First of all, before I begin another rant, let me wish everyone a merry xmas. I’ve had a good one, hope you all have too.
Now, onto the rant. One of my xmas presents this year was Call of Duty 2, which I was quite looking forward to playing. Unlike most of the rest of the world, I haven’t played any WW2 FPS’s in the last few years (including the original COD) so for me it was going to be something new. So, this morning I thought I’d have a go before we have to run out on more visits.
On my machine it installed fine, but refuses to run, complaining that I haven’t inserted the corred CD/DVD (DVD in my case). I thought at first that it might be disliking the fact that I had Daemon Tools running on my machine, for the purpose of mounting the legally downloadable VC 2005 Express ISO image for install rather than burning it to a CD, not for any illegal copying I hasten to add. Still, know PC games publishers are anally retentive these days, so I uninstalled DT (since I don’t need it anymore now VC Express is installed), and even tried uninstalling and reinstalling COD2. No luck.
So, I did a bit of research. Turns out that COD2 uses SafeDisc 4.6 which uses some kind of direct DVD access code to prove that you’re using a genuine DVD. Which, I must stress, I am. There was apparantly an issue with nForce motherboards which is fixed with the latest driver release, but I don’t have an nForce. I also noted that not using PIO mode on your DVD would cause problems, but mine is.
Further research illuminated the fact that SafeDisc 4.6 is so paranoid about piracy, it blacklists all SCSI optical drives in the hope that this will eliminate most image mounting / CD emulation tools. I don’t have a SCSI DVD drive, but it pisses me off to know that a publisher is willing to make a game incompatible with a particular hardware setup. My main hard drive does in fact look like a SCSI drive to XP since I’m using a realtively old SATA controller – I don’t think that’s it though since I believe it’s only optical drives it blacklists.
More seaching ended up leading me to various illegal download sites where the use of a combination of tools like Alcohol 120% (to rip), Daemon Tools and a SafeDisc 4 hider seem to allow people who have pirated the game or downloaded it over BitTorrent to bypass all this and play the game anyway.
So, here’s the deal again with copy protection. I, as a perfectly legal punter, am prevented from playing the game because the copy protection refuses to recognise something on my machine as acceptable. Meanwhile, people who download the game illegally have access to the tools to bypass the copy protection. In order to play my legal game, am I forced to resort to making an illegal image of it and use these tools to get past the problem? What part of this seems sane to anyone?
This isn’t the first time this sort of problem has arisen, but it’s the first time it’s been such a pain in the arse to me. I’ve wasted over an hour trying to sort this out, and now my allotted time for trying out my xmas present is used up, and I’ve not had any fun at all. Publishers, wake up and smell the damn coffee you ignorant, money-grabbing bastards. Technically savvy people are going to bypass your copy protection no matter how hard you try, yet the harder you push, the more genuine customers who aren’t interested in pirating software will get pushed away. And you wonder why PC gaming is in decline. Sheesh.
December 26th, 2005 at 3:34 pm
So why don’t you return the game, since it’s unplayable on your computer? Then the retailer loses a sale, and they return it to the publisher, who loses money as well.
Until they start losing money, the publishers are going to continue their draconian copy protection, and probably make it worse. They fear the infinite number of people who COULD be stealing the game more than the finite and real number of customers who are losing the ability to run the game.
December 27th, 2005 at 5:42 am
I can’t wait until the day comes that every purchased game comes with a USB hardware key that is required to be inserted in order to play the game. We’re already seeing that with high cost engineering packages, it’s only a matter of time before the manufacturing costs drop to a point that make publishers consider it as an option.
I’m really going to “love” that…
April 27th, 2006 at 8:29 pm
[...] How to stop casual pirates is another thing. Going to the extremes that Sony went to last year with some music CDs, or that some companies, such as Activision, go to by using anti-pirate tools like SafeDisc on some game cds is no solution at all. The last thing you should want to do is to incovenience your legitimate customers. That’s all such solutions accomplish. Call of Duty 2 is a SafeDisc-protected game that Activision publishes. I’ve heard more than once of people being unable to install the game at all on their computers because of something SafeDisc didn’t like. Of course, SafeDisc’s ‘Advanced Hack Protection’ (how’s that for abuse of terminology) was circumvented the day the game was released and cracks were available for download. People who couldn’t install the game ultimately turned to the cracks just to be able to play. Rather than preventing piracy, Activision actually encouraged it while managing to upset legitimate customers. Score one for the pirates. [...]
