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.

  • freedomPusher@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
    1·
    54 minutes ago

    You’re not at fault if email is the only option. The lawyer would rightfully recognize that.

    It’s one thing to avoid blame. It’s quite another to hold someone accountable. Avoiding blame is only ½ the problem.

    So making (online) email the only option absolves you of the blame. Is that really all you want?

    No, that’s insufficient. First of all, with knowledge comes responsibility. Even if email is the only option, I would be a witting participant in the abuse of my own data. Lawyers point fingers. I cannot effectively hold someone accountable for an act that I was a part of. The gov can of course argue: “you weren’t forced to do the transaction at all”. The gov can also get off the hook for wrongdoing on the basis that the people elected representatives who decided it’s okay to impose email. They point the finger back and say we did what the people elected us to do. We can bitch about their choice to use Microsoft, but the gov can rightfully argue: we cannot select an email provider that everyone will approve.

    I really don’t understand this reasoning behind the idea that only “internal data abuses” are ok.

    An internal fuckup is 100% outside of the people’s knowledge and control, unlike a situation where the people must directly interface with a bad player. The gov can’t argue that they were elected to internally use some shitty mechanism when in fact it’s a non-transparent operation. They were elected to do a /job/ and the fucked up in the execution of the job. As soon as it becomes transparent, we (the people) become good candidates for finger pointing.

    1. government services should minimize sharing data with third-parties
    2. copyright should be abolished

    The first addresses your issues with interacting with government services. It would allow you to say, boycott Microsoft while still using government services. It would extend to internal data processing. And it would even cover things like allowing Tor, since Tor is used to minimize data sharing with your ISP, which is a third-party.

    I thought we’ve been over this. Minimization does not work. Europe shows this. It’s not just that it’s a symbolic law that rarely gets enforced. Even under an unlikely hypothetical situation of full-blown perfect enforcement, minimisation does not imply a ban on outsourcing. Minimal processing does not restrict /who/ may do the processing, just that excessive processing is banned.

    The second addresses your desire to play games offline. The main reason why games force online connection even when the game doesn’t need it, is to prevent piracy. Without copyright, there is no piracy.

    Without copyright, game creators work even harder to protect their games from copying. Technological protections become far more important to creators when legal protections are gone. If you drop copyright protections, that does not ban game makers from using countless protection mechanisms. It just means they cannot take you to court for going against them. The game will still refuse to operate without Internet.