191–200 of 796 posts
Yea, but there are bigger problems coming, this outage is just a temporary preview of the future. What happens to game preservation in 20 or 10 years when the authentication servers for this generation are permanently shut down? Millions of physical discs will instantly turn into e-waste.
Hasn't Microsoft had a good track record of enabling playing old generation games on new hardware?
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This is the same effect of wanting to watch an old film... If you want to do it the legit way, you will have to face all kind of hurdles, starting from finding a service provider that might have the film, then forget about all the modern audience "edits" they put on these things, at times the quality isn't even good, the audio tracks are messed up... So you either give these jackals at least 30 to 60 minutes of your…
I don't know if I agree with you with this example. Sure it's annoying to find a streaming service but once done it generally works. Usually true with a film or TV show through the "forums" too, but not always. Sometimes it's the wrong episode, sometimes it's the wrong language, sometimes one particular show keeps buffering even for no obvious reason. And even though it's quite rare, you never know until you're sat w…
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Thank God for Fitgirl doing so much archival work with high quality highly compressed game releases. If you know where to look everything is available somewhere.
Fitgirl is a packing group. They take what other people have already done, and compress it (to a ludicrous degree). They should not be credited for anything besides the compression.
> so much archival work with high quality highly compressed game releases
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This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap. There's something seriously wrong in Redmond. At least with linux, you can search on the web and find a forum post telling you the magic incantation. With Microsoft, you will be forced to consume some second-rate engineer's unmanaged, barely workable, edge case until it might or might not work. Office on the web is…
It is strange to me that people are re-discovering this today, in 2026. Microsoft has always been half-baked, even in the 80s and 90s. Heck, my parents basically raised me (20+ years ago) by running a business fixing problems with Microsoft products for their clients.
The absurdity is that back in gen-7 we had everything figured out: PS3 used the (free) servers only for matchmaking and all online games were hosted on the consoles themselves. The matchmaking servers are still up and working, and everybody plays with better latency thanks to the prominence of fast fiber. No internet? Games work offline and support LAN if you have a switch and a couple of consoles. In 2026 I can stil…
I’m not sure whether this is because of the PS3 client-hosted server model, or just poor coding from COD.
Either way, I gave up eventually. It was a brief passing thought one evening; I’m sure if I really wanted to I could figure out a way to play properly. But you can’t just put the disc in and play online, at least in my experience.
I wanted to show my gf the halo 1 campaign, so I downloaded the 30GB Masterchief Collection via steam. When I launched it, I was greeted with a black box. After 1 Minute it was a microsoft login screen that looked eerily like a browser inside the game. Since I couldn't do anything else, the game was stuck at a sub 720p resolution. I said fine Ill just create an account. Yea so mail, firstname, lastname, birthday, cou…
but it is so hard to give them money on it
i dread buying new games as it is a game of chance what way might work this time
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Most Steam games don't actually have any DRM. They just link to steamapi.dll for things like achievements, and that makes you think you can't run them without Steam. Some have DRM, of course.
What is the command I can use to run them without Steam then? If the game links to a dll that launches Steam and won’t play without it, then that is effectively Drm. Before I even play the game without Steam: how do I download it without Steam?
The absurdity is that back in gen-7 we had everything figured out: PS3 used the (free) servers only for matchmaking and all online games were hosted on the consoles themselves. The matchmaking servers are still up and working, and everybody plays with better latency thanks to the prominence of fast fiber. No internet? Games work offline and support LAN if you have a switch and a couple of consoles. In 2026 I can stil…
That's not true. Naughty dog shutdown online servers for their ps3 games in 2019:
https://www.naughtydog.com/blog/uncharted_the_last_of_us_mul...
Rockstar games shut down gta online for ps3 in 2021:
https://www.rockstargames.com/newswire/article/51989315o2aa3...
To be fair, there are private servers for these games, thanks to reverse-engineering efforts, but those are community efforts.
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I've been wondering about this, in some sense we might hit a big cultural black hole where all these cool things that we've created in the last few decades just are functionally lost and all the amazing things of the previous generation that could be found on archive, roms, stuff on CD's / DVD's etc are what actually have cultural value going forwards Everything else is in this position of "actively at risk" where if…
I agree, but I feel like pointing out that any game that was distributed without DRM or that was successfully 'cracked' by pirates can also be found on archive and therefore might be carried over to future generations. Physical media isn't the only way. The real risk, IMO, is live service games that don't function at all without the server being online. There are games where fans have reverse-engineered and made thei…
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This assumes a large portion of the game doesn’t rely on servers.
Sure, but that's orthogonal to discs. Nothing prevents a game developer from making "check the server" the first thing that happens when the game on a disc loads.
Though it would be nice if more game makers ultimately provided a server. That used to be more common.