January 8th, 2007 at 1:19 pm
[...] Whatever the reasons a person pirates, legitimate consumers pay the price. We are seeing this more and more. Games are sold with obscene copy protection programs that fail to work on some system configurations. Sony distributed audio CDs which stealthily installed a rootkit intended to protect the content. Audio content purchased from Apple’s iTunes store will only play on Apple’s iPod — and consumers are limited in how many systems they can copy the music to. However, these are all insignificant compared to what is coming. [...]
January 9th, 2007 at 9:39 pm
Just call Activision and tell them to give your damned money back.
February 11th, 2007 at 2:21 pm
SafeDisc sucks? Couldn’t agree more mate!
I’ve now got four Medal-Of-Honor (AA, AAS, AAB, PA) and three Call-Of-Duty (CoD, CoDUO, CoD2) that now won’t play due to the same fault because something (unknown) has changed on my PC that upsets poor liddle SafeDisc. (cue the small violins…)
John (9thJan) – I hope Steve has more luck with Activision than I did – I reported the fault to Tech Support via web and didn’t even get an automated answer. Way to go with the customer support guys!
Anyway, I’ve taken it up with EA now, since they support MOH, and fingers crossed that they’ve got a solution that doesn’t involve dodgy “no-cd” hacks or completely reinstalling Windows. =8-o
Could understand if I was trying to crackz or using warez, but I’m not – I’m just trying to USE the products that I’ve paid my hard earned semolians for! >-(
Bob
February 11th, 2007 at 3:00 pm
I contacted Activision support but it was a complete waste of time. In the end I just used a hack and got on with playing the game rather than wasting my time with them. Which just illustrates how completely pointless what they’re donig is – we, as genuine customers, get our enjoyment of a game we validly purchased ruined by a clueless executive decision, whilst people who actually pirate games are hardly held back at all – in fact, they get a better deal than us. It’s pure insanity. The people that make these deicions haven’t the slightest idea what happens in the real world, and need a damn good slap to wake them up.
February 13th, 2007 at 7:19 am
I legally purchase all games I wish to play – I personally own over 300 PC games. I prefer to create images on my hard drives because of the quicker load times and ease of installation/reinstallation, not to mention zero wear and tear on my opticals. But because of the aforementioned jackasses, my choices are becoming more and more limited as time goes by. Just as I decided to boycott television indefinitely two years ago, due to too many quality programs being replaced by moronic crap, I will eventually refuse to buy ANY new games if I have to jump through even ONE hoop to create my convenient images.
But here’s a jolly prognostication perhaps few of you fellow gamers have considered:
I’ll go you all one better… I hope all the publishers that use copy protection on PC games either go tits up, or move their despicable decisions into the console realm forever. Then, the most beautiful thing in the world will happen –> awesome open source PC games will begin to work their way to the top of the heap. The greedy dickhead publishing executives, who are so far removed from the actual gaming experience that they haven’t a clue about what their own customers want, will move on to bigger and better revenue-producers, like pharmaceutical drugs and fossil fuels. Open source crunchers will eventually have hacks for everything, and projects such as Doomsday will be come more and more commonplace, thereby providing free access to most past games; many of them improved along the way by utilizing newer engines. Never underestimate the tenacity of a pissed-off reverse engineer. The publishers are spitting in our faces… eventually someone will spit back.
Wishful thinking, you say? Give Linux a few more years and you’ll see just how much of the home AND business market Windows dominates world-wide… the potentially HUGE computer client China is already telling Microsoft to kiss its ass in not so many words. The masterstroke that will change everything will be a seamless and resource-friendly emulator (anonymously written and distributed) that will allow Linux users to pitch their dual-boot configs while still using the third party software written for Windows, especially all games. Approximately a year after that, rare will be the developer who wastes time on writing anything exclusively for a Microsoft OS.
Remember, ever since the 1950’s, people “in the know” in the chess world laughed at the idea of a computer ever defeating a world champion human chess player. Ironic how it was Kasparov, who many consider the greatest chess player in history, who bowed to IBM in May of 1997. Never say never…
August 30th, 2007 at 12:04 pm
[...] A lot of people have been ranting online recently about the copy protection the PC version of Bioshock comes with. Now, I’ve done my fair share of ranting about dodgy copy protection before on this blog, but I now find myself in the rather surprising position of being on the opposite side of the argument on this occasion, to a certain degree anyway. [...]
August 31st, 2007 at 11:22 am
hi PLEASE TELL ME WHERE CAN I FIND SafeDisc 4 hider 1.1 , not 1.0