it to insufficient skill. Even if they searched f…

QA should be playing these games to completion. At least one of the events in the game was completely unwinnable. Devs then and now use poison pills like this to discourage dishonesty, and I don't fault them for it. It's hard to make a living producing digital content that's easily replicated at almost no cost.

I very much doubt that GOG makes enough on such old titles to justify thorough QA.

And I absolutely fault the developera for it, because it's a stupid, counterproductive thing to do - if nobody knows it happens because the game is pirated, it will just get a reputation for being buggy and deter honest buyers just as much as pirates. So why do it? To secretly "get back" at the pirates?

Re: Uncovering the mechanics of The Games: Winter Challenge

#96

Post by mattkrause »

Clepsydra wrote: post #44
mattkrause wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leisure Suit Larry had a twist on this where it “verified” you were an adult by asking questions that older people were much more likely to know: “During the 70s, Carroll O'Connor portrayed a…” They were multiple choice and some of them were very tongue-in-cheek, like Richard Nixon was an “audio technician or plumber’s friend”.

I believe there was a shortcut to skip the questions on the PC. I think it was ctrl+alt+x.

Gah! Where were you in 1994 when that knowledge would have come in handy?!

Re: Uncovering the mechanics of The Games: Winter Challenge

#98

Post by homarp »

mlinhares wrote: post #64
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #54

The downside of these systems is that the behavior of the cracked game is often simply attributed to the game, contributing to the perception that the game is buggy (or just bad/not fun). While they are somewhat effective at making pirates miserable, I have my doubts on whether they are actually good at driving sales. Keeping pirates from enjoying the game isn't a victory for the developer, generating sales is...

One of the reasons Sony won in most third world countries, there was a lot of piracy for the multiple playstation devices and it was easy to access it. As those generations of gamers grew older and the country's economy improved, they didn't even consider xboxes as all their friends had sony consoles, why would you bother?

https://www.thetimes.com/travel/destinations/asia-travel/chi...

Gates: how piracy worked for me in China - The Microsoft chairman says that bootlegged software is creating a demand for his legitimate products in the longer term

Re: Uncovering the mechanics of The Games: Winter Challenge

#100

Post by saratogacx »

abra0 wrote: post #75
skocznymroczny wrote: post #71

Interesting, I remember the speed skating issue being a problem in the copy I had back in the 1990s, but I don't remember the issues in other games like downhill and such. People usually find these gameplay based copy protections amusing as in "hehe stupid pirates let them play a broken game", but I have bad memories of them because I often had them trigger when playing legit copies of the game. All it took was havin…

Tbh it still puzzles me why gameplay degradation specifically was chosen as a way to try to discourage piracy. I imagine many more people hit the degradations, thought the game was just buggy and abandoned it, compared to people who were motivated by bad gameplay to give the developers money. The mindfuck angle is pretty effective though. This article wouldn't have been written otherwise.

A few reasons

  1. It is harder to see if your crack was successfully completed, especially if the degradation happens late in game.
  2. If the game is fun until it goes wonk and the person learns it is pirated, they may decide to buy the real deal.
  3. The potential damage, if you didn't have a noticeable false-positive rate, is limited and for those unwittingly hit and find out their software is pirated, they're likely to not buy/get from the downloaded source again.
  4. From the standpoint of a developer, it is creative fun.
Post reply on HN