I remember playing a similar track & field game on the Apple ][ my dad bought us and getting so frustrated.
After reading this article I had a vague recollection that when booted up it would briefly display a "cracked by..." message,
and now I figure the game probably had a similar "copy protection" mechanism.
Uncovering the mechanics of The Games: Winter Challenge
101–110 of 114 posts
Re: Uncovering the mechanics of The Games: Winter Challenge
#102Not DOS, but I remember playing a copy of Settlers III and was surprised when iron smelters produced pigs instead of iron.
At least some games in the Arma series have also used a copy protection that messes with gameplay if it judged the game to be pirated. I don't know if it used tricks to trip crackers, though -- Wikipedia mentions intentional errors on optical media that didn't get passed on by disc copy software.
Re: Uncovering the mechanics of The Games: Winter Challenge
#103Not a DOS game, but one of the early Prince of Persia (circa 2007) had an evil DRM trick: after a few hours into the game, there is a pressure pad activated door that does not work on cracked versions. So if you are in a cracked versions, and if the crack is not good enough, you will spend a lot of time frustrated unable to go past that door. It is possible that the crack itself broke the game, but I want to believe…
Well, in the 80's I had an Amstrad CPC, and there was a game named "Le passager du temps" ("Passenger of time") [1]. It was a text adventure game with some graphism in it. The goal was to explore the house of your uncle and find out where he was.
After a while, you found a machine and when you finally assemble everything and start it....the game stop working and loop in a "we're tired of hacking" message ! Of course, with the cracked version.
And it was clever, because
1) you tried the game and enjoyed it. And now you're frustrated and want to play it, so you might actually buy it
2) the anticopy test was late in the game, so everyone who copied it thought the copy was ok and spreaded it.
A sort of shareware.
Re: Uncovering the mechanics of The Games: Winter Challenge
#104I remember both those games from when I was about 12 and I also remember being endlessly frustrated with the mechanics. I couldn't get controls in order, seemed to fail at almost every sport (for some reason, I remember high jump vividly). Since those games came with several dozen others on a very cheaply bought CD (if you know what I mean) then I guess I can finally have a redemption arc for my skills after three decades. Great stuff!
Re: Uncovering the mechanics of The Games: Winter Challenge
#105I remember Pizza Tycoon having copy protection based on pizza recipes (for which I didn't have the recipe booklet, for usual reasons). In the early days of your pizzeria, people would only want the classics and if you couldn't make them, you struggled hard. Somehow, I've managed to power through (probably easy difficulty or something) and as soon as you build up connections to the mafia, people would gladly eat the most abhorrend pizzas the world has ever seen (I vividly remember an all-plum pizza I've created, it was beloved beyond any reason).
Re: Uncovering the mechanics of The Games: Winter Challenge
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
Jordan Mechner :) pretty nice explanation with his "motion capture" footage. https://youtu.be/6ozxnrs0BP4
Wow, I just want to call attention to this for anyone scrolling through. If you loved the game, watch this video!!
Re: Uncovering the mechanics of The Games: Winter Challenge
#107For 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.
Given that they sell the game on itch.io, I really doubt they're going out of their way to enforce any crazy copy-protection.
Re: Uncovering the mechanics of The Games: Winter Challenge
#108[dead]
Re: Uncovering the mechanics of The Games: Winter Challenge
#109Interesting, 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.
[dead]
Re: Uncovering the mechanics of The Games: Winter Challenge
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Perhaps they could have made it slightly more obvious, especially after some threshold or lifetime date.
I think it's a sensible approach to discourage piracy. Consider the irony when pirates of Game Dev Tycoon find their virtual games fail due to piracy: https://www.eurogamer.net/game-dev-tycoon-forces-those-who-p